Yasha M. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Yasha M., who was born in Szczuczyn, Poland (presently Shchuchyn, Belarus) in 1920. He recounts attending school in Vilna; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; Soviet occupation; being sent to Lida to work in a factory; German invasion; fleeing with a friend to Baranovichy; traveling on a train with other Jews to the Warsaw ghetto; escaping; returning to Szczuczyn via Hrodna; forced agricultural labor; a round-up and mass killing of the Jews (he, his father and stepmother were selected for work); transfer to Lida in May 1942; working as a carpenter; escaping to the forest; local villagers hiding and assisting him; joining a group of non-Jewish partisans; participating in skirmishes; battles with Polish partisans; capturing Geranony; recruiting Jews from the Szczuczyn ghetto; a Soviet officer taking command of his unit; sabotaging bridges and trains; confiscating supplies from villages that cooperated with the Germans; briefly joining the Bielski brigade; hospitalization for typhus; his unit joining a Soviet military group; assignment to the factory in Lida where he had previously worked; learning his family had been deported to Sobibor and killed; traveling to Łódź en route to Palestine; contact with Yitzhak Zuckerman; working with refugees in Rome; marriage; and illegal emigration to Palestine in 1948.

4 videocassettes