Eldar B. Holocaust testimony (HVT-3906)

Videotape testimony of Eldar B., who was born in Humenné, Czechoslovakia in 1924, one of four children. He recounts a wonderful childhood; participating in Betar; expulsion from school in 1939 due to anti-Jewish restrictions; working at a lumber mill; round-up for forced labor in 1942; deportation to Auschwitz via Žilina; transfer to Birkenau; slave labor building roads; guards beating a prisoner to death; being beaten for helping a friend obtain extra soup; volunteering for the Sonderkommando; digging trenches for mass graves and collecting corpses; public hangings; transfer to construction, building crematoria; a Polish worker sharing food; spending ten nights in an underground bunker for hitting a non-Jewish prisoner; assignment to driving horse wagons; receiving food and trading goods with locals when outside the camp; a death march and transport in open box cars to Gross-Rosen; transfer to Dachau, then Schongau; abandonment by the guards; liberation by United States troops; traveling to Plzeň; marriage in 1948 (his wife converted to Judaism); and emigration to Israel in 1949. Mr. B. discusses learning no one from his family had survived; very few of his original transport surviving (Otto P., HVT-3998 is one); continuing fears resulting from his experiences; not sharing his story, even with his children; and not wanting to give the impression that it was heroic to survive.