Pierre B. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Pierre B., who was born in Berlin, Germany in 1935 to a Jewish father and Christian mother. He recalls that his parents did not marry because of the political situation; his father's forced emigration, inability to adjust to life in Brazil, and return to Europe; and traveling with his mother to rejoin his father in Paris. He describes school; roaming the streets of Paris with his best friend Lucien, who died in Auschwitz and about whom he has written poetry; difficulties with other children who considered him German; his independence as a young child; his father's hospitalization, marking the last time Mr. B. cried until long after the war; and his father's arrest and deportation to Drancy. He relates a last visit with his father in Drancy before deportation to Auschwitz in July 1942; having to live with a family in St. Laurent-des-Eaux; staying alone with their two-year-old child; constant fear; one or two visits to his mother in Paris; liberation by the French underground; and reunion with his mother. He recounts his fierce desire to be French resulting in hatred of his mother because she was German; spending the next five years in a children's home run by Maurice de Rothschild; the trauma of attending summer camps in Germany; converting to Judaism at thirteen in order to have a Bar Mitzvah; and his education, career, and family. He ponders his ambivalent feelings toward his mother.

2 videocassettes (3/4" u-matic)