All language subtitles for Kinderblock.66.Return.To.Buchenwald.2012.1080p.WEBRip.x264.AAC5.1-[YTS.MX]

Downloaded from
YTS.MX

Official YIFY movies site:
YTS.MX

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.