Jack O. Holocaust testimony (HVT-713) interviewed by Harold Cronson and Debbie Weinberg

Videotape testimony of Jack O., who was born in Sierpc, Poland in 1924, one of six children. He recalls his family's poverty; antisemitic harassment; German invasion; ghettoization in Sierpc, then Warsaw; escaping back to Sierpc; transfer to another ghetto, then Mława; transport to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation from his family; slave labor collecting corpses; sterilization; contact with his father; receiving food from him; assignment to a bricklayer's school; castration on one side in Josef Mengele's "experimental" hospital and, a year later, on the other side; a privileged position sorting clothing of arriving prisoners, then cooking for an SS officer; delivering water to Kommandant Höss's residence; receiving food from his wife; affection for a female prisoner; wearing civilian clothing under his uniform at evacuation; escaping; joining six other escapees; being caught; escaping again; liberation by Soviet troops; living in Kraków; returning to Sierpc, seeking relatives (none of his family had survived); warnings of AK violence against Jews; traveling to Katowice, then Breslau; abusing alcohol to deal with his sorrow; interpreting for the Soviets interrogating Nazis as a form of revenge; rejection by the woman from Auschwitz; living in Marburg displaced persons camp; engagement to another survivor; corrective surgery in Paris; abandonment by his fiancée; emigration to join relatives in the United States; a "messy" divorce after twenty-one years of marriage; and finding a writer to tell his story.