Prelude: The Buchenwald Children after Liberation

According To The International Camp Committee's report on Buchenwald produced shortly after the war, about 900 children — 85 percent of them aged between fourteen and eighteen — were among those liberated at the camp on 11 April 1945. The vast majority of these children were Hungarian, Polish, or Czech Jews; the youngest was a three-year-old Polish child. While some subsequent publications claim that this latter child was Stefan Zweig, others claim it was Josef Streich. Klaus Drobisch, a GDR historian, claims that Zweig was the second youngest. What is certain is that a number of very young children survived. One of these was the Polish- Jewish boy Joseph Schleifstein. On arrival at Buchenwald in 1943, he was hidden by his father in a sack. His father and other inmates protected him until liberation in April 1945, by which time Joseph was four. A famous photograph of Joseph shows him sitting on the running board of a United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) truck. Schleifstein's memories of his time at Buchenwald surfaced in the American press shortly after the release of Roberto Benigni's film Life Is Beautiful (La vita è bella, 1997). The most astonishing survival tale is surely that related by an American soldier, Leo Pine, who entered Buchenwald with the 183rd Engineer Combat Batallion one or two days after liberation. Pine tells of his encounter there with a three-year-old Dutch Jew by the name of Yankala. An adult Jewish prisoner told Pine that Yankala had been born in Buchenwald. The baby was hidden by prisoners between floorboards and fed on potatogruel.The miraculous survival of Yankala and other children should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact of the terrible loss of their parents. Yankala's mother was murdered by the SS after she had given birth. Elie Wiesel, who was fifteen when he was brought to Buchenwald and went on to become one of the most famous of all Holocaust survivors, was scarred for life by the loss of his parents and sister. In his memoir Night (1958), he provides a painful description of the death of his father from dysentery and weakness at Buchenwald. At the time, his own continued survival meant little to him: “I have nothing to say of my life during this period.