Ernst M. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Ernst M., who was born in Troppau (Opava, Czechoslovakia), Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918. He recounts the transition to Czechoslovakia; his family's move to Prague; his father's position as a health minister (he was a physician); attending medical school; German occupation in March 1939; arrest with his parents in 1941; their imprisonment in Prague; deportation to Theresienstadt; slave labor in construction; confinement with his parents to the small fortress, a punishment area, in May 1943; their transfer to Auschwitz in late July; quarantine; assignment to hauling excrement and dead bodies; a prisoner from Troppau arranging for a better assignment in the Birkenau roofing commando; frequent meetings with his mother and a cousin; the man from Troppau getting his father a better assignment; friends shielding him from selection when he was ill; working at the ramp and in Canada Kommando; the trauma of seeing his mother led to the crematorium in February 1944; Franz Wunsch, an Austrian guard saving his life more than once (he testified on his behalf at a 1972 trial in Vienna); his father's selection in October; the Sonderkommando uprising; the death march in January 1945; train transport to Lesslau, Stettin, then Ebensee; liberation; and placement in a tuberculosis sanitorium.

2 videocassettes