Herman L. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3127) interviewed by Barbara Hadley Katz and Dana L. Kline

Videotape testimony of Herman L., who was born in Thessalonikē, Greece in 1926. He recounts his family's long history in Salonika; Jewish life; German invasion in 1941; anti-Jewish restrictions; fleeing with his friends to Drama; their arrest attempting to cross the Turkish border; frequent torture during six months in a Gestapo jail in Belgrade; transfer by train to a Greek jail in Thessalonikē in March 1943; assistance from a Greek friend; deportation to Birkenau in August 1943; his assigned job carrying corpses; transfer to Warsaw after the ghetto revolt in August 1943; mass killings during a death march from Warsaw to Dachau in July 1944; a Sephardic rabbi blessing them before their transfer to Waldlager; sabotaging production of concrete blocks; and liberation by United States troops on April 29, 1944. Mr. L. describes returning to Salonika from Feldafing; marriage in 1946; his daughter's birth; being drafted into the Greek army in 1947; fighting in Albania; and antisemitic laws in postwar Greece. He reflects on the importance of friendship to his survival; complex relations between inmates from different countries; his Sephardic background; the disadvantage of speaking neither Polish nor German in the camps; and his attachment to a diary he found in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto.