Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum #90250, courtesy of NARA.
Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum #69136, courtesy of Israel Press Office.
UPDATE, September 2008: Yad Vashem has located the family of Fyodor Michajlitschenko, identified by MSU Professor Kenneth Waltzer as the young man who protected Rabbi Israel Meir Lau in Buchenwald.
In the archives of the Red Cross International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, Professor Ken Waltzer uncovers the identity of "Fyodor from Rostow," the protector of Israel Meir Lau at Buchenwald. Now the search is on to find him or a surviving relative.
When General Patton's Third United States Army liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945, American soldiers and visitors were astonished to find 904 children and youth—all boys in a men's camp—among the 21,000 surviving prisoners. Most were adolescents; many were younger than 12 years old. Among them were 16-year-old Elie Wiesel from Sighet, Romania, later a famous writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and 8-year-old Israel Meir Lau, later the chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel and recipient of the Israel Prize.
Discovering who these children were, what they experienced in the camp, and how they survived to be liberated is the mission of Kenneth Waltzer, director of Jewish Studies at Michigan State University.
His current book project, "The Rescue of Children and Youths at Buchenwald," traces the activities of an underground organization in the camp that helped the boys survive internment. Waltzer draws on interviews with former Buchenwald boys, now in their late seventies, as well as Nazi camp records preserved by the Red Cross's International Tracing Service (ITS). Among these records are transport and camp lists that provide the dates of arrival of prisoners, their ages and towns of origins, and their barrack assignments in the camp.
Until now, Waltzer has had to consult digital copies of the records in Jerusalem and Washington, D.C. This summer, he'll have the chance to see them firsthand—and in the process help provide a road map to the records for future researchers—when he takes part in an international workshop at the newly opened ITS Archives in Bad Arolsen, Germany, sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
"For more than sixty years, the Red Cross International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen has been just that—a tracing service," says Waltzer.
”ITS staff has drawn on concentration camp records, forced labor records, and postwar displaced persons records deposited by the Allies after World War II to trace individuals and develop information responsive to requests made by survivors and their families. Scholars have not had access to the former Nazi records.
"All this is changing as ITS transforms itself into an archive. Its leadership wants to know from a group of visiting scholars sponsored by the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum what uses we might make as new clients of the collections here; what opportunities for new research into Nazi activities, the Holocaust, and the experiences of victims they might offer; and what sorts of finding aids and priorities in developing these and what new investments should be considered to make the materials known and accessible."
Note to media: contact Kenneth Waltzer by e-mail or call (517) 355-5633 to arrange an interview.
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