Jack R. Holocaust testimony (HVT-553)

Videotape testimony of Jack R., who was born in Mukachevo, Czechoslovakia in 1928. He describes his very loving parents; attending Czech public school; Hungarian occupation in 1938; anti-Jewish measures; deportation of non-Hungarian Jews to Poland; clandestinely studying for his Bar mitzvah with a Polish rabbi in 1941; German invasion in 1944; ghettoization; his brother's draft into a labor battalion (he never saw him again); separation from his mother and sisters upon arrival at Auschwitz on March 26, 1944; transfer with his father to Buchenwald and Zeitz; forced labor at the Brabag factory; his father's death after a severe beating for stealing an onion; volunteering to return to Buchenwald; hiding in the sick barrack until liberation; and traveling to Prague with a friend. Mr. R. recalls learning that none of his family members had survived; traveling to Munich in 1946; living in Föhrenwald displaced persons camp; emigrating to the United States in August 1947; and living in an orphanage, then with foster parents. He discusses his trauma when accused of stealing in a camp; his postwar abandonment of Judaism; and subsequently realizing its importance in his life.