- Summary
- 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.
- Author/Creator
- T., Arie, 1925-
- Published
- Tel Aviv, Israel : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 2000
- Interview Date
- March 9 and 16, April 13, and May 3, 2000.
- Locale
- Greece
Thessalonikē
Thessalonikē (Greece)
Modena (Italy)
Salzburg (Austria)
Palestine
Cyprus
- Cite As
- Arie T. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4169). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Notes
-
This testimony is in Hebrew.
Related material: Heinz K. Holocaust testimony [friend](HVT-2784), Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
