Henri B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3017) [videorecording] / interviewed by Jaša Almuli, December 12, 1994.

Athens, Greece : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1994.

1 videorecording (2 hr., 3 min.) : col.

French

This testimony is in French.

Videotape testimony of Henri B., who was born in Thessalonikē, Greece in 1919 to an impoverished family of four children. He recounts attending Greek public school; military service in Albania; attending university in Athens starting in 1940; benign Italian occupation; German invasion in September 1943; anti-Jewish regulations; obtaining false papers from a Greek police officer; hiding with friends; arrest; incarceration in Haidari; denunciation as a Jew; pointless slave labor; escaping from a deportation train in September 1944; discovering he was near Zolná in Slovakia; assistance from local villagers; futile attempts to contact Slovak resistants; arrest; imprisonment in Bratislava; and contacts with French POWs. Mr. B. describes posing as an Italian during interrogations; expulsion to the Hungarian border; refusing to enter Hungary; working on a farm in Čeklís, posing as an Italian non-Jew; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to Bratislava; returning to Thessalonikē; learning his family was killed except his for younger brother in the leftist resistance; his brother's exile to Bulgaria by the rightist government; working as a chemist in Athens; marriage in 1953; deciding not to have children so they would not experience suffering due to antisemitism; and bringing his brother and family back to Greece in 1965.

June 01, 2002

Henri B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3017). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Henri B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3017). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)