Menachem S. Holocaust testimony (HVT-152) interviewed by Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock,

Videotape testimony of Menachem S., who was born in Kraków in 1938. In this unusually vivid and insightful testimony, he outlines his family background and relates his earliest recollections, which date to 1942 when his family moved into the Kraków ghetto ,then Płaszów concentration camp. He describes his March 1943 leavetaking from his parents (noting that they promised to find him after the war) and his mother's parting gift of her high school photo identification which sustained him throughout the separation. He tells of being smuggled out of Płaszów; his stay in a whorehouse, where his parents had arranged for him to be taken in; and his life with the band of street children which he joined when the whorehouse was closed by the Germans. He recounts his stays with two Polish women in Kraków (who took him in in the fall of 1944) and in a nearby village with relatives of the second woman, where he remained until the end of the war. He recalls the painful postwar reunion with his parents, who had survived concentration camps; their emigration to Israel; and Oskar Schindler, who had helped his uncle to survive and whom he met in Israel. He also details psychological effects of his experiences, including his denial, until recently, of those effects; insomnia and recurring nightmares; an absence of fear which accounted for his heroic behavior as an Israeli soldier; and the possible effects on his children and other children of survivors.