Hershel Vider grew up with three brothers. He attended cheder and spoke with his parents in Hungarian and with his grandparents in Yiddish. As an adolescent, he was involved in Zionist movements, such as Betar and Hashomer Hatzair. During the war, he was imprisoned in a Russian labor camp in Vorkuta,Russia, from which he was released in 1946. He was married in a traditional wedding in 1949.
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Over seventy percent of Transcarpathian Jewry was killed in Auschwitz. A minority of the prewar population of 102,000 individuals, however, managed to survive either in hiding or in forced labor camps, sometimes under Hungarian direction and sometimes under Russian direction. In this clip, Hershel Vider explains how he survived the war in the Vorkuta gulag, where he was sent at age 18. He jokes that he was accused of being a spy for the Yiddishists. It was in the gulag, he explains, that he learned to speak Russian. In the clip below, Vider describes the fate of the rest of his family: two brothers were in Auschwitz, one brother was in hiding in Budapest and was saved by Raoul Wallenberg, and the fourth brother fought in France as part of a brigade of volunteer exiles from Czechoslovakia, calling themselves the "Masaryk Czechoslovak Regiment."