Bedrich B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3897) interviewed by Peter Salner and Ingrid Antalová

Videotape testimony of Bedrich B., who was born in Nové Mesto nad Váhom, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1924, the younger of two brothers. He recalls his parents were intellectuals and hard working (his father was a physician, his mother a piano teacher); cordial relations with non-Jews; a very assimilated lifestyle; antisemitism and anti-Jewish restrictions beginning with Slovak independence in 1938; leaving high school; training as an auto mechanic; brief imprisonments in Hungary and Slovakia, then in Nováky in April 1942, for attempts to illegally enter Hungary; learning his parents had been deported; illegally traveling to Budapest with friends; obtaining false papers as a non-Jew; German invasion in March 1944; returning to Nové Mesto; hiding in a forest during the Slovak uprising; liberation; looking for his parents and brother; learning they had been deported to Auschwitz (they never returned); completing high school, then medical school in Olomouc and Bratislava; marriage to a non-Jew; his daughter's birth; working in India, Switzerland, and Africa; divorce and remarriage; dismissal from the Communist Party and his job; and rejoining after some time for his daughter's sake. Mr. B. discusses his ethnic self-identity as a Jew, as well as his daughter's, despite not practicing the religion; difficulties accepting his brother and parents had been murdered; and successfully “forgetting” his sad past so he could “move on.”