In this video, Aba Beer describes the typhoid outbreak at the Janowska concentration camp. Aba and other inmates were rounded up one day for delousing. Source: Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives, 1981
[00:00-00:07]
Video begins with inter-title in white text on black screen while instrumental music plays and fades into the next frame: In the spring of 1942, Aba Beer was deported to the Janowska concentration camp and selected for forced labour.
[00:08-02:21]
Cut to Holocaust survivor Aba Beer, sitting in front of grey curtains, and looking to the right of the camera. The camera shows his face and shoulders as he speaks during an interview conducted in Montreal in 1981.
>> Aba Beer: In camp, there was filth. We had lice.
[00:10-00:16]
The name “Aba Beer” and the location of the filmed interview, “Montreal”, appear in white text above Aba's right shoulder.
>> Typhoid was terrible. People were falling down, collapsing. And one day, they announced that they would do a delousing, entlausung. And we had to undress, because they were going to do the entlausung. They announced it, the entlausung. We will get rid of the typhoid. We stayed there in the field all night. I don't know if it was at night or if it was in the morning. In the morning, there was a barrel of some kind of liquid. And we were supposed to go into this barrel – it was 3-4 feet in diameter – and dunk in this barrel. It smelled of some kind of liquid. Now I got into this barrel, it was already many who had went through it. So you can imagine a couple of hundred guys go through the barrel, there was nothing left. I went into an empty barrel, but we have to pretend that we are doing it. I went into the barrel, I dunked in a barrel, I got up, and everything was okay. Now, at night we were naked, sitting around. You can imagine, hungry people, starved people, we were sitting, shivering, miserable. Outside? Outside in a field. It was summer but it was so terribly cold, I never experienced such cold as there. In the morning after this barrel, I believe, we were again put in the fields. Now you have to sit down. It was a hot day. It was blazing hot. People were getting… there was no shade. We had to sit in the sun, and again, you must not get up! And of course, and they from time to time you hear always a shot here, a shot there, and you see one guy falling down. And in the evening, they start to distribute us some clothing. So a shirt, pair of pants, and then again all kinds of shooting and so on. And we went back into the barracks. The barrack was as filthy, nobody was in the barracks and it was just full with all kinds of vermin and lice as it was when we left it.
[02:22-02:31]
Music plays for the remainder of the video. Three credit pages appear in white text on black screen: Interview conducted by Josh Freed, Holocaust Documentation Project, Montreal, 1981, Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
Directing: Helgi Piccinin; Editing and Colorization: Michaël Gravel, Helgi Piccinin; Audio Mix and Original Music: Pierre-Luc Lecours. [Logo for Chaire de recherche du Canada en patrimoine ethnologique]
Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, copyright 2017.
--
End of transcript.