- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Ben K., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1921. He describes antisemitic incidents; German invasion; being drafted into the Polish army; discharge after Polish capitulation; his father fleeing to the Soviet zone and returning because his mother refused to leave Warsaw; ghettoization; slave labor and beatings; joining the underground; obtaining train tickets through a Polish friend; escaping with friends to Józefów; joining partisans near Lublin in 1941; military actions against Germans; learning that Polish partisans were killing Jews; fleeing with Soviet prisoners of war to Ukraine; returning to Poland with the Soviet-sponsored partisan group Wanda Wasilewska in 1943; discovering the bodies of forty Jewish women and children slaughtered by Poles; smuggling himself into the Warsaw ghetto to bring food to his parents; rejoining the partisans; participating in the liberation of Chełm and Janow Lubelski in 1944; deserting the Soviet army in order to avoid being killed by Poles, as his friends had been; fleeing to Danzig in 1945; marriage; his daughter's birth in Fulda; living in Stuttgart; and emigrating to the United States. Mr. K. emphasizes the importance of Jewish partisans and resistance and the additional difficulties due to Polish hostility toward Jews.
- Author/Creator
- K., Ben, 1921-
- Published
- Los Angeles, Calif. : UCLA Holocaust Documentation Archives, 1983
- Interview Date
- March 6, 1983.
- Locale
- Poland
Warsaw
Warsaw (Poland)
Józefów (Poland)
Chełm (Lublin, Poland)
Gdańsk (Poland)
Fulda (Germany)
Stuttgart (Germany)
- Cite As
- Ben K. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-416). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Other Authors/Editors
- Samuel, Olga, interviewer.
Portney, Charles, interviewer.
