Rolf F. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Rolf F., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1916. He recounts his father was a German industrialist and his mother the daughter of a Jew who had converted in 1908 (she was baptized and raised as a Christian); half siblings from his father's previous two marriages, the first to a non-Jew, the second to his mother's sister (both wives had died); not knowing he was legally Jewish until his expulsion from school in 1933; attending technical school in Mittweida because he was barred from university; draft into a forced labor battalion; returning to school after his release; conscription into the Air Force; release when his lineage was discovered; managing his father's coal mine in a rural area; the Gestapo ordering him to terminate his affair with a non-Jewish woman or be sent to a concentration camp; secret engagement to another woman; providing good treatment to French and Soviet Prisoners of war who worked in the mine; imprisonment in Leipzig for supposedly speaking against the Nazi regime; his fiancée bribing guards to bring him food packages; escaping during a transfer; hiding with his fiancée's friend; returning to the coal mine; hiding until liberation by United States troops; Soviet take-over; marriage; nationalization of the coal mine; escaping with his wife to Berlin; the births of two daughters; emigration to Australia in 1955; and return to Berlin forty-eight years later. Mr. F. discusses the importance of his father's wealth and position and keeping a low profile to his, his mother's and sister's survival; not identifying as a Jew; and his daughter's and grandson's conversion to Judaism.

1 videocassette