Arthur P. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3478)

Videotape testimony of Arthur P., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1912, one of three children. He recounts his father's military service in World War I; attending a Jewish school; participating in leftist youth groups; apprenticing as a merchant in 1928; non-Jewish friends shunning him starting in 1933; his sister's emigration to Australia and his brother's to Holland, and later Palestine; working for a Jewish social welfare organization where he met Recha Freier, a founder of Youth Aliyah; escorting kindertransports to Denmark and Sweden; Kristallnacht; leading a hachsharah in Havelberg then Neuendorf; returning to Berlin; working with abused youth, then in a dye factory; round-up from the factory to Moabit prison (he never saw his parents again) in February 1943; deportation to Auschwitz; assignment to Buna/Monowitz; slave labor in the factory; public executions; meeting friends from hachsharah who obtained a privileged position for him as a typist; hiding friends during selections; friendship with Fred D., whose brother was publicly executed; working in the infirmary; a death march to Gleiwitz, then train transfer to Buchenwald; liberation by United States troops; returning to Berlin; working for Werner Hilpert, a non-Jewish, former Buchenwald prisoner; moving to Fulda; establishing Kibbutz Buchenwald in Geringshof; assistance from UNRRA; visiting friends in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp; working with Beriḥah to assist Jews migrating to Palestine; his emigration to Israel in July 1948; one-year service during the Israeli-Arab War; marriage to a survivor; their son's birth; and testifying in the Frankfurt war crime trials. Mr. P. discusses the importance of friends and not facing reality to his survival; the camp hierarchy and relations between nationalities; and pervasive painful memories.