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Who am I? Where am I?

Who am I today?

I am Alex Moskovic.

Beautiful, Alex, great shot.

Excellent shot.

I am a person who lived through the holocaust

and because I lived through the holocaust,

I have certain responsibilities

to the world.

In the winter of 1944-45,

the vice was closing on the Third Reich.

The Russians were pushing from the east,

the allies from the west,

so the Nazi increased

the pace of slave labor and extermination.

Somehow, in the farthest corner of

Buchenwald concentration camp, in central Germany,

more than 1,000 young boys found a safe haven,

and a prisoner became their guardian.

When General George Patton's army

liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945,

amidst the piles of bodies and human wreckage,

904 boys were found still alive.

But the guardian slipped away, unremembered.

When you're by yourself and you can think about it,

you don't have an audience, you know,

you can really

think about how you feel about that time.

How important is the framing?

Good.

To have someone else on there I will just turn it like so.

Right.

It's on.

See you later.

It's on?

Yeah. You are on.

Okay.

I'm recording now.

I'm trying out the new camera

and I hope that the audio is fine

and my framing is okay.

My name is Alex Moskovic,

I arrived in Buchenwald on January 26, 1945.

I was 13 years old.

And so it began,

four boys on four journeys.

Pavel Kohn,

from Prague to Theresienstadt, to Auschwitz Birkenau.

Israel Laszlo Lazar

from Oradea to the Oradea ghetto

to Auschwitz Birkenau.

Naftali Furst

from Bratislava to Sered to Auschwitz Birkenau.

Alex Moskovic

from Sobrance to Ungvar to Auschwitz Birkenau.

It wouldn't be until later that their terrible journeys

would bring them together

into the heart of the Third Reich,

to Buchenwald.

The family was orthodox,

so my father couldn't even carry his tallit to the temple.

He could not carry anything on him on Saturday so,

I wasn't bar mitzvah yet, so I could do it,

so I was the one that did it.

I was proud to carry my father's tallit

because I felt that

it's my responsibility

and he gave me that responsibility,

it was me.

We arrived at the temple,

I had the bag and then he wore the tallit

throughout the services.

I'm very happy that federal republic

decided to give us money to invite,

probably for the last time,

so many survivors who still could come.

It's our last chance to meet them.

We're all used to celebrate, let's say the 75th anniversary,

and before that the 50th,

but we know in 15 years

there will be no survivors any more.

We tried to invite as much as survivors as we could find

and we knew it would be very hard

because we had to say so many times goodbye,

because so many died in the last years.

PROF. Survivor memory

about their experiences in the camps,

which some people call traumatic memory

is pretty enduring.

They remember a beating, they remember a block elder,

they remember a routine roll call,

they remember having to work or not having to work.

Most of these survivors

tell the exact same story themselves,

as they would've told after the war.

The really small children, most of them did not survive.

So if you were 15, or 14, and you were deported,

they would send you to a forced labor

or to a slave labor camp.

If you were younger,

you would be sent with your mother to death.

So I'm standing on the platform

with my mom,

and my younger brother was also

being picked at that point

and he went off with the children,

so now it's just my mom and me standing at the platform.

A kapo walks up to us and he says to us in Yiddish,

why is he standing here with you?

So he said why didn't he go with your husband?

And my mom said to him,

he's only 13 years old

and he cannot do any hard work.

So with that the kapo grabs me by the arm

and starts walking me towards the men

and he keeps asking me, where is--

Who is your father? Where is he?

So I pointed to my father and as we are walking,

he says to me,

if someone asks you your age,

tell them you're 16, and we're walking,

taking a couple of more steps and he keeps repeating,

you're 16, you're 16,

you're 16 till we actually got to my father

and then he left me there and walked away.

And I turned back

and my mom was still on the platform there standing,

and that was the last time I saw her.

Mr. Alexander Moskovic, welcome to the ITS.

We have your original documents, you want to see them?

The International Tracing Service

in Bad Arolsen, Germany,

opened its doors to the public in 2007,

50 million pages of Nazi records

were finally available,

after more than 60 years of being locked away.

Now let me ask you this, this is off by one year.

I think you have given this birthday

because you want to be older.

Yes.

To have a chance to survive.

Because young children, and so on,

they often were murdered at once.

And therefore,

many, many children used the wrong,

another birth date because I'm older,

and I can work.

- Right. - I am strong, I can work.

And therefore, this is often...

Yes.

When Pavel Kohn arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau,

he was told nobody stays long,

we are all leaving through the chimney.

More than one million people did.

Everyday brought the prospect of new terrors and abuses.

From kapos, guards,

SS commandants and for so many,

from the perverse doctor, Joseph Mengele.

Then I came from Mengele.

Thank God, he never asked me my age,

basically he just looked at me and he made a decision

that I should go to the right and I ended up with the boys.

So I stayed in Birkenau

for the next eight and a half months.

My father and my older brother went off to work somewhere

and at that time I just lost contact,

I had no idea where they were.

If somehow you avoided the chimneys,

avoided the gas chambers,

if somehow you didn't starve to death

or weren't worked to death,

it didn't mean that Auschwitz and Birkenau

were behind you,

they would forever stare you in the face.

What lay ahead was the unknown,

inside a camp called Buchenwald.

Shalom.

The numbers coming in reached huge proportions

and the boys arriving in January and February

had been on death marches in the cold,

snowy, frigid weather,

January, February weather

and then they've been placed in open coal cars.

The train pulled into Buchenwald

and the guards got out and keep hollering "Heraus! Heraus!"

Get out of the train, get off the train.

So the...

who ever was still alive climbed out of the train

and of course as soon as we got downstairs

on the platform, they counted us

and then after they counted us, they said to us, okay,

now climb back into the coal cars

and start unloading the dead bodies.

They came with an experience of seeing

a lot of violence.

Many hours of suffering,

self suffering or seeing others suffer.

Buchenwald was the last station,

you can say, in the life of these kids.

In 1937,

six kilometers from Weimar,

the Nazis built Buchenwald concentration camp

on the side of the Eldersburg Mountain.

In German, Buchenwald means beech wood forest.

Not a death camp, but a slave labor camp,

with dissidents of all sorts.

Gypsies, Jehovah's witnesses, criminals, homosexuals,

prisoners of war and political prisoners,

especially communists.

Built into the wrought iron entrance gate

were the words "Jedem DaS Seine."

To each his own.

But the Nazis had their own translation,

everyone gets what they deserve.

The communist, Jorge Samprun,

a member of the French resistance

was arrested in 1943 by the Gestapo

and deported to Buchenwald.

During the last year of the war,

large numbers of transports came to Buchenwald

from Polish labor camps in western Poland,

from Auschwitz and its satellite camps.

And among the transports,

the 1000s and 1000s of prisoners who came,

there were about 5-6-8 % boys, 16 and under,

and they poured into the camp.

The "Kleiner Lager,"

"the little camp" was a place of mud and cold,

rife with disease.

A quarantine camp,

it was located at the farthest end of Buchenwald,

it was separated

from the main camp by barbed wire.

Historians have referred to it as a cess pool.

For most of the boys coming to Buchenwald,

the "Kleiner Lager" would be their last camp,

but they had no way of knowing it.

The Nazis could use prisoner functionaries

as an extension of Nazi power

to be in the blocks at night,

to be in the work groups with the prisoners,

to be in the key institutions of the kitchen

and the

which was the clothing storage place.

Why did the Nazis need the communists?

Because they themselves were not capable of

running the entire camp

and because frankly they were afraid

to go into some of the camps,

particularly near the end of the war

when typhus was raging through.

By 1944,

Buchenwald had grown to over 100,000 prisoners

and the power held by the communist

underground grew along with it.

This level of influence

and opportunity was unparalleled

and set Buchenwald apart

from other concentration camps.

The consequence was that the communists made a deal,

they entered the gray zone of the camp.

They made a deal with the devil.

For political prisoners,

it was a big shock to see that Nazis also brought children

to the concentration camps.

One can say political prisoners had a certain resentment, ethic,

a certain morality.

Political prisoners had to make a decision whom to save

and they decided we will do our best

to save the children's lives and to save children's lives

means to save humanity in a way.

When we arrived,

there was a lot of SS in front of us.

And I remember,

there was one of the Jews and he says to us,

don't be afraid here, we have no gas chambers more.

He cheered us up in Yiddish you know.

The underground was faced with a dilemma,

what to do with these lost children.

A Czech communist

who had been in the camp for five years

proposed that all the boys be gathered in one block,

deep in the little camp, far from the gaze of the SS.

His name was Antonin Kalina.

It was block, in the distance,

middle of a block, in the little Lager,

in the little camp in number 66.

Antonin Kalina,

the block elder of Kinderblock 66,

sat for the only known interview

he ever gave in 1988,

at the age of 86.

Serving as his translator was Dr. Jendrik Flusser,

also a prisoner in Buchenwald,

Flusser was Kalina's assistant in the block.

Their friendship never wavered.

Kalina told the head of the communist committee

that they should make a block just for children.

But some on the committee were against it.

They thought the Nazis would come

and take the children away if they were all in one place.

He was young, much younger.

Yad Vashem was charged with commemorating

the six million,

the destroyed communities.

But the Jewish people also remembered

that there were some people

who stood by their side in those terrible days.

One of the clauses in the law establishing

Yad Vashem,

also gave Yad Vashem the task to commemorate

The Righteous Among The Nations,

they took this term from the Jewish tradition,

who risked their lives to save Jews.

We're excited about the effort to try

and obtain the righteous among the nations' distinction

for Antonin Kalina, the block elder of Block 66.

It's something of a puzzle to me,

why it hasn't happened already.

The process is fairly rigorous and challenging and...

Alex is the lead survivor providing testimony

and so he will petition Yad Vashem along with me

for the recognition that Kalina deserves.

She has to get testimony directly

from survivors in their own language.

We had a very productive meeting

in which I learned a great deal.

It's a much more complicated process

that I thought initially,

I was pretty optimistic at the beginning that

yeah, just snap.

On block 66,

the children didn't work anymore,

so we were just sitting there and looking at each other,

and sometimes fighting each other and so forth,

that was block 66,

but it was the warmest block I've ever been to,

because there you were recognized of being a person.

Once Kalina spoke to a kapo

and told him that some blankets were needed

because the children were cold.

The kapo asked how many? Five or ten?

Kalina told him 2,000.

The next morning they had enough blankets

to give the children.

How many, five or ten?

He said, no, 2,000.

2,000.

Kalina asked us, where are we coming from?

So I told him, we are from Hungary,

but the part of Hungary that used to be Czechoslovakia,

so immediately he took more of an interest in us

and he found us a place and he said, okay,

so this is gonna be your place.

And that time he told, by the way,

just remember one thing.

Every afternoon,

I hold classes and I want you to be there at those classes.

And we didn't argue. We said, okay, we'll be there.

As young men, Abraham Ahuvia,

and his older brother were prisoners in Buchenwald.

Ahuvia often watched his brother

teach classes in block 66.

So we got all different songs

we used to sing together, you know.

Kalina said it was nearly impossible to teach children

who had just seen their parents go to the gas chamber.

But sometimes,

they did manage to get the children to sing.

The founding fathers of this program had realized

that the decisions,

the dilemmas would not be very simple,

that the commission would have to deal

with very complex situations.

Because, you know,

stories are rarely black and white.

I thought of the story as a complex gray story

in which people who were part of the underground

when they could and where they could

they stashed boys in the barrack and took care of them

who were in part collaborating with the Nazis

and in part using their position as collaborators

with Nazis engaging in clandestine resistance

and put their position to use in saving human lives.

Some of the parcels were handed over to block 66.

The children's parcels,

I remember them coming in a box,

in a carton box and then they were opened

and some things had to be boiled

and had to be cooked

and other things had to be eaten.

It was a big adventure. It was a big adventure.

To me came one sardine and since then I loved sardines.

Portuguese sardines, that was a dream.

The bread that we were having,

was a small size,

I would say maybe seven inches long,

maybe less than that and we took it--

we got for seven boys, one loaf of bread.

So we took a string, we divided and we took a...

Jitka Flusserova and her husband

Dr. Jendrik Flusser were in separate camps

during the war.

After liberation, they began life anew in Prague.

Although she would not talk about her own experiences,

she has vivid memories of their friend,

Tony Kalina.

It was Kalina who put his life on the line

to protect the boys.

He changed their badges,

so that there were no Jews marked

with a yellow triangle in the barrack.

It's-- I told you.

Right before liberation,

the SS came to ask for the Jews.

Kalina said there were no Jews left.

They have all been taken the day before,

he told them the only children left were not Jews.

Kalina had also told the boys that if the SS came,

they were to say they were not Jewish.

And the SS believed them.

Even though 90% of the children were,

in fact, Jews.

DR. I have no Jews here,

here I have only children.

The SS weren't stupid.

They knew they had Jews in the camp,

so they went to the barracks

where they expected there would be Jews,

and they demanded

that the block elders put them forward.

And it was the block elders' responsibility

priced at their own lives to be responsive

to Nazi SS requirements.

He stood his ground

and he said there are no Jews here.

How does it feel to have saved

so many lives?

When asked how it felt to have saved all those lives,

Kalina didn't want to answer.

He simply said he had received a lot of cards

from the children after the war.

Thomas Geve was one of those boys.

Using found materials, colored pencils,

colored water in the backs of forms

from the camp administrative office,

Thomas made drawings of his camp life

that now reside in the permanent collection

at Yad Vashem.

Within one and a half months in Buchenwald,

I drew over 80 scenes of camp life in color.

Everything is in it, the plan of the camp,

the food we ate, the songs we sang,

the work and the illnesses and the punishments,

everything is in these colored drawings.

In the final days,

Jews were frantically being ordered out

on massive death marches.

If the announcements came over the loud speaker

to report to roll call, Kalina told the boys not to go.

At one point however the boys had no choice

but to report.

As air sirens sounded and SS guards ran for shelter,

Kalina ordered them back to the block.

The back was emptied out,

we had to go to the main upper platz

with the rest of the camp

and then there was a marsh pit,

so my brother was picked to go on this march.

I wasn't picked at that time.

Alex later found out that

Zoltan fell out of line and was shot.

We could see from block 66 over the other barracks,

and the roofs of the other barracks,

we could suddenly see the Nazi flag has gone.

And I never remembered any other flags in Germany,

only the Nazi flag,

because when Hitler came to power

I was only three years old.

Buchenwald became peaceful, very quiet,

there was nothing moving much,

it wasn't the usual thing, no roll call.

You know, every morning the roll call in front of --

so this was something different.

We are free.

I came to the summit of a plateau and there I looked,

and there was all this barbed wire

and these empty guard towers on the corner,

and looking through the barbed wire,

I saw this countless number of people

dressed in that same type of burlap uniform.

We came up to the tree line and looked at the camp

and we started saying, oh, my gosh,

it's a Nazi training camp, we...

you know, we're in for a big fight.

We ended up in a concentration camp here in Buchenwald.

So we waited and then all of a sudden

we saw the naked bodies, out in the--

they're unburied.

I got them here. Look.

We saw these very skinny people, eyes sunk,

sockets just back of their head, no hair, half of them...

they were just kind of swirling around like water.

Now these are some of the pictures that I took

when we came to Buchenwald.

Now these people were here

at the request of General Eisenhower.

He wanted to see what was going on in this part

and as I said, see, I was conscious,

I was assuming that

these pictures were going to be reproduced,

so when I photographed the guests with naked bodies,

I tried to make it very subtle,

because they would not have used them at that time, you know,

showing naked bodies lined up like log wood.

It's as if those sights

of what we saw just occurred yesterday.

We had never imagined that

men could do this to other human beings,

that what we witnessed there.

Six kilometers from Buchenwald is the city of Weimar,

the historic center of German culture and intellect.

Throughout its rich history, Weimar has been home to Bach,

List, Strauss, Schiller and Goethe.

As for Buchenwald,

the locals barely acknowledged its existence,

even when they saw it with their own eyes.

But behind the curtain of civilized behavior,

many of the most depraved Nazi medical experiments

were conducted at Buchenwald,

including the burning of prisoners with phosphorous

to observe how long it would take them to die.

Ironically, Buchenwald was referred to

as the singing forest,

because of the screams from prisoners

who were hung with their wrists tied behind their backs.

For the anniversary of the liberation,

the boys are returning to Weimar,

the city they pretended that didn't exist.

They are returning as men who 65 years earlier,

were together in block 66.

So we are very happy that we will have with us

50 former children of Buchenwald,

children who survived and were protected

by the political resistance by the camps underground

and then brought back to life

by members of the -- army.

This is second birthday of the survivors,

that's how they call the day of celebrations.

It's their second birthday.

As a young woman of 22,

the social worker Judith Hemmendinger

was given an overwhelming task,

to run an orphanage for a train load of boys

coming directly from block 66, after the war.

Located just north of Paris,

Taverne became the home

for nearly 100 Buchenwald orphans.

They never, never spoke about their families,

and you know that I wrote,

I made a doctoral dissertation about them,

and then for the first time I asked them

how was your brother, how was your mother?

And they all said the same thing, "my brother was,

my father was wonderful." He was not a strong father?

"No, he was wonderful." And your mother?

"My mother also was exceptional and wonderful and nice,"

and I'm sure it's not true, I'm sure it's not true

because it's impossible that all the fathers were ideal.

No, I think they needed it to make an idolization

about their parents, yeah.

After my return home from Buchenwald,

I came home and of course

I didn't find anyone in my immediate family

or the other extended family, like my cousins, uncles.

No one returned and I felt lost

and with this feeling of being lost,

I kept asking myself questions, why did this happen to me?

Alex.

We meet again.

Yeah.

Was this really planned?

This is not the place where we were supposed to meet.

We were supposed to meet in Jerusalem.

Yes, you can come.

You are invited.

Thank you.

I would like the nice weather...

This is not really cold. It is...

Remember, like, when we came here in January--

Yes, 23 year in January.

1945. It was freezing.

You come also in 23, January? Yes?

Well, I think we came from --

Yes, same train. In the first class.

Oh, yes.

Open coal cars. First class.

With snow.

In this block...

here.

Antonin Kalina was part of an effort

to protect 900 to 1,000 boys.

In terms of scale of effort,

in terms of central importance in the effort,

I just don't see how the case would be turned down.

Yes, of course, there are nos, yeah.

Wherever you have criteria, there are those who are not,

who don't enter within the criteria.

So and very often, you know, it's agonizing.

It's agonizing and they have to vote yes or no,

it's not the historian who can write

on the one hand and on the other hand

and if I look at it from this perspective and from the other,

no, in the end, it's black and white.

When you were in Buchenwald,

you took a tremendous risk, your life was at stake

to do what you did for these children.

When reflecting on whether

he ever risked his life in the camps,

Kalina said 1000s of times.

It was nothing.

If there's righteous among the nations,

this guy in the gray zone belongs there

along with all the rest.

So when I was asked to make a research about Antonin Kalina,

the main problem was that I knew only a very few things.

I knew that he was born in 1902 in Trebitsch.

Therefore it was logical that he is not alive anymore.

So I asked the lady in the state archive

responsible for that files whether she could look

and within a week I had a copy

of an entire file of Antonin Kalina.

And I found Kalina's last address there.

Okay, so I had the address, then I went to the house.

I've managed to find the owner of the house

who was an inhabitant of the house, even 20 years ago,

that Kalina was living there, even died there,

was barely visited by someone in the last stage of his life.

You know, the next stop was the central cemetery of Prague.

They told me there were three Antonin Kalinas buried here,

so I told them, give me the location of this one.

After the war, coming back to Trebitsch,

receiving prominent communist positions,

then gets divorced,

then goes to Prague to work at the ministry.

And then in 1968, went into pension.

That's Antonin Kalina.

The survivors are so important in everything we do.

So what will our work look like?

Not only in the righteous project,

but in every other respect.

When the survivors are gone, when they are not there,

when I cannot pick up the phone

and say, sir, you were in Auschwitz,

so tell me, was it this or was it that?

Many of the boys have told me that after liberation,

they carried Kalina on their shoulders,

you don't carry somebody on your shoulders,

especially if you're weak and you've been in a camp

and you've been in a block where other people have been dying,

unless this is some deeply felt feeling

and not very many of the block elders in Buchenwald,

I believe, were carried on their shoulders

of anybody after liberation.

So he hasn't heard anything from Yad Vashem,

however, he feels that this is a very difficult thing

to get the righteous from Yad Vashem

and he doesn't have too much hope

that we will be able to get it.

We are here in the garden of the righteous,

it's a very quiet corner on the mount of remembrance,

Yad Vashem,

and here we have walls where we engraved

the names of the righteous amongst the nations

and it's engraved in stone,

so it will be there forever and for perpetuity.

In his memoir, Man's Search For Meaning,

survivor Viktor Frankle spoke for so many survivors

when he wrote, "everything can be taken from a man,

but the last of the human freedoms.

To choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

To choose one's own way."

And so 904 children could be saved.

1,600 children and young people couldn't be saved,

have been killed by torture

as a reality of German concentration camp.

And I said to myself, how come they still believe in man?

That they still believe in history?

That they still think we can do it better?

Why don't they hate Germans, especially,

and why do they have hope?

And that's why I call them my teachers

to learn to how to live in a better way.

And that's part of the meaning of Buchenwald,

because why do we remember the dark sides of our history?

Because we don't want to let that have the last word.

Years ago, he had like a little basal cell removed from his back

and he went to the dermatologist on his own.

He came home and he looked a little ashen and I said,

was it painful?

He said, no, he says.

But as all this thing happened,

when they started to burn that off,

immediately he'd smelled the crematory.

Dear, Mom and Dad,

I wish that you would've been here longer

and see what I did in my lifetime.

At the end of the war, after I found out

that I was the only one to survive it, it was difficult.

The first time that I met him, he told me about,

about himself being a survivor, holocaust survivor.

And he told me that he's invited to Buchenwald,

he invited me to come with him.

I was very tense to see how he will feel here.

And he's a hero.

Quite an hero.

In a way, he cried several times,

but he enjoyed every meeting,

every thing that they arranged for the survivors.

Before we got married, I made the decision,

he didn't ask me, I made the decision to convert.

I just thought out of respect for his parents,

I mean, they died because they were Jewish,

so why would I want their son to raise someone, you know,

his children in another religion?

I met my woman who is still my wife today

and we had a wonderful life,

I was able to start and continue our family

and today I have two sons and we have four grandchildren.

I would have really loved you to see all that

and I hope that I have accomplished

what you wished for me.

See, Naftali is a person that goes forward always,

this year, he had cancer and heart operation

and you cannot see it on him.

He looks perfect, you know.

He walks, he goes to the gym almost every day.

He meets people.

He's not depressed by anything.

He's the kind of person that walks on and on in life

and takes all the flowers that he can pick.