Arkadi︠i︡ P. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Arkadi︠i︡ P., who was born in Chashniki, Belarus in 1923. He recalls his family's orthodoxy; cordial relations with non-Jews; attending public school; earning teachers' certification; teaching third grade; visiting Minsk in June 1941; German invasion; riding trains with German soldiers to Barysaŭ; walking to Lukomlʹ; staying with an aunt for three days; returning to Chashniki; anti-Jewish regulations; forced labor in a peat factory; a non-Jewish woman who offered to help him; hiding with his mother and sister during a mass killing in February 1942; his mother forcing him out a window when they were discovered; assistance from a non-Jew; staying with non-Jews in Lukomlʹ; reunion with his aunt (her family had been killed); he and a friend finding partisans in the woods; learning his sister had escaped only to be killed elsewhere in a mass shooting; many assignments blowing up German installations; joining the Soviet military in November 1942; moving up the ranks; and leaving the military in 1946. Mr. P. notes he settled in Mahili︠o︡ŭ where he worked as a teacher, a school head, then for a bank, and his sense that pre-war Chashniki was an ideal place.

4 videocassettes