John S. Holocaust testimony

Videotape testimony of John S., who was born in Stanisławów, Poland (presently Ivano-Frankivsʹk, Ukraine) in 1925, the younger of two sons. He recalls his family's upper-class, assimilated lifestyle; Soviet occupation in 1939; German/Hungarian invasion in 1941; ghettoization; his father's participation in the Judenrat; escaping with his parents and brother to the Buchach ghetto; his round-up for deportation; his father bribing a guard to let him go; his mother obtaining false papers for all of them; moving to Warsaw by himself; arrest for not having travel papers while on a train; imprisonment for two months in Warsaw as a Pole; deportation to Auschwitz as a Roman Catholic Pole; befriending Soviet prisoners; escaping with a group of them; being caught after a month; transfer to Mauthausen before his punishment was inflicted; volunteering as a car specialist; working in a factory; transfer to Gusen in December 1944; assignment as head of the tool shack because he spoke German; receiving extra soup from an SS guard; liberation in May 1945; walking to Linz; living in Leipheim displaced persons camp; traveling to Budapest, then Kraków, seeking his family; learning his parents and brother had been killed; joining a kibbutz; living in a displaced persons camp in Nuremberg; completing dental studies in Nuremberg; emigrating to the United States in 1950; serving in the military; establishing a dental practice; and teaching in a dental school. Mr. S. discusses visiting his home town and Buchach with his wife, and obtaining family photographs from a cousin in the United States to whom his mother had sent them.

1 videocassette