Samuel W. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Samuel W., who was born in Częstochowa, Poland in 1923, one of three children, to a Russian mother and a Jewish father. He recounts his mother's conversion to Judaism; attending a Hebrew school; his family's move to Warsaw; attending school; moving to Radość; German invasion; enlisting in the Polish military; moving with his battalion, ending in Chełm; being injured in a train bombing; hospitalization in Lublin; returning to Radość; traveling with his mother to join his father in Opatów in January 1941; his mother obtaining papers as a non-Jew; ghettoization; sneaking out to trade his father's paintings for food; hiding with non-Jews during round-ups; traveling with friends to work in a factory in Starachowice; returning to Opatów; his father obtaining false papers for the family; his father's move to Warsaw; his return to Częstochowa with his mother and sisters; his sisters' round-up; his mother sending him back to Opatów; deportation to Treblinka in October 1942; a friend who had arrived earlier advising him to say he was a construction worker; meeting a former teacher; assignment to a warehouse sorting possessions of the murdered Jews; finding his sisters' clothing; the pervasive odor of burning bodies; observing mass shootings and pits filled with burning corpses; assignment to a kommando building fences; forming a close group with his friend, his teacher, and a converted Jew who was a Protestant minister; assisting his friend when he had typhus; a severe beating; his friend treating his infected wounds; and observing the murder of his former teacher.

8 videocassettes