David M. Holocaust testimony (HVT-2982) interviewed by Jean-Michel Chaumont and Claire Paulus

Videotape testimony of David M., who was born in Oberhausen, Germany in 1922. He recounts moving to Charleroi, Belgium, then Brussels; attending public school; his father's support of trade unions; his participation in a leftist group; disbelief in German refugees' stories of concentration camps; German invasion; briefly fleeing to Abbeville, France; returning to Brussels; involvement in a Resistance group; arrest; incarceration in Saint-Gilles; interrogations; transfer to Malines; meeting his father there; not escaping due to his promise to escape with his father; deportation to Auschwitz; selection as a tailor; learning his father had perished in Birkenau; a doctor refusing his request to stay in the infirmary (this saved his life); transfer to Warsaw to demolish the ghetto; working as a tailor; evacuation to Dachau eleven months later in August 1944; and transfer to Waldlager V. Mr. M. recalls returning to Brussels; his family's disinterest in his experience; learning he had lost vision in one eye; marriage in 1947; and frequently talking about the war years with fellow deportees. He discusses concentration camp life: intergroup relations, organization, absolute arbitrariness, and contrast with normality. Mr. M. notes his dismay that his expectation that "things" would be better, did not occur.