Lewis S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-1563) interviewed by Sonia Simons and Sarah Hirschfield,

Videotape testimony of Lewis S., who was born in Horst, Germany in 1921. He recalls his family had lived in that town hundreds of years; leaving school in 1935 because of antisemitism; a painter's apprenticeship from 1936 to 1938; Kristallnacht; his parents sending his two younger sisters on a Kindertransport to Holland; and deportation with his parents to the Rīga ghetto in January 1942. Mr. S. recounts forced labor for Organisation Todt and the SS; working outside the ghetto; smuggling food for his parents; meeting his future wife; transfer with his father to Stutthof, then Buchenwald; encountering British and American prisoners of war there; volunteering to transfer to Bochum, near Horst; working in a Krupp munitions factory; a German worker who helped them contact a friend and plan their escape; escape in March 1944; hiding with their friend, then with the friend's brother in Essen; and liberation in April 1945. He describes locating his sisters; learning his mother had died three weeks after liberation; and marriage in 1945. Mr. S. details life in the ghetto and concentration camps; notes the importance of luck to his survival; and tells of testifying at a war crime trial in Düsseldorf.