Itamar O. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Itamar O., who was born Warsaw, Poland in 1936, an only child. He recounts summer vacations in Sródborów; his father's medical practice; his grandparents' affluence; their assimilated lifestyle; German invasion; his father's military draft; his capture by Germans as a prisoner of war; his mother's futile attempt to find him; living with his paternal grandparents; entrusting valuables to his mother's non-Jewish nanny; ghettoization; hiding while the adults worked; his grandparents' deportation; accompanying his mother to work; learning his father had returned and was outside the ghetto; his father arranging their escape; obtaining funds and false papers from his uncle's Polish business partner (he was in Armia Krajowa) and valuables from his mother's nanny; his father reading to him nightly which made conditions bearable and provided an education; observing the ghetto burning from his window; his aunt and uncle joining them when they moved to Praga (they moved five times after being discovered, then bribing officials); fleeing to Płudy; liberation by Soviet troops; his father's attempt to join the Polish army (he was rejected due to his health); moving to Mińsk Mazowiecki; continuing to live as non-Jews; harassment at school when students suspected he was Jewish; moving to Wrocław; his father's death in 1949; moving to his uncle's home in Warsaw; becoming a mechanical engineer at university in Warsaw; and emigration with his mother to Israel in the 1950s. Mr. O. notes his complex relationship with Poland and becoming a Zionist two years after arriving in Israel.

7 videocassettes