- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Henri B., who was born in Thessalonikē, Greece in 1919 to an impoverished family of four children. He recounts attending Greek public school; military service in Albania; attending university in Athens starting in 1940; benign Italian occupation; German invasion in September 1943; anti-Jewish regulations; obtaining false papers from a Greek police officer; hiding with friends; arrest; incarceration in Haidari; denunciation as a Jew; pointless slave labor; escaping from a deportation train in September 1944; discovering he was near Zolná in Slovakia; assistance from local villagers; futile attempts to contact Slovak resistants; arrest; imprisonment in Bratislava; and contacts with French POWs. Mr. B. describes posing as an Italian during interrogations; expulsion to the Hungarian border; refusing to enter Hungary; working on a farm in Čeklís, posing as an Italian non-Jew; liberation by Soviet troops; traveling to Bratislava; returning to Thessalonikē; learning his family was killed except his for younger brother in the leftist resistance; his brother's exile to Bulgaria by the rightist government; working as a chemist in Athens; marriage in 1953; deciding not to have children so they would not experience suffering due to antisemitism; and bringing his brother and family back to Greece in 1965.
- Author/Creator
- B., Henri, 1919-
- Published
- Athens, Greece : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1994
- Interview Date
- December 12, 1994.
- Locale
- Slovakia
Greece
Thessalonikē (Greece)
Athens (Greece)
Piraeus (Greece)
Zolná (Slovakia)
Bratislava (Slovakia)
- Cite As
- Henri B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3017). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Other Authors/Editors
- Almuli, Jaša, interviewer.
- Notes
-
This testimony is in French.
