Title
Itzchak H. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3481) [videorecording] / interviewed by Nathan Beyrak and Levana Frank, September 22, 1992.
Summary
Videotape testimony of Itzchak H., who was born in Łódź, Poland in 1929, the sixth of seven children. He recounts his family's Hasidism; attending cheder and public school; his family's Zionism; his mother' death in 1938; German invasion; ghettoization; living with his younger sister in a children's home starting in June 1940; a Zionist leader, Shalom K., giving them hope; returning with his sister to his family in October 1942; obtaining food for his family; many deaths from hunger and disease; being slapped by Mordecai Rumkowski, head of the ghetto, when asking for food for his brother; his brother's hospitalization (he was deported and killed); his older sister's death; brief hospitalization for typhus; deportation with his brother, sister, and father to Auschwitz/Birkenau in August 1944; separation from his sister and father; observing prisoners praying with tefilin; assistance from a doctor; his brother's transfer; living in the Zigeunerlager (Gypsy Lager) with Shalom K. from the orphanage; hiding during selections; smuggling himself into a transport to Braunschweig with a cousin and Shalom K.; slave labor in a truck factory; a public hanging; a march to Watenstedt two months later; train transfer to Ravensbrück, then Wöbbelin; abandonment by the Germans; liberation by United States troops; walking to Neustadt; transfer to several locations by U.S. troops; hospitalization in Lübeck; transfer by the Red Cross to Trelleborg, Sweden; Shalom K. joining his group; forming a kibbutz; obtaining permits to emigrate to Palestine; emigration there in 1946 via Stockholm, Helsingborg, Calais, and Marseille; meeting his future wife en route; living on a kibbutz; military service in the Israel-Arab War; joining a group to establish a new kibbutz; and marriage. Mr. H. sings songs from the ghetto and the Zionist youth group.