- Summary
- 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.
- Author/Creator
- O., Jack, 1924-
- Published
- Dallas, Tex. : Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies, 1986
- Interview Date
- January 18, 1986.
- Locale
- Poland
Sierpc
Mława
Warsaw
Wrocław (Poland)
Katowice (Poland)
Kraków (Poland)
Sierpc (Poland : Powiat)
Paris (France)
- Cite As
- Jack O. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-713). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Other Authors/Editors
- Cronson, Harold, interviewer.
Weinberg, Debbie, interviewer.
- Notes
-
Related publication: '80629' : a Mengele experiment / Gene Church. -- Albuquerque, NM : Route 66 Pub., c1996.
