Harry M. Holocaust testimony (HVT-4390)

Videotape testimony of Harry M., a prominent Dutch author, who was born in Netherlands in 1927. He recalls his father was a German non-Jew and his mother a Dutch Jew; their divorce in 1936; living in Haarlem with his father; weekly visits to his mother in Amsterdam; neither of his parents practicing any religion, although his mother celebrated holidays with her Jewish friends; German invasion in 1940; his father's position at the bank that spearheaded the confiscation of Jewish assets and property; his mother's arrest in May 1943; his father arranging her release; deportation of his grandmother and great-grandmother to Sobibor; protection from a round-up by his father; his father's three-year imprisonment after the war as a collaborator; beginning to write in 1946; and a literary prize at age twenty-four establishing his career. Mr. M. discusses the impact of the war and Holocaust upon his writing; attending the Eichmann trial; the witness accounts of the Holocaust “making him sick;” his subsequent book; traveling to Auschwitz/Birkenau and Sobibor; the influence of other authors upon his work; his writing process; and the moral ambiguity of his father's misdeeds, resulting in his mother's and his survival.