Itzcak D. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3749)

Videotape testimony of Itzcak D., who was born in Corfu, Greece in 1929, one of four children. He recounts his family's poverty; speaking Italian at home; his older brother's death; attending Greek and Hebrew school; visiting Athens with his father; benign Italian occupation in 1941; German invasion; fleeing briefly to Kamára; round-up of all Jews; their ship transfer to Lefkáda, Patrai, then Piraeus; imprisonment; transport by cattle cars from Athens to Birkenau; singing for extra food; a beating for smuggling food to his father; slave labor; public hangings; observing cannibalism; transfer to Myslowice (Fürstengrube); a friend from Corfu assisting him; assignment to the garbage detail where he found food and cigarette butts; being bitten by a guard dog; transfer in open box cars, then a death march to Dora; an Italian doctor operating on his leg; hospitalization; assignment to a block of Italian prisoners where conditions were better; transfer to Bergen-Belsen; liberation by British troops; Russian prisoners attacking Germans (he wanted to but was too weak); assistance from the Red Cross; transfer to Celle, then Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camps; transfer to Belgium; returning home; reunion with an aunt and cousin who had been hidden; fighting with antisemitic Greeks; assistance from the Joint; living on a hachsharah; illegal emigration to Palestine by boat; interdiction by the British; transfer to ʻAtlit; enlisting in the navy; and marriage in 1951. Mr. D. notes that only three relatives of over one hundred survived the Holocaust. He shows photographs, drawings, memorabilia, and sings songs from the camps.