Testimony of Yona Livne, born in 1922 in Belzyce, Poland, about his experiences during the war

Testimony of Yona Livne, born in 1922 in Belzyce, Poland, about his experiences during the war Childhood in a religious family in Belzyce; Jewish community life in Belzyce; many Zionist movements active; Tarbut school and Beth Jacob school active in town; good neighborly relations with Poles; father dies in 1936; witness helps to support the family; war breaks ouot in September 1939; German forces invade; abuse and humiliation of Jews; Jews assigned to streetcleaning as forced laborers; Jews forbidden to engage in trade; Jews banished to the ghetto; Judenrat established; rebuilding a dam, damaged in bombardments, and digging antitank trenches as a forced laborer; Jews in the ghetto deported to Majdanek; witness hides in a cellar during the deportation and remains in the ghetto; Jewish population of surrounding villages rounded up and sent to the Belzyce ghetto in October 1941; overcrowding; witness hides in a stable; escapes with approx. eighteen family members; moves from hideout to hideout in surrounding villages; captured and interned in a synagogue along with other Jews; infants and children in the synagogue murdered; pit excavated behind the synagogue in the cemetery area; family members and other Jews murdered in the killing pit; remaining Jews, including the witness, are ordered to cover the pit with soil; remaining Jews, including the witness, are taken to a labor camp; 300–400 prisoners sent to Majdanek; forced labor: farm work, tending vegetable fields; witness taken on foot to Auschwitz in July 1944; conditions of the march; prisoner number tattooed; forced labor: manufacturing double-barrel antitank cannon in August 1944, in an industrial area near Auschwitz; living on the factory grounds; forced labor at the plant until December 1944; prisoners transferred in freight cars to Gusen in January 1945; housed on empty barracks and given no food and water; transferred to Mauthausen; mass mortality among prisoners; cannibalism; liberation in April 1945 by American forces; back to Poland; immigration to Israel.