Ya'akov G. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3787)

Videotape testimony of Ya'akov G., who was born in Kletsk, Poland (presently Belarus), in 1924, one of four children. He recounts attending a Jewish school and yeshiva; Soviet occupation; German invasion in 1941; witnessing a mass killing of the town's rabbis; round-up to a synagogue; separation from his father (he was killed in a mass shooting); ghettoization; forced factory labor; trading goods to non-Jews for food; setting his house on fire, and hiding in a bunker during the ghetto's liquidation; escaping to the forest; assistance from farmers; walking to Hantsavichy; returning to the forest; staying in the Baranavichy ghetto; building a bunker; two months later escaping with an armed group to the forest; forming a Jewish partisan group; killing policemen for their weapons; receiving weapons from Soviet airdrops in 1943; blowing up train tracks; considering his killing of Germans as revenge; the deaths of many partisans in action; draft into the Soviet military; serving in Lyakhovichi; entering Berlin; capture by Germans; escaping; demobilization in 1946; returning home (none of his family had survived); traveling to Łódź; joining Ichud, a Zionist group; illegal emigration to Palestine via Paris; reunion with a cousin en route; incarceration by the British on Cyprus; draft into the Israeli military; and marrying a survivor. Mr. G. notes not sharing his experiences and nightmares resulting from them. He shows photographs.