Kalman W. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3565)

Videotape testimony of Kalman W., who was born in Łódź, Poland in 1920. He recounts attending a local Bundist school and summer camp in Vilnius; joining Bundist protests against antisemitic laws; an accounting apprenticeship in 1938; German invasion in September 1939; orders to report for military service with his father in Warsaw; German bombings; returning home; ghettoization; teaching in a ghetto school; his family concealing his grandmother's death to obtain her rations; round-ups and deportations; work in the ghetto finance office; listening to a clandestine radio and disseminating the news; Ḥayim Rumkowski assigning him as a factory accountant; meeting his future wife; arrest of a clandestine radio team; retrieving the radio from his family's apartment before a German search; his father's, uncles' and cousin's arrest (he never saw them again); hiding the radio with a friend; transfer to a factory; listening to BBC; deportation with his brother in October 1944 to Radogoszcz, Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, and Königs Wusterhausen; slave labor building tank barricades; liberation by Soviet troops; celebrating Passover with Jewish soldiers; reunion with his girlfriend in Łódź; a friend's murder in anti-Jewish riots; and emigrating with his wife to Israel via Marseille in 1948. Mr. W. discusses the Bund, Rumkowski, Mendel Grossman (the ghetto photographer), and other radio operators; saving the radio as a political act; and donating it to the Ghetto Fighters Museum.