Louis R. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Louis R., who was born in Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1921, one of two brothers. He recounts his parents' tailor shop; his mother's orthodoxy; attending public and Hebrew school; working from age fourteen; German invasion in 1940; his brother's deportation because he would not leave his wife (they did not survive); feigning illness to avoid deportation; hiding on a farm, then with his father's friend; obtaining false papers with assistance from the underground; working in a bakery; learning his parents were in hiding; obtaining documents to work for the Germans on the Atlantic wall; joining his parents in hiding with a non-Jewish couple (there were a total of eighteen); Germans searching the house; liberation in May 1945; and emigration to the United States in 1957. Mr. R. discusses confronting Abraham Asscher and David Cohen, heads of the Judenrat, about the deportations; the murders of many relatives and children in the Holocaust; many non-Jews who helped; and pervasive painful memories. He shows documents and photographs.

2 videocassettes