Peter B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3427) [videorecording] / interviewed by Andrés José Nader and Eva Lezzi, April 26, 1996.

Potsdam, Germany : Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien, Universität Potsdam, 1996.

1 videorecording (4 hr.) : col.

German

This testimony cannot be used without prior permission of the donor.

Videotape testimony of Peter B., who was born in Cologne, Germany in 1920. He recalls his father's socialist activities; his mother's death in 1935; his family fleeing to Antwerp; his father's death while a physician in the Spanish Civil War; his brother's service in Spain; working in Brussels, then France; incarceration after war began in 1939; release; joining the Resistance; obtaining false papers; organizing a children's home near Montpellier with assistance from Cardinal Pierre Gerlier; imprisonments and escapes; arrest at the children's home; incarceration in Vénissieux, then Drancy in December 1943; transport to Trzebinia, Auschwitz/Birkenau, then Warsaw; slave labor in the former ghetto; using his false name (he was marked as a "political," not a Jew); a death march to Łódź; transport to Dachau, then a labor camp; receiving extra food from locals; with other inmates shaving a second stripe on their heads as an act of resistance near war's end; liberation by United States troops; traveling to Lyon; recuperating in Paris; reunion with his brother; returning to Cologne; and futile efforts to get family property returned. Mr. B. discusses the importance of prisoner solidarity to his survival; his sense of paralysis in the camps; not sharing much of his story with his sons; and his lost youth. He shows photographs.

June 01, 2002

Peter B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3427). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Peter B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3427). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)