Walter P. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4456) interviewed by Betty Chrustowski and Steve Forst

Videotape testimony of Walter P., who was born in Warsaw, Poland in approximately 1919, the oldest of five children. He recalls their abject poverty; apprenticing to a tailor at age ten; pervasive antisemitism; military draft in 1939; German invasion; desertion; local farmers saving him from Germans; traveling to Lublin; imprisonment; transfer to Majdanek; transfer a year and a half later to Birkenau; privileged jobs as a tailor, then a barber; realizing he could be killed at any moment; exchanging his yellow symbol for a red triangle, to which he attributes his survival; transfer to Majdanek; a death march to Dachau; transfer to Allach; choosing not to escape because he could not bring his future wife with him; a death march; escaping; encountering United States soldiers who gave them food; finding his future wife; marriage; emotional struggles due to his realization that his family were all killed and he had no home; becoming an alcoholic; his wife compelling him to stop drinking; establishing a business in Memmingen; his son's birth; emigration to the United States in 1949; and his daughter's birth. Mr. P. discusses wanting to “give up" being Jewish after the war to avoid suffering for him and his future children; his wife's early death; and his remarriage.