Yekutiel S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3823)

Videotape testimony of Yekutiel S., who was born in Białystok, Poland in 1928, one of two children. He recalls a large, extended family; attending Jewish and Polish schools; participating in Hashomer Hatzair; his father's death in 1938; brief German invasion, then Soviet occupation; German occupation in June 1941; ghettoization; forced factory labor; smuggling food into the ghetto; hiding during round-ups; his sister being taken from work; round-up by Ukrainians; being beaten unconscious and, upon awakening, seeing his mother shot; deportation to Bliżyn; slave labor in a quarry; trading valuables he found with local Poles for food; sharing with his friend; public executions of escapees; transfer to Auschwitz/Birkenau, Sachsenhausen, Ohrdruf, then Peenemünde; slave labor in an underground rocket factory; sexual harassment by a German prisoner; Allied bombings leading to evacuation; a death march to Szczecin, Buchenwald, then Bergen-Belsen; liberation by British troops; obtaining food from houses in Celle; traveling east; draft into the Soviet army; deserting with several others; assistance from a woman in Bydgoszcz; returning home; finding his house occupied; living on two kibbutzim in Poland (Yitzhak Zuckerman was at one), then in Föhrenwald displaced persons camp; illegal emigration to Palestine by ship via Marseille in 1946; interdiction by the British; incarceration in ʻAtlit; release; serving in the Palmaḥ; losing a leg in the 1948 Israel-Arab War; marriage; and the births of two children. Mr. S. discusses visiting Auschwitz and Białystok five years ago with his wife.