- Summary
- Videotape testimony of David F., who was born in a town in Poland (presently Ukraine) near Rivne. He recounts his family's comfortable life; attending private school; Soviet occupation in 1939; liquidation of his family's business; German invasion in 1941; ghettoization; escaping a year later with his immediate and extended family to a forest the night before the ghetto was liquidated; building bunkers; escaping a Ukrainian police attack a month later; separation from the others; wandering for three days; assistance from local farmers; finding his family; building more bunkers; Ukrainian police shooting into the bunkers, killing almost everyone, including his father and sister; escaping with his mother and a few others at night from under the dead bodies; assistance from former customers of his parents who brought them to hide with Evangelical Christians; his mother working for them as a seamstress; traveling from farm to farm, but always returning to the Evangelicals; Soviet partisans routing the Ukrainian collaborators in February 1944; liberation by Soviet forces; traveling to Rivne with them; identifying Ukrainian police who had killed Jews (the Soviets shot them); his mother's marriage; traveling to Prague in 1946 via Kraków and Katowice; moving to Föhrenwald displaced persons camp; assignment to an orphans' barrack; transport with the orphans to the United States in early 1947; a relative vouching for him; attending school and working; establishing his career as a cutter in the garment industry; marriage in 1958, and the births of three children. Mr. F. describes witnessing mass killings of children and deciding to tell his story after reading Bloodlands, which mentions many of the places he hid.
- Author/Creator
- F., David, 1928-
- Published
- New Haven, Conn. : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 2013
- Interview Date
- June 14, 2013.
- Locale
- Ukraine
Poland
Rivne (Rivnensʹka oblastʹ, Ukraine)
Kraków (Poland)
Katowice (Poland)
Prague (Czech Republic)
- Cite As
- David F. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-4462). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Other Authors/Editors
- Kline, Dana L., interviewer.
Millen, Susan, interviewer.
- Notes
-
Related publications: Bloodlands : Europe between Hitler and Stalin / Timothy Snyder. - - New York : Basic Books, c2010.
