Eliezer S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3782)

Videotape testimony of Eliezer S., who was born in Bilki, Czechoslovakia, one of six children. He recounts his family's orthodoxy; attending cheder, then public school; participating in a Mizrachi youth group; attending yeshiva in Vynohradiv; Hungarian occupation; anti-Jewish restrictions; his father's draft into a slave labor battalion; his return; German invasion in spring 1944; deportation with his family to the Berehovo ghetto, then Auschwitz; separation from his mother and siblings (he never saw them again); a public hanging; transfer with his father to Buchenwald after thirteen days; meaningless slave labor; transfer to Gleina; working in a Braunkohle Benzin AG (Brabag) refinery; a Serb prisoner beating his father; sabotaging the Serb's machine for revenge; an uncle's arrival and assignment to the tailor shop (a privileged position); his uncle arranging his and his father's transfer there; assignment as the kapo's personal servant; kind treatment by the kapo; escaping with his father during the bombing of Dresden; returning to the camp; train evacuation; Allied bombings killing some prisoners; burying them; a death march to Theresienstadt; liberation by Soviet troops; returning home via Prague, Bratislava, and Budapest; joining an uncle in Košice; assisting in organizing illegal emigration to Palestine; his father's remarriage and emigration to the United States; working in Bratislava, then Vienna; emigration to Israel in 1950 via Paris and Marseille; marriage; and his daughter's birth. Mr. S. discusses praying and fasting on Yom Kippur in camps; his father assisting many other prisoners; and the importance of his father's support to his own survival. He shows photographs.