Israel G. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3704)

Videotape testimony of Israel G., who was born in Piotrków, Poland in 1930. He recounts living in Łódź; attending a Jewish school; German invasion in September 1939; immediately fleeing with his mother and grandfather to Lublin; his father's arrival; their return to Łódź; joining their family in Piotrków; ghettoization in October 1939; Germans murdering his grandparents; slave labor with his father in the Hortensia glass factory (his father paid for him to work there and “changed” his age to eighteen); confinement to the factory during round-ups; his mother's deportation; returning to the ghetto; transfer with his father and two uncles to Dietrich and Fischer wood-processing plant; their transfer to Częstochowa in November 1944; slave labor in a munitions factory; transport to Buchenwald in January 1945; transfer to the children's block; visiting his father; the block leader changing their documents to identify them as Poles; a death march to Weimar; train transfer to Theresienstadt; Czechs throwing them food; he and a friend sharing stolen potato peels; liberation by Soviet troops; hitting any remaining Germans; returning to Piotrków seeking relatives; reunion with an uncle in Łódź; hospitalization for typhus; learning his father was in Feldafing displaced persons camp; he and his uncle traveling there; reunion with his father; seeing the block leader who saved him beat two former kapos in Landsberg; and emigration to Israel. He shows photographs.