Advanced Search

Learn About The Holocaust

Special Collections

My Saved Research

Login

Register

Help

Skip to main content

Miland B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-266) interviewed by Dennis Ducorsky,

Oral History | Fortunoff Collection ID: HVT-266

Videotape testimony of Miland B., who was born in Mukacheve, Czechoslovakia (presently Ukraine) in 1927 to a Hasidic family of five children. He recounts antisemitic violence; Hungarian occupation in 1938; anti-Jewish restrictions, including confiscation of the family business; apprenticeship to a watchmaker; clandestinely observing Jewish holidays; three-week ghettoization; deportation to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation from his parents and younger brothers; encountering his sister; urging her to stay alive; slave labor on a vegetable farm; public hangings; the suicide of a friend's father; encounters with Josef Mengele; losing track of his sister; the death march in January 1945; train transfer to Gross-Rosen; observing cannibalism; volunteering to carry corpses to obtain food; transfer to Zittau; slave labor in an airplane factory; sabotaging the airplane parts; abandonment by the guards; walking to town; a German officer giving them food and warning them to return to the camp so they would not be killed; liberation by Soviet troops who raped some female prisoners; traveling to Bratislava, then Budapest; learning his sister was alive; reunion with her in Mukacheve; emigration to join relatives in the United States in May 1947; and bringing his sister to the U.S. Mr. B. discusses details of camp life; not sharing particular experiences which are too humiliating; and denying God and orthodoxy after the war, but later believing in God in his own way.

Author/Creator
B., Miland, 1927-
Published
Lawrence, N. Y. : Second Generation of Long Island, 1982
Interview Date
July 19, 1982.
Locale
Ukraine
Mukacheve
Mukacheve (Ukraine)
Czechoslovakia
Bratislava (Slovakia)
Budapest (Hungary)
Language
English
Copies
4 copies: 1/2 in. VHS master; Betacam SP restoration master; Betacam SP restoration submaster; and 1/2 in. VHS with time coding.
Cite As
Miland B. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-266). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.