Related material: Heinz K. Holocaust testimony [friend](HVT-2784), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

This testimony is in Hebrew.

Videotape testimony of Arie T., who was born in Thessalonikē, Greece in 1925, the fourth of six children. He recalls a large and close extended family; cordial relations with non-Jews until the rise of a fascist party in the 1930s; his mother's death in 1937; working in a carpentry factory to help support his family; his older brother's marriage and the births of his two children; military draft of two brothers; German invasion; a round-up of Jewish men over eighteen in July 1942 for forced labor, including two brothers; a non-Jew taking one of them to his workshop to protect him; ghettoization; starvation; chief rabbi Zvi Koretz giving public assurances about deportations; deportation with his family to Auschwitz/Birkenau in March 1943; his friend Heinz K. translating from German to Greek; separation with his father and brothers from his sisters; slave labor with his brother digging ditches; his father doing odd jobs in the barrack; his brother saving him when he became aggressive toward a guard; assignment with his brother to a privileged factory job; receiving extra food from the non-Jewish workers; smuggling food to his father and friends; learning of the gas chambers and crematoria; his father's selection for gassing; and public hangings.

Mr. T. recounts receiving greetings from his sister through other Greek prisoners; learning she had been gassed; his brother's transfer; meeting his sister-in-law; learning of the Sonderkommando uprising; a death march to Gross-Rosen in January 1945; carrying a Greek friend who could no longer walk; train transfer days later to Oranienburg/Sachsenhausen, then to Mauthausen about a month later; registering himself and a friend as non-Jewish political prisoners; harassment by a homosexual kapo; a severe beating; reunion with his brother; slave labor felling trees; losing his will to live; being hidden by Spanish Catholics; liberation by United States troops; observing revenge killings of Germans; assistance from the Red Cross; trying to follow his brother to Greece; traveling to Salzburg with the Jewish Brigade; living in Modena for several months; assistance from the Joint and UNRRA; illegal emigration by ship to Palestine; interdiction by the British; incarceration on Cyprus for five months; joining his aunt and uncle in Palestine; joining the Haganah; being injured dismantling mines; military service in the 1948 war; marriage; establishing a carpentry business; and the births of two daughters. Mr. T. discusses fear defining his life in camps; prisoner hierarchies; continuing nightmares and painful memories; sharing his experiences with his family; and visits to his brother in the United States. He shows a photograph.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) > Personal narratives.

World War, 1939-1945 > Personal narratives, Jewish.

World War, 1939-1945 > Children.

Jews > Greece > Thessalonikē.

Concentration camps > Psychological aspects.

World War, 1939-1945 > Atrocities.

Concentration camp inmates > Family relationships.

Concentration camps > Sociological aspects.

Palestine > Emigration and immigration.