Jack O. Holocaust testimony (HVT-713) interviewed by Harold Cronson and Debbie Weinberg
- Published
- Dallas, Tex. : Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies, 1986
- Interview Date
- January 18, 1986.
- Language
-
English
- Copies
- 2 copies: 3/4 in. dub; and 1/2 in. VHS with time coding.
- Cite As
- Jack O. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-713). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
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.
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View in Yale University Library Catalog: http://hdl.handle.net/10079/bibid/4294106
Record last modified: 2014-02-20 10:05:00
This page: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/hvt4294106