Iaacov R. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Iaacov R., who was born in Orlov, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (presently Slovakia) in 1917, one of five children. He recounts living in Prešov; his family's assimilated lifestyle; memorizing the Hebrew for his bar mitzvah; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; completing high school; two sisters emigrating to Palestine in 1935; leading Hashomer groups in Žilina, Košice, and Bratislava; anti-Jewish restrictions after Slovak independence; Joint support of Hashomer; draft into a Slovak labor battalion; serving in Trebišov; demobilization; Hashomer activities in Trenčín and Piešt̕any; organizing emigration to Palestine under Oskar Neumann; attempting to illegally emigrate to Palestine in March 1941; being caught in Hungary; returning to Bratislava; obtaining false papers to move youth groups members to Hungary; hearing of German plans to deport Jews; returning to Prešov to warn his father; obtaining weapons for the communist underground; Neumann warning him Germans were watching him; escaping to Budapest; arrest; volunteering for forced labor to avoid deportation; assignment to a farm in Pécs; deserting six months later during a one-week break; visiting his family in Prešov; working in Bratislava; smuggling weapons to Novaky and other work camps; delivering weapons and money to the underground in Dolný Kubín to pay for passage for Jews who had escaped from Będzin, including his future wife, Chaika Klinger, and the head of the Będzin Jewish police; escaping to Budapest; illegal emigration to Palestine by train in March 1944; marriage; his son's birth; returning to Slovakia as a Zionist representative in 1947; speaking at friends' graves in Banská Bystrica; and testifying at the trial of the head of the Będzin Jewish police in Tel Aviv. Mr. R. notes his wife wrote a diary during and after the war, which he had published after her death.

9 videocassettes