Avraham B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3781)

Videotape testimony of Avraham B., who was born in a small town in Czechoslovakia, one of seven children. He recounts his family's farm; attending public school and cheder, locally, then in Irshava; bar mitzvah; attending yeshiva in Uz︠h︡horod; learning tailoring in Bergovo (Berehove); Hungarian occupation; moving to Budapest in 1938; joining the Communist Party; arrest; being sent home; returning to Budapest; his sister joining him; anti-Jewish restrictions; a non-Jew helping him escape from a labor detail; returning home, then back to Budapest three weeks later; draft into a Hungarian slave labor battalion in October 1942; forced labor near Komárom, then Transylvania; digging an underground fuel dump; visiting his parents in December 1943; transfer to German custody in Bucsu; digging bunkers; assignment to the detail obtaining food for the camp in Szombathely; a death march to Mauthausen, then Gunskirchen; abandonment by German guards; liberation by United States troops; traveling in a group to Wels displaced persons camp; hospitalization for typhus; traveling to Prague; locating relatives with assistance from UNRRA; reunion with a sister in Budapest; traveling to Berehove; reunion with another sister and a brother; traveling to Budapest; his sister and brother returning to Czechoslovakia (they were trapped there when the border closed); and preparing for emigration to Palestine. Mr. B. notes learning his parents were deported to Auschwitz, and that his father had been in Dachau as well (they did not survive).