Robert B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4248) [videorecording] / interviewed by Jürgen Draschan and Michael Dippold, 2000.

Brussels, Belgium : Fondation Auschwitz, 2000.

3 videorecordings (10 hr., 54 min.) : col.

German

This testimony or excerpts from it cannot be published without prior permission of the donor.

Videotape testimony of Robert B., who was born in Budapest, Hungary, an only child. He recalls his large, close extended family; living with his mother; attending a secular school; adoption by a paternal uncle; his uncles and mother apprenticing him as a car mechanic; working in a garage; draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion in about 1943; transport to a munitions factory; assignment to the garage; receiving a permit to visit home; assignment to another camp; slave labor digging trenches; a three-week visit to Budapest; inhuman slave labor pulling a floating bridge in early 1944; believing he would die; escaping with a friend; hiding with local strangers; reporting themselves to the police as lost; walking to join their company that was en route to Ukraine; escaping with another friend in March, posing as Hungarian soldiers; returning home by train; imprisonment; his mother's visit; hospitalization for two months; release in October; learning his mother had been deported (she did not survive); staying with an aunt who was married to a non-Jew; hiding in a factory with an uncle until February 1945, then in a physician's home; liberation by Soviet troops; opening a garage with a friend; smuggling people to Austria for Beriḥah and also for payment; arrest in December 1948; imprisonment for about eight months; restarting his smuggling business; arrest; escaping with a friend to Austria; living in displaced persons camps; traveling to Brussels via Luxembourg under a false name; marriage in 1954; the births of two children; building a successful business; and writing a book about his experiences. Mr. B. reads his poem based on his experiences at the end of 1944.

July 01, 2003

Robert B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4248). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Robert B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4248). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)