- Summary
- Videotape testimony of Soli G., who was born in Šilutė, Lithuania in 1928, the youngest of three children. He recounts moving to Kaunas in 1933; enjoying his large extended family; attending a local school; antisemitic harrassment; transfer to a Jewish school; Warsaw refugees living with them after outbreak of war in 1939; Soviet occupation in June 1940; a social relationship with the Japanese consul Chiune Sugihara and his wife; his family obtaining documents from him to emigrate; German invasion in June 1941 preventing their departure; briefly fleeing to Jonava; hiding with a farmer; witnessing Lithuanian mass shootings of Jews; the farmer helping them return to Kaunas; his brother's round-up to the Seventh Fort and murder; ghettoization in August; assistance from a Lithuanian family; an uncle, aunt, and cousins living with them; his father's job in the ghetto administration; a Lithuanian friend providing food for them; Germans burning a hospital with everyone inside; round-ups and mass killings in the Ninth Fort; a friend escaping from a mass grave in October 1941; reading a great deal; studying with a teacher who died of starvation; occasionally substituting for his uncle for slave labor at the airport; acting as a courier for the underground; and hiding with his family during the round-up of children in March 1944.
Mr. G. recalls their discovery; deportation to Stutthof; separation from his mother and sister; homosexual advances by a kapo; seeing his sister and mother across the fence; his sister throwing them bread; transfer with his father to Kaufering, then Utting (Kaufering V and X); his privileged assignment delivering food; sharing extra food with his father; persuading a supervisor to give his father an easier assignment, thus saving his life; lice infestation; a typhus epidemic; receiving Red Cross packages in December 1944; a death march to Landsberg, then Dachau in April, then a death march from Dachau; separation from his father; liberation by Japanese-American troops; finding his father in a hospital in Bad Tölz; a month in a sanitarium; moving to Munich with his father; assistance from the Red Cross; learning his sister was alive but not his mother; studying English; his father's marriage; working as a translator and interrogator for the Americans to discover collaborators, then with UNRRA; emigration to Israel in June 1946; participating in the Arab-Israel War; and serving eight years in the merchant marine. Mr. G. discusses nightmares resulting from his experiences and beginning to talk about the Holocaust only after meeting the troops who had liberated him.
- Author/Creator
- G., Soli, 1928-
- Published
- Tel Aviv, Israel : Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 1995 and 1996
- Interview Date
- December 14 and 21, 1995, January 25, and February 1 and 8, 1996.
- Locale
- Lithuania
Šilutė (Lithuania)
Kaunas (Lithuania)
Jonava (Lithuania)
Bad Tölz (Germany)
Munich (Germany)
- Cite As
- Soli G. Holocaust Testimony (HVT-3818). Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library.
- Notes
-
This testimony is in Hebrew.
