Victor P. Holocaust testimony (HVT-2887) [videorecording] / interviewed by Lawrence L. Langer, July 26, 1994.

Brookline, Mass. : Brookline Holocaust Memorial Committee, 1994.

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

English

Associated material: Penzer, Victor. Interview 15983. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Access at https://vha.usc.edu.

This testimony or excerpts from it cannot be used for commercial, trade or pictorial art.

Videotape testimony of Victor P., who was born in Kraków, Poland in 1919. He recalls two years attending medical school; German invasion; escaping with his father and brother to Lʹviv in the Soviet zone; his brother's assignment as a physician in a border town; traveling with him; returning to Kraków; obtaining papers of a dead Pole from Polish friends; establishing a network to obtain papers of Poles ordered to report for forced labor in Germany and replacing them with Jews; retrieving his brother from Ukraine after German invasion of the U.S.S.R.; sending him to Germany to work as a Pole (he survived); betrayal in 1943; imprisonment; an unsuccessful suicide attempt (he did not want to betray anyone); a Polish friend suggesting he admit he was Jewish to avoid execution; transfer to the ghetto jail, then Auschwitz/Birkenau; a friend registering him as a medical orderly which saved his life; a German kapo nursing him through typhus; becoming a medical orderly, a privileged position; receiving extra food from Polish prisoners who could receive packages; and one friend's ruse to save thirty to fifty prisoners during selections. Mr. P. discusses his book and many Poles who helped him and other Jews survive.

June 15, 2025

Victor P. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2887). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.

Victor P. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2887). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.