Frantisek K. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Frantisek K., who was born in Dunajská Streda, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1924, the youngest of three children. He recounts his siblings were thirteen and fourteen years older than he; his family's affluence; attending a Hungarian-Jewish school; his father's election to city government; his father teaching him German; his sister's marriage in 1933; participating in Jewish scouting; attending a Jewish school in Vrbové in 1936 and 1937 to learn Slovak; friendship with his future wife; Hungarian occupation in 1938; immediate confiscation of his father's business; a non-Jewish neighbor's unsuccessful attempt to prevent looting of their possessions; apprenticing in his father's tailor shop, then with another tailor after his father lost his business permit; moving to Budapest with his parents in 1941; working with a tailor whose clients were wealthy and famous; his father's arrest; visiting him in Komárom; incarceration with him for a night when he smuggled food to him; his father's transfer to Kistarcsa, where he became ill; visiting him in the hospital; smuggling food in and letters out; his father's release; returning with him to Dunajská Streda; posing as a non-Jew to work in a tailor shop; learning the owner was in the Arrow Cross (Hungarian Nazi party); training with the non-Jewish paramilitary youth group; meeting Ference Szálasi, national head of the Arrow Cross; working from home, fearing discovery; German occupation in March 1944; ghettoization; draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion; his father being beaten, resulting in his inability to walk; deportation of his parents, grandmother, sister and his future wife's family (none survived); and slave labor in Komárom, then Győr.

2 videocassettes