Walter L. Holocaust testimony (HVT-1464) interviewed by Trudy K. Turkel and Helene Goldberg

Videotape testimony of Walter L., who was born in Gerolzhofen, Germany in 1924. He recalls his father's death in 1931; significant local support for Nazism; anti-Jewish restrictions; attacks by other children when returning from school; his grandfather being marched through town to be cursed and spat upon; moving to Buttenhausen in 1936; expulsion from public school in 1937; his bar mitzvah; burning of the synagogue on Kristallnacht; forced labor in a nearby town; moving to Cologne; receiving emigration papers through relatives in Palestine; traveling to Haifa under the auspices of Youth Aliyah; his brother's arrival in 1941; and emigration to the United States in 1946. Mr. L. tells of his grandmother's deportation to Terezín and his mother's to Rigā; his mother's last letter to him, which he still cannot bear to read; his visit to Buttenhausen in 1980 when the mayor described his mother's and grandmother's deportation; a non-Jew who cares for the Buttenhausen Jewish cemetery; the erection of a monument in 1988 memorializing the Jews of Gerolzhofen; and its desecration shortly thereafter.