Witold F. Holocaust testimony (HVT-2146) [videorecording] / interviewed by Joanne Weiner Rudof and Barbara Hadley Katz, July 6, 1993.

New Haven, Conn. : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1993.

1 videorecording (2 hr., 47 min.) : col.

English

Videotape testimony of Witold F., a non-Jew born in Pleszew, Poland in 1915. He recalls attending school in Chorzów, a military academy in Warsaw, and teaching in Silesia; German invasion; military service in Kraków; being captured by Germans in Tomaszow Lubelski; attempting escape to Czechoslovakia using false papers; incarceration in Kraków's Montelupich prison; and inclusion in the second transport to Auschwitz in 1940. Mr. F. describes camp life in detail; friends helping him to obtain a job, which included access to many areas; receiving and writing letters home (he shows them); observing construction of the crematoria and gassing of Soviet POWs in 1941; clandestine Catholic services; Maximilian Kolbe volunteering to replace another man to be executed; organization of the prisoner underground; visits by Eichmann and Himmler and the activities of Drs. Mengele and Dering; the Sonderkommando uprising; transfer to Sachsenhausen and Wanzleben; and liberation from a death march. He recounts living in UNRRA's Schwäbisch Gmünd displaced persons camp; marriage in 1945; and emigration from France to Ecuador, then the United States. He discusses continuing nightmares and war crimes trials that resulted in light sentences and acquittals, and shows sketches done by a friend in Auschwitz and family photographs.

June 01, 2002

Witold F. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2146). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Witold F. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2146). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)