Horror and Hope: Studying the Holocaust

Bad Arolsen Journal

June 20, 2008

Yesterday I followed the trail of the Kovno boys again from Dachau to Auschwitz and to Buchenwald or Mauthausen. I was testing whether I could get inside the Mauthausen camp in the same way I can inside Buchenwald. But the Kovno boys arrived at Mauthausen late—January 30, 1945—after evacuation from Auschwitz, and they show up only mixed into the larger mass of prisoners in the nummerbucher; the zugangsbucher cut off on January 23 or 24, probably because the camp is overwhelmed by newcomers. Nor can I follow the Kovno boys from Mauthausen to the auskommando built in March at Gunskirchen, where Americans liberated many in early May.

Thus, my sense is that social history work in the ITS concentration camp records carries the richest possibilities in Buchenwald, where transport lists, zugangsbucher, blockbucher, and digitized prisoner materials can be linked. In Dachau and Mauthausen, there is not the same range of materials, they cut off earlier, and they are more difficult to link as well. On Bergen Belsen and several other camps, forget about it. Yet Buchenwald was the main camp in the concentration camp system, and huge numbers moved through and out of it. It is the Grand Central Station and affords a view of prisoners being moved around, deposited, quarantined, then moved out again. 

All this sharpens my sense of what was happening as numerous transports came to Buchenwald in 1944–45 from factory labor camps and death and slave labor camps in Poland, many containing many children and youths. The boys appear on the transport lists; they can be followed into the clustered barracks into which underground prisoners moved them while temporarily keeping other prisoners and then sending them to auskommandos around central Germany. The boys were clustered in barrack 8 for a time, then after mid-summer 1944, they were clustered in barrack 23. In early 1945, they were picked off the transports and placed again in block 8; and then, when the transports came in larger numbers from Auschwitz and Gross Rosen, they were placed in huge numbers in a new block 66, down the hill.  The prisoner materials in ITS, now also digitized, contain materials specifying arrival dates tied to transport lists and block assignments. The block cards say blocks 8 and 66 for most children and youths again and again.  Elie Wiesel’s block card says he was moved to block 66.

Yesterday I found out who mentored little 8 year-old Israel Meir Lau (Lolek) in block 8 in the main camp. Lau’s memoir states it was Fyodor from Rostow but fails to mention his last name. I looked at all the Fyodors and think it is Fyodor Michajlitschenko, an 18-year old prisoner arrested by the Gestapo in 1943. He made ear warmers for the boy and watched over him like a father. I also found out about the Gypsy boy the same age in block 8, Josef Berger, from Aachen Holland, who nearly alone among the Gypsy youths brought to Buchenwald, was saved from being sent back to the gas at Auschwitz. Many boys were entertained in block 8 by Jakow Nikiforow, a former circus artist recently from Novosobirsk.  I found his materials and other information about other members of the prisoner conspiracy. Later today I will work mainly on my own research.

I skipped the walking tour of Bad Arolsen provided by a local guide last night. It turned out to be a lot of stuff about the local castle and main town streets, but my colleagues were disturbed by the historical bracketing that went on around the local leadership. It turns out that the duke of the castle was the biggest Nazi in the district and was prosecuted after the war in the Allied trials held at Dachau.  He was guilty as hell. It also turned out that he named Heinrich Himmler as his son’s godfather. That’s the current duke who lives in the castle at Bad Arolsen. 

On Sunday, after two personal work days in the archive, we’re heading to Bergen Belsen, where a new museum opened this year. Interestingly, because the camp was ravaged by typhus and the British set flame to it after liberation, there are not the kinds of materials here at ITS that there are from several other camps. Nor are there many original materials on the ghettos. I looked at holdings yesterday on Warsaw, Lodz, and Kovno.

Kenneth Waltzer
Bad Arolsen, Germany

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