Testimony of Yaakov Levin, born in Lodz, 1921, regarding his experiences in the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Mauthausen

Testimony of Yaakov Levin, born in Lodz, 1921, regarding his experiences in the Lodz Ghetto, Auschwitz and Mauthausen Family background and way of life; attends a Jewish religious school and a vocational school; activities in Beitar; relations between non-Jews and Jews until the outbreak of the war. Draft of his father into the army one week before the outbreak of the war; Germans occupation of Lodz and retreat of the Polish Army without any fight; looting and confiscation of Jewish stores; confiscation of Jewish apartments as residences for Germans; deportation to the Lodz Ghetto, late 1939; deterioration of the situation in the ghetto: hunger and disease; organization of the ghetto by the Jews: allocation of money to the ghetto inmates and opening of workshops, 1941-1942; simultaneously, start of the deportations and transports to Chelmno camp, lack of definitive information regarding the destination of the transports and "Aktions" in the ghetto; deportation with his family to Auschwitz-Birkenau, September 1944; transfer to a coal mine in Poland before Yom Kippur; transfer in open train cars to Mauthausen, January 1945; death of inmates who froze during the deportation; camp registration process; labor as an electrician in the camp; liberation and chaos afterwards. Contacts with the Jewish Brigade; aliya to Eretz Israel via Cyprus after wanderings on the "Shabbetai Lozinski" ship.