Yaakov M. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Yaakov M., who was born in Łódź, Poland in 1925, one of two children. He recounts his family's affluence; attending a Polish school, then a Katzenelson school and summer camp; antisemitic harassment of orthodox Jews; volunteering in a civil defense corps during the German invasion; forced labor; a German assisting his father receive payment for his store merchandise; ghettoization; receiving food from the same German; attending a school and a haschshara in Marysin; slave labor in a shoe factory, then a printing factory; receiving extra food from the manager when a songwriter among them wrote songs (he sings one of them); hiding with his family during round-ups; their deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau in 1944; separation from his family; trading his shoes to a kapo for food; transfer to Friedland; slave labor in an airplane propeller factory; Italian POWs, believing he was Italian, giving him food, cigarettes, and a coat; working in the kitchen; throwing food to fellow prisoners; a religious prisoner refusing to eat bread during Passover; making and obtaining weapons to resist if there was a liquidation; assistance from a German guard; abandonment by the Germans; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to Czechoslovakia, then back to Friedland; traveling to Łódź with a group; one of them being killed en route by Poles; assisting with Jewish emigration to Palestine; emigration to Israel in 1958; and the birth of a son. Mr. M. discusses the deaths of almost his entire family in the Holocaust. He shows photographs.

5 videocassettes