The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

"Completely By Chance": Surviving the Ponar Massacre

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William (Volfke Zev Gdud) Good, speaker of ten languages, describes being captured and taken to Ponar, where he miraculously escaped a massacre of Lithuanian Jews.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with William (Volfke Zev Gdud) Good.

This excerpt is in Yiddish.

Other video highlights from this oral history

Not Gambling With Another's Life: My Father's Lesson About Money

4 min 53 sec

Why I Didn't Kill A Nazi and My Daughter's Reaction

10 min 37 sec

Languages in My Village and Shtetl Childhood

2 min 19 sec

Memories of Zionism in the Intellectual Landscape of Interwar Vilna

3 min 35 sec

Traveling through a Forest Full of Birds and Wolves from Our Village to Get to School in the Shtetl of Nementchin

1 min 52 sec

I Was Delivered By the Same Doctor as Zalman Shazar

3 min 12 sec

Daily Life for a Jewish Kid in Nementchin, Lithuania Before World War Two

3 min 19 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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