Chanan B. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Chanan B., who was born in Ústí nad Labem (formerly Aussig), Czechoslovakia in 1924, the younger of two children. He recounts living in Bochum until his father's death in 1930; living with aunts in Aussig, then Teplice; moving to Prague with his mother in 1939; participating in Tehelet Lavan, a Zionist youth group; attending a Jewish school; his bar mitzvah; visiting his father's family in Slavkov u Brna; German occupation; anti-Jewish restrictions; expulsion from school; apprenticeship as an electrician; assistance from an aunt who was married to a non-Jew; deportation with his mother to Theresienstadt in February 1942; encountering an uncle who assisted him; visiting his mother and grandmother; his group of friends sharing food and singing; transfer with his mother to the Zamość ghetto two months later; slave labor installing telephone cable; his mother's round-up while he worked outside the ghetto (he never saw her again); escaping with another prisoner; traveling to Kraków; smuggling themselves to Prague via Bohumín and Ostrava; joining his sister; his brother-in-law arranging his escape with his friend to Slovakia; their arrest in Žilina; and transfer two weeks later to prisons in Nový Bydžov, Ostrava, then Brno.

9 videocassettes