Title
Allen S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-833) [videorecording] / interviewed by Suzanna Horn and Helen Katz, December 14, 1986 and March 1, 1987.
Summary
Videotape testimony of Allen S., who was born in Mikołajow, Poland, in 1929. In these detailed and graphic testimonies, Mr. S. recounts prewar life in Iwje; the rise of Nazism and Polish antisemitism; Soviet occupation; deportation of relatives to Siberia; German invasion; Polish harassment and violence against Jews; Einsatzkommandos killing his father; ghettoization of Iwje; hiding during a mass killing of 2,500, including his mother, in 1942; and forced labor. He recalls escaping; hiding with a neighbor in Mikołajow; joining the partisans; smuggling himself to Iwje to find contraband for the partisans; escaping after the head of the Judenrat refused to give him false papers; anti-Nazi operations by the Stalin Brigade; his commander's rape of two Polish girls and the unit's execution of their family; partisan antisemitism; meeting relatives in the Bielski Brigade; liberation; and his return to Iwje. He describes his depression; alcohol abuse; police work punishing ex-collaborators; being drafted into the Soviet army unit denazifying Soviet POWs near Brest-Litovsk; Soviet antisemitism; transfer to the Polish army to escape to the West; meeting Israelis in Białystok who gave him false papers; reunion with surviving friends and family in the Neufreimann displaced persons camp; emigrating to America in 1947; finding attitudes unchanged as an American soldier in Germany in the 1950s; and his successful career in the fashion industry.