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Displaying items 4,321 to 4,340 of 4,487
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Language of Description: English
Holding Institution: Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

  1. Wiera G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Wiera G., who was born in approximately 1921. She recalls a happy childhood in Vilna, Poland; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; learning dressmaking; Soviet occupation in 1939; Lithuanian independence; Soviet reoccupation; German invasion; her father's murder in Ponary; ghettoization in September 1941; murder of her grandparents at Ponary; slave labor in a uniform factory; hiding during round-ups; injuring her leg; hospitalization; deportation with her sister to Kaiserwald in 1943; slave labor in a silk factory in Strazdenhof; assistance from a Lithuanian doctor; sab...

  2. Wili G. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Wili G., who was born in Olomuoc, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (presently Czech Republic) in 1914, the oldest of three brothers. He recounts his family's affluence; attending the local German gymnasium; completing engineering studies in Belgium; draft into the Czech military; German occupation; military discharge at the end of 1938; one brother's emigration to Palestine; moving to Prague with his grandmother; participating in Maccabi; teaching at a Zionist school; joining a hachsharah; marriage to a woman he met there in October 1941; joining his parents in Olomouc; a no...

  3. Willi E. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Willi E., a Romani, who was born in East Prussia, Germany in 1927. He remembers traveling and performing prior to Hitler's ascent to power; racial laws requiring them to live in barracks in 1937-1938; persecution of Jews; deportation of young Romani men; his deportation to a prison camp in Bia?ystok; witnessing a mass killing of Jews in Brzesc Litewski (Brest); deportation to Auschwitz in 1943 (his mother and two siblings were gassed); slave labor; transfer to Bergen-Belsen in 1944; liberation by British troops in 1945; searching for relatives; marriage; and postwar h...

  4. Willi F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Willi F., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1923 to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. He recounts the excitement of Nazi rallies; learning his father was Jewish (though he had converted to Catholicism) in 1932 when he was harassed at school; anti-Jewish laws barring him from an apprenticeship; working for a Communist Party member; the impact of anti-Jewish laws increasing after Kristallnacht; forced labor in a munitions factory; sabotaging his work; traveling to Konstanz, planning to enter Switzerland illegally; a guard accosting him; traveling to Lustenau to ente...

  5. William B. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William B., who was born in Vilna, Poland in 1927. He recalls his immediate family's secularism; his mother's family's orthodoxy; his father's career as a military officer; attending Polish schools; antisemitic harassment; weekly Hebrew lessons; his father's departure when the war began and his return; brief Soviet occupation; Lithuanian independence; favorable conditions for his family; his father's reluctance to emigrate to the United States; spending a summer with relatives in Kaunas; exposure to Jewish life; Soviet occupation; his father's arrest and release; fina...

  6. William F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William F., who was born deaf in a small town near Sa?toraljau?jhely, Hungary, in 1910. Mr. F. describes his childhood in a large family (two brothers were also deaf); learning from his father to read Hebrew for his bar mitzvah; being self-taught because he lacked a formal education; becoming a leatherworker; his pride at living independently in Budapest at age eighteen; growing antisemitism; fleeing to Czechoslovakia in late 1937; courtship and marriage; and establishing a business in Pies?t?any. He recalls a Christian maid who helped him and his wife avoid deportati...

  7. William F. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William F., who was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1915 the only child of a Jewish mother and Catholic father. He recalls attending public school, gymnasium, and university; working as a librarian at Vienna University; the Anschluss in March 1938; his mother's chocolate business being closed due to anti-Jewish restrictions; arrest for not wearing a swastika; incarceration in Dachau; his father's death (he never learned how he died); slave labor digging fortifications; becoming the body carrier for his barrack; keeping some hope despite his belief he would never be releas...

  8. William H. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William H., who was born in 1916. He recounts his medical education; enlistment in the United States Army Medical Corps; sailing on the Queen Elizabeth to England in May 1943; caring for field casualties; and entering Germany in January 1945. Dr. H. describes his disbelief upon entering Buchenwald on April 21, 1945; walking through Buchenwald with a Catholic priest and a Belgian officer; and seeing debilitated survivors in the barracks and corpses of women and children in the "killing area." He reads from letters to his wife written on April 22 and May 14, 1945, descr...

  9. William J. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William J., who was born in the United States in 1921. He recounts military draft in 1944; entering Europe through Scotland in January 1945; serving in the 90th Infantry division of the Third Army; liberating Flossenbu?rg on April 28, 1945; shock at the dead and dying inmates, their emaciated state, and the living conditions; being instructed not to share their rations with the prisoners; the high prisoner death rate; compelling local residents to bury the dead; leaving after three days; moving through Germany and Czechoslovakia; handling German POWs; assignment after...

  10. William K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William K., who was born in Szarvas, Hungary in 1911, the oldest of seven children in an Orthodox family. He recalls brief military service in 1930; establishing a trucking business; disbelief that the events in Germany would effect Hungarian Jews; revocation of his business license in 1940 due to antisemitic laws; compulsory service in a slave labor battalion in Gyoma; assignment as a truck driver during the German offensive in Ukraine; discharge in spring 1942; hiding in a mental institution in Gyula and in his home to avoid further service; German invasion in March...

  11. William K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William K., who was born in Cologne, Germany in 1912. He recalls participation in Zionist organizations as a youth; his parents' divorce; joining his mother and sister in Berlin; employment at a department store; declining a promotion for fear of provoking antisemitism; the public hitting of the store's owner on April 1, 1933; loss of own his job; attempts to leave for Palestine; meeting his future wife and their engagement; and embarkation for Shanghai in October 1938. He recounts assistance from the Japanese upon their arrival; organization of the Jewish community i...

  12. William K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William K., who was born in Tarno?w (Wojewo?dztwo Ma?opolskie, Poland), Poland in 1922, one of five children. In addition to information included in a previously recorded testimony (HVT-635), Mr. K. recounts writing poetry as a boy; working at his mother's candy store; one sister's emigration to Palestine in 1936; a Pole reneging on his agreement to hide their younger sister because she "looked too Jewish"; contemplating a group suicide; slave labor in the Madritsch factory in P?aszo?w; a severe beating in Mauthausen for refusing sexual advances by a kapo; observing c...

  13. William K. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William K., who was born in Tarno?w, Poland, in 1922. Mr. K. recalls his youth; his father, an "ultrareligious" Talmud scholar; his mother's modest businesses which supported them; escaping domestic unhappiness in school; and prewar anti-Semitic experiences. He tells of German occupation; anti-Semitic restrictions and looting; ghettoization; being beaten publicly; the first Aktion when his father and 12,000 others were killed in June 1942; his mother's death from a heart attack; forced labor; his sister's selection in the second Aktion; his refusal to reveal the locat...

  14. William L. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William L., who was born in Liptovsky? Mikula?s?, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1911. He recalls his father's death during World War I; his mother's orthodoxy; a sister's emigration to England; attending schools in Pies?t?any and Topol?c?any; apprenticeships in Dunajska? Streda and Filakovo; marriage in 1939; his son's birth; service in the Czech army; visiting his mother (he never saw her again); returning to Filakovo; anti-Jewish laws; losing his job; deportation to a labor camp in 1943 (he never saw his family again); forced labor on a farm, a munitions factory in P...

  15. William M. and Leonard S. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of Leonard S., an African American, who enlisted in the United States Army in November 1941. He recalls encountering discrimination for the first time during tank training in the south; deployment to England in 1944; embarkation in France; participating in the Battle of the Bulge; fighting their way into a fenced area (he later learned it was Dachau); cessation of German firing; observing naked, severely emaciated men falling out of the barracks; offering them food; being told not to feed them since it could do more harm than good; securing the outer area; the stench of ...

  16. William M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William M., who was born in Cherniyev, Poland in 1925. He recalls a strict, Orthodox family life; extreme poverty; pervasive antisemitism; Soviet, Hungarian, and German occupations; forced transfer to the Stanislav ghetto; hanging of Jewish police, including his brother, for not delivering a required number of Jews; forced labor on a farm; smuggling stolen food to his family; digging graves for a mass killing, which he witnessed; obtaining a Polish birth certificate; escaping from the ghetto; traveling to Ozeri?a?ny, posing as a Pole; working for farmers; attending ch...

  17. William M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William M., an African-American who enlisted in the United States Army in May 1942. He recalls placement in the segregated 761st tank battalion; local prejudice during basic training in the south; being shipped to England in 1944; his unit's assignment to Patton's Third Army; participation in campaigns, including the Battle of the Bulge; plunging into Dachau by chance in spring 1945; eliminating German resistance; observing prisoners who were "walking skeletons"; the horrible stench; prisoners holding up their hands in gratitude; being warned not to feed them; and lea...

  18. William M. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William M., who was born in 1924, and served with the United States Army Air Forces in World War II. He recounts military draft; deployment to Britain in January 1943; being shot down over Germany in March 1944; crashing in the North Sea; capture by the Germans; transfer to Rotterdam; imprisonment in Amsterdam; transfer to Frankfurt, then a prison camp in Wetzlar; beatings and interrogations; transfer to an asylum near Frankfurt, then back to Wetzlar two weeks later; train transport to Krems; receiving Red Cross packages; being treated by a dentist for injuries stemmi...

  19. William N. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William N., who was born in 1923 and served with the United States Army 12th Armored Division of the 7th Army in World War II. He recalls coming across several small labor camps while advancing across Germany in March 1945; coming upon a group of emaciated Dachau survivors in late April; recognizing them as "camp people" because of their uniforms; and giving them rations, water, and blankets before leaving. Mr. N. shows photographs his friend took when liberating Landsberg.

  20. William N. Holocaust testimony

    Videotape testimony of William N., who was born in Ga?nsendorf, Austria in 1916. He recalls moving with his family, at the age two, to Czechoslovakia; antisemitic incidents; joining the socialist group "Red Falcon" in Steyr, and later a Zionist youth group in Vienna; being drafted into the Austrian army in 1937; one month's service in the German army after the Anschluss; persecution of Austrian Jews; Abraham Stern organizing illegal emigration from Austria; traveling from a port near Athens to Palestine via Belgrade and Thessalonike?; joining the Irgun, then the Stern Group; and organizing ...