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.

They Took My Mother: The First Days of the Holocaust

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Yakob Basner, Yiddish teacher and Holocaust survivor, remembers the day the men in his building were taken away by Russian soldiers, and what happened to his mother after they took her instead of his father who was hiding in the attic.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Yakob Basner.

This excerpt is in Yiddish.

Yakob Basner was born in 1927. Yakob died in 2021.


Other video highlights from this oral history


More information about this oral history excerpt