Alfred F. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Alfred F., who was born in Breslau, Germany (presently Wrocław, Poland) in 1920, the older of two siblings. He recounts his father's pro-German sentiments based on his military service in World War I; anti-Jewish laws resulting in his expulsion from school in 1934; attending a Jewish school; moving with his family to Berlin in 1935; participating in Hechalutz; attending their summer camp; hearing Martin Buber speak; non-Jewish neighbors hiding his family during Kristallnacht; his sister's emigration to England, then his to Wieringen, Netherlands with a hachsharah in March 1939; German invasion in May 1940; Germans transferring the hachsharah to Amsterdam; delivering mail to Westerbork for the Joodse Raad; working with the Jewish underground producing false papers, stealing passports from government offices, and supplying food to Jews in hiding; hiding during round-ups; escaping to Brussels with three others; capture while entering France; their release in Lille based on their false papers; traveling to Paris; working as a non-Jew for Organization Todt; delivering weapons to partisans in Toulouse and Nice; being sent to Cuneo, Italy to aid French Jews who had escaped to nearby mountains; trips to Florence, Rome, and Siena for the underground; arrest in Paris in April 1944 as a resistant, not a Jew; incarceration in Fresnes; interrogations, beatings, and torture; transfer to Drancy, Buchenwald, then Witten-Annen; slave labor in a factory, then for a German camp official; contacts with prisoners of war from many countries; escaping from a death march; liberation by United States troops in Lippstadt; repatriation to Deventer; joining Hechalutz in Amsterdam; assignments in Toulouse, Paris, Biarritz, and Sète to arrange illegal emigration to Palestine; illegal emigration by ship; and brief incarceration by the British. Mr. F. discusses the prisoner hierarchy and relationships among national groups in the camps.

8 videocassettes