Śimḥah R. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Simcha R., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1924, one of four children. He recounts his family's orthodoxy; attending Jewish schools; fights with Polish children; participating in Hashomer Hatzair and Akiba through which he met Mordechai Anielewicz in 1939; German invasion in September; a bomb killing his grandparents, brother, aunt, and wounding him; anti-Jewish restrictions; removing the star to travel to Radom for food; ghettoization; trading with Poles for food; joining relatives in Klwów; working for six months as a cowherd for a non-Jew; returning to the Warsaw ghetto; joining his parents in a kibbutz in Czerniaków; joining the Zionist underground; returning to the ghetto with his family; participating in the Jewish fighting organization, Z.O.B.; his family hiding with his mother's Polish friend in Sierierki; returning to participate in the Dror division of Z.O.B; meeting Yitzhak Zuckerman; serving under Hanoch Gutman and Marek Edelman; buying guns from Poles with funds he collected from wealthy Jews; preparing to fight rather than being rounded-up in April 1943; throwing grenades and Molotov cocktails at German troops entering the ghetto; retreating to bunkers; finding the body of Michał Klepfisz who had been in charge of grenades; observing the utter destruction when they left the bunker; being sent out of the ghetto with Zalman Friedrich to meet Zuckerman; he and Tovia Szajngut recruiting Polish sewer workers to organize an escape of a surviving ghetto fighters through the sewers, among them Pnina G. and Zivia Lubetkin; having to leave over a dozen behind; and reaching the forest.

19 videocassettes