Ignatez R. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Ignatez R., who was born in Solotvyno, Czechoslovakia (presently Ukraine) in approximately 1923, one of five children. He recounts his family's affluence and orthodoxy; attending school and yeshiva in Frankfurt; returning home in 1935; Hungarian occupation; draft into a slave labor battalion; postings in Minsk, Ivano-Frankivs?k (where he saw a grave from a Jewish mass killing), then Stalingrad; returning home via Budapest in February 1944; German invasion; deportation from Sighet to Auschwitz/Birkenau; separation from his parents and siblings (none survived); slave labor in a coal mine in Janina; transfer to Buna/Monowitz; prisoners organizing a prayer service; losing his faith in God; a brutal beating by a guard; working as an electrician; seeing United States prisoners of war; bringing food to a hospitalized friend; trading with Polish villagers; sabotaging work, when it could not be discovered, in order to avoid reprisals; Allied bombings; fellow prisoner Primo Levi remaining when almost everyone left on a death march to Gleiwitz in January 1945; train transport to Landeshut; escape and recapture; liberation; returning home; traveling to Vienna, Paris, then Australia in 1948; meeting his future wife; and returning to London with her. Mr. R. discusses the importance to his survival of not losing hope, and the social order in camps.

3 videocassettes