Michael J. Holocaust testimony (HVT-726) interviewed by Irving Gadol and Heidi Hample,

Videotape testimony of Michael J., who was born in Konin, Poland in approximately 1925, one of six children. He recounts his family's orthodoxy; antisemitic harassment in public school; German invasion; anti-Jewish restrictions; a public execution; transfer in cattle trains to the Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski ghetto; smuggling food and supplies into the ghetto; a round-up in 1942 (two siblings hid and were caught); his parents' deportation; remaining in the smaller ghetto with his brother; his brother's escape (he was killed with the partisans); obtaining weapons for the underground; forced labor clearing Jewish homes; finding abandoned infants (the Germans killed them); escaping from the ghetto with false papers; briefly hiding as a non-Jew with assistance from a Pole; entering Ostrowiec labor camp; slave labor in a brick factory; deportation to Birkenau in 1944; assisting the camp underground; the Sonderkommando uprising; public executions; a death march in January 1945 to Mauthausen; transfer to Gusen; slave labor in an airplane factory; sabotaging airplane parts; liberation by United States troops; assistance from the Red Cross; organizing sports in displaced persons camps; and emigration to the United States. Mr. J. discusses never losing hope of surviving, and the deaths of his immediate family and about eighty relatives in the Holocaust.