Dan A. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Dan A., who was born in 1922 in Kraków, Poland, one of two children. He recounts his family's affluence; attending a Zionist school; his father's military draft as a physician; he and his sister being sent to relatives in Zolochiv; his father joining them; Soviet occupation; attending university in L'viv; German invasion in 1941; moving to Przemyśl; ghettoization; his mother joining them; his father working in the ghetto hospital; his death from typhus in 1942; encounters with Josef Schwammberger, German head of the ghetto; round-up in 1943; separation from his mother and sister (they were killed); escaping from a train; assistance from local farmers; returning to the ghetto; deportation to Szebnie, then Birkenau; transfer to Auschwitz, then Buna/Monowitz; assignment to a privileged position as a translator; writing letters for illiterate Poles to obtain extra food; assignment to masonry training, to which he attributes his survival; doing repairs inside the camp; assignment to a privileged position maintaining the showers; public executions; a death march to Gleiwitz in January 1945; hiding with others during the evacuation; leaving two days later; staying with a local woman for a week; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to Kraków, Przemyśl, then Bucharest; assistance from the Joint; smuggling Jews from Budapest to Graz, and money to Italy; joining Abba Kovner's group; learning of a plan by survivors to poison a German city; being assigned to search for war criminals in Germany and Austria; traveling with the Jewish Brigade to Paris, Lyon, then Marseille; illegal emigration by ship to Palestine; interdiction by the British; and release six weeks later. He shows photographs and a camp uniform.

7 videocassettes