- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Ben H., who was born in Pabianice, Poland in 1929, the oldest of three children. He recounts his family moving to Piotrków; attending cheder and a Jewish secular school; fighting back during antisemitic attacks; spending the summer of 1939 with relatives in Sieradz; German invasion; returning home; fleeing east to Sulejów; returning home; confiscation of his father's flour mill; restricted access to food; helping his father smuggle flour; ghettoization; forced labor in a glass factory; his Polish supervisor saving him from a round-up; joining his parents in hiding; sneaking back into the ghetto; liquidation of the ghetto; learning one sister and his mother had been killed; transition of two factories into Poniatowa camp; joining his father and sister at the lumber factory; deportation with his father to Buchenwald (the females - his sister, cousin and aunts - were sent elsewhere); slave labor in a quarry; transfer to Schlieben without his father; assignment to a munitions factory; compulsory singing; dreaming of food; transfer to Theresienstadt; liberation by Soviet troops; learning his father had been killed; traveling to Prague, then Piotrków; returning to Theresienstadt to retrieve his cousin; antisemitic incidents in Częstochowa en route to Piotrków; returning to Theresienstadt; emigrating to England with a group of Jewish children; living in Windermere; learning his surviving sister was in Sweden; attending university; and competing as a weightlifter in the Olympics, Makabiyah, and British games. Mr. H. discusses his profound grief when he was separated from his father and founding the '45 Aid Society with other “boys” who had been in his group.
- Author/Creator
- H., Ben, 1929-
- Published
- London, England : British Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1992
- Interview Date
- December 3, 1992.
- Locale
- Poland
Piotrków Trybunalski
Pabianice (Poland)
Piotrków Trybunalski (Poland)
Sieradz (Poland)
Sulejów (Łódź, Poland)
Prague (Czech Republic)
Częstochowa (Poland)
Windermere (England)
- Cite As
- Ben H. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-2121). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
