Victor S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-885) interviewed by Brenda Steifel and Norman Blumenthal

Videotape testimony of Victor S., who was born in 1910 in Kozienice, Poland. He recalls being raised in a Hasidic family; Polish army service in 1934; work as a cabinet maker in Warsaw when the Germans invaded; army service in several places; deserting; assistance from Poles in reaching safety in Łódź; and returning to Kozienice. Mr. S. details leaving for Warsaw to join his girlfriend; their marriage in Kraśnik, her hometown; ghettoization; forced labor; his son's birth; finding his wife's mother, father and grandmother murdered; his incarceration in Budzyń in late 1942; learning of a mass killing in Kraśnik including his child, wife, and her family; and the Yiddish poem "Memorial," he wrote upon learning of their deaths. He recalls specific atrocities in Budzyń and Kaufering; liberation by United States forces in April 1945; many prisoner deaths after liberation; living in Germany; and his marriage to another survivor. Mr. S. tells of the murder of most of his family in Treblinka; a short stop in Auschwitz on a transport from Poland to Germany; the importance of his poetry; and the Hasidic influence in Kozienice. He shows family photographs.