Meir G. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Meir G., who was born in Kaunus, Lithuania in 1929, an only child. He recounts attending a secular Jewish school; Soviet occupation; German invasion; his father's arrest by Lithuanians (they released him because he was a Lithuanian army veteran); ghettoization; attending a vocational school; deportation to Stutthof, then Landsberg in July 1944; separation from his father; transfer to Auschwitz/Birkenau; slave labor; a friend arranging to have his number removed from a selection list; a death march and train transfer to Mauthausen; observing cannibalism; a death march to Gunskirchen; abandonment by German guards; walking to Wels; liberation by United States troops; taking food from German homes; transfer to a displaced persons camp; assistance from the Joint and a Jewish-American soldier; traveling to Budapest, then Transylvania; living in a Soviet displaced persons camp; traveling to Orsha, then Vilna; reunion with his father; learning his mother was alive in the Soviet Union; her arrival in 1946; draft into the Soviet military in 1950; serving near Moscow; discharge in 1954; marriage to a survivor; the birth of twins; and emigration to Poland, then Israel in 1957, with his parents, wife, and children. Mr. G. notes the importance of his group of friends to his survival; their annual meetings to the present day; relations between ethnic groups in the camps; publication in South Africa of his experiences as part of a larger book; and sharing very little of his experiences with his children, not wanting to burden them. He shows photographs.

8 videocassettes