Mendel B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4453) interviewed by interviewed by David Herman and Jonathan Friedland

Videotape testimony of Mendel B., who was born in Poland in 1921, one of three children. He recounts his family moving to Izbica that year; their poverty; attending Polish school and cheder; antisemitic harassment; his bar mitzvah; participating in Shomer Hatzair, Maccabi, and Ha-Poel Ha-Zair; their move to Łódź in March 1939; working as a watchmaker with his father; improved economic conditions; German invasion in September; briefly fleeing with his father to Izbica; ghettoization in February; forced labor in several ghetto workshops; pervasive starvation, disease, and death; deportation to Auschwitz in August 1944; he and his father volunteering together as watchmakers; receiving extra rations; his father encouraging him to volunteer for transfer; their separation (he never saw him again); transfer to Görlitz; slave labor in Wumag Fabrik; public executions; a civilian worker secretly leaving him extra food; making a comb for the women prisoners; a death march in February 1945; return to Görlitz; liberation by Soviet troops in May; a Soviet Jewish doctor treating him for dysentery; returning to Łódź in June, seeking relatives; learning he was the sole family survivor; returning to Izbica with a friend; returning to Łódź after a warning from the Armia Krajowa they would be killed; traveling to Kraków, Prague, then Feldafing displaced persons camp; assistance from the Red Cross; moving to Landsberg, back to Feldafing, then Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camps; and emigrating to join relatives in England. Mr. B. notes people were not interested in his experiences after the war; sharing his stories with his daughter; his son's fears that retelling his experiences caused him too much pain; and satisfaction at sharing his experiences through this testimony.