Sydney Schwimmer was born in the town of Dovha in Subcarpathian Russia in 1915. He graduated from high school in Berehov, then studied medicine in Brno for four years.
Like all other Jews, he was expelled from the university immediately after the occupation. At the end of 1939, he was forced to return to Dovha, which had meanwhile been occupied by Hungary. Anti-Jewish laws were introduced and labor camps for Jews were set up. Sydney was included in one of them, helping fellow Jews threatened with deportation as "stateless persons" who were eventually murdered in Kamenets Podolski.
In the summer of 1942, he was included with thousands of other Jewish men in a labour unit sent to the Eastern Front: he experienced the horrors and mass murders in Kiev, Darnitsy and Stanislavov. In the spring of 1944, he was allowed to return to Hungary; shortly afterwards, the country was occupied by Germany and deportations of all Jews to their deaths began.
Stanley survived the Berehovo ghetto, the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the Wolfsberg camp and Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated. In 1948, he emigrated to the U.S., settling in Netanya, Israel at the turn of the millennium.
The interview was filmed on May 6, 1996 in Miami Beach, Florida, USA.