During the final months
at Buchenwald, 15-year old Elie
Wiesel was
assigned to a special barracks that was created
and maintained by the clandestine underground resistance in the camp as part of a strategy
of saving youth. This block, block 66, was
located in the deepest part of the disease-infested
little camp, a separate space below the main
camp at Buchenwald, that was beyond the normal Nazi SS gaze (the local SS officer actively
cooperated and conducted appels inside
the barrack).
The barracks was overseen by block elder
Antonin Kalina, a Czech Communist from Prague,
and his deputy, Gustav Schiller, a Polish
Jewish Communist originally from Lvov Schiller,
who was
a rough father figure and mentor, especially
for the Polish-Jewish boys and many Czech-Jewish
boys; but he was less liked, and even feared,
by Hungarian- and Rumanian-Jewish boys, especially
religious boys.
After January 1945,
the underground concentrated all children
and youth that could be fit in this windowless
barracks — more than 600 children and
youth, mostly Jews — and sheltered and protected
them. Younger children, like Israel
Meir Lau (Lulek) from Piotrkow, later the Chief
Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel, not yet 8 years
old, and several others were secreted in
block 8 in the main camp and watched by prisoners
there, still others, as young as 4 years
old, including Josef Shleifstein of Sandomierz,
and Stefan Jerzy Zweig (Juschu) of Cracow,
were hidden elsewhere throughout the camp.
When General
George Patton’s Third
Army arrived on April 11, 1945, more than
900 children and youth — mostly teenagers,
but also younger boys — were discovered
among the 21,000 emaciated prisoners. They
were alive in part due to a remarkable effort
by key elements in the Communist-led underground
to assist them to survive until liberation.
In this barrack, young Jews were protected
and sheltered from work, save for occasional
forays to clean up after bombing raids in
nearby Weimar, where they scavenged for food.
Survivors recall extra food in Red Cross
packages distributed to them from Danish
and other political prisoners in the main
camp. They recall efforts by their mentors
to raise their horizons in the barracks,
songs, stories, even history and math lessons,
to convince them there was another world
awaiting them. And they recall heroic intervention
by Kalina or Schiller during the final days
to protect them from being led out when the
Nazis sought to clear Jews from the camp.
Many of the boys, despite all that was done
for them, were nonetheless marched to the
main gate on April 10 and lined up to be
marched out. Wiesel says this in Night. “So
we were massed in the huge assembly square
in rows of five, waiting to see the gate
open.” However, American airplanes
flew overhead, sirens sounded, the guards
ran to the shelters, and Kalina, who marched
with them, ordered the boys back to the barracks.
They were still there the next afternoon
when advanced armored units of the American
Third Army drove SS guards from the camp
and broke through the barbed wire fences.
*Waltzer
is Professor and Director, Jewish Studies,
Michigan State University