Isaac K. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of Isaac K., who was born in Košice, Czechoslovakia (presently Slovakia) in 1925, the middle child of five. He recalls cordial relations with non-Jews; Hungarian occupation in 1938; his bar mitzvah shortly thereafter, which was sad due to the occupation; his father losing his business permit; learning cantorial and opera singing; German invasion in spring 1944; his arrest as a hostage in place of his father; his father obtaining his release after two weeks; ghettoization at a brick factory; a severe beating which left him unable to process information for some time; deportation with his family, except for an older brother, to Auschwitz; separation from his mother and sisters; transfer with his father and brother four days later to Kittlitztreben; slave labor laying railroad tracks; breaking his ankle; hospitalization for three weeks; assistance from a Czech prisoner nurse; a kitchen assignment; singing as he worked; a kapo giving him extra food for singing cantorial music; sharing it with his father and brother; receiving permission to pray on Rosh ha-Shanah; a clandestine service on Yom Kippur; faking an injury to be readmitted to the hospital to see his father; remaining behind during evacuation of the camp at the end of February; liberation by Soviet troops; a month-long trip home via Bratislava and Prague; finding their home destroyed; reunion with his younger sister (his mother and older sister and brother did not survive); traveling to Vienna; and his sister's emigration to Ireland, his brother's to Canada, and his and his father's to the United States. He shows photographs and documents.

1 videocassette