Tibor M. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Tibor M., who was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1918, the youngest of three sons. He recounts his mother's death in 1940; draft with his brothers into a Hungarian slave labor battalion; three months in Sa?toraljau?jhely; returning home; recall in 1942; reporting to Nagyka?ta; slave labor on the Russian front including Kiev and Seredyna-Buda; frequent beatings; learning one brother had been killed; Soviet partisans freeing them; separation from the partisans and re-capture; retreating with Axis troops; bombings by Soviets; improved treatment under the Wehrmacht in 1943; constructing Axis defenses in Warsaw and Go?ra Kalwaria beginning in May 1944; transfer to Flossenbu?rg in December 1944; a public hanging; transfer to a factory in Niederoderwitz in January; improved conditions due to working with German civilians; transfer to Leitmeritz, then Theresienstadt in April; liberation by Soviet troops; hospitalization; traveling to Prague, Bratislava, then Budapest in June 1945; reunion with a brother, uncle and cousin; learning his father had perished; marriage to a non-Jew in December 1945; working in Vienna for UNRRA, then the Joint; his wife's conversion to Judaism; his daughter's birth; moving to Salzburg; and emigrating to the United States in 1949. Mr. M. discusses the kindness of Russian peasants; sabotaging the German effort; the importance to his survival of being with his friend, luck, and "stealing" from the Germans; a 1984 reunion in Hungary with battalion/camp friends; and not mentioning his experience for forty years, even to his children. He shows a plate from Flossenbu?rg and one from the hospital near Theresienstadt.

3 videocassettes