Michel W. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4281) [videorecording] / interviewed by Yannis Thanassekos and Jean-Marie De Becker, March 7, 2001.

Brussels, Belgium : Fondation Auschwitz, 2001.

1 videorecording (2 hr., 57 min.) : col.

French

Videotape testimony of Michel W., who was born in Kalisz, Poland in 1926, the younger of two sons. He recounts his family's emigration to Antwerp in 1929; their move to Liège two years later; their orthodoxy; attending school; his bar mitzvah; working in his father's bakery; registering as Jews with the Nazis; deportation with his brother to Dannes-Camiers in August 1942; slave labor building military defenses; learning his mother had been deported and his father was in a tuberculosis sanitarium; brief transfer to Malines in October; escaping with his brother from a deportation train; assistance from locals; walking to Tongeren, then Liège; contact with the underground; visiting his father; receiving false papers through a priest; living with a non-Jewish family in Liège; his brother escaping to England and joining their military; liberation by United States troops; reopening his father's bakery; his brother and father emigrating to Israel; marriage to the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, from whom he learned his mother had been killed there; his father's death in a terrorist attack in 1950; and his son's birth. Mr. W. discusses his good fortune being in a camp only three months; his and his father rejecting orthodoxy after learning his mother had been killed; and not sharing his experiences with his sons until their recent interest in them. Mr. W. provides copies of letters written to his father during the war.

April 23, 2004

Michel W. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4281). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Michel W. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4281). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Oral histories (document genres)