New article by Carolyn Yeager accuses Professor Ken Waltzer of being a “fraud”

I just got a pingback from wordpress because another blogger quoted a comment on my blog in a new post that went up this morning on the blog entitled Elie Wiesel Cons the World.

This quote is from the article, written by Carolyn Yeager, that you can read in full here:

I [Carolyn Yeager] wrote back to him [Ken Waltzer] asking where I could find it [his essay] because I wanted to read it. No reply – which is typical because factual information is not his forte, emotional rhetoric is. What might be in his essay on Elie Wiesel and Buchenwald? Will it be the same as he wrote in a March 6, 2010 comment at Scrapbookpages Blog, when he said:

[Begin Quote]
For the skeptics [I was using the name skeptic then -cy] and know-nothings who have written in suggesting Eli Wiesel was not in the camps, that Night is purely fiction, you are all dead wrong. The Red Cross International Tracing Service Archives documents for Lazar Wiesel and his father prove beyond any doubt that Lazar and his father arrived from Buna to Buchenwald January 26, 1945, that his father soon died a few days later, and that Lazar Wiesel was then moved to block 66, the children’s block in the little camp in Buchenwald. THese documents are backed up by military interviews with others from Sighet who were also in block 66, and by the list of Buchenwald boys sent thereafter to France. All of this is public domain.

Wishful thinking by Holocaust deniers will not make their fantasies true. While Wiesel took liberties in writing Night as a literary masterpiece, Night is rooted in the foundation of Wiesel’s experience in the camps. The Buchenwald experience, particularly, runs closely to what is related in Night.

Comment by kenwaltzer — November 14, 2010 @ 6:57 am
[End quote]

I usually don’t allow name calling in the comments on my blog, but I let “know-nothings” pass because Know Nothings refers to a political party from the dim past.

Ms. Yeager wrote in her latest blog post that the web page, in which Ken Waltzer identified Elie Wiesel in a photo of the boys of Buchenwald marching out of the camp, has been taken down and replaced by another page.   I previously blogged about the web page that was taken down; you can read my blog post here.

Carolyn Yeager is absolutely fearless.  She’s not afraid of Ken Waltzer, as he is finding out.  I would love to know what is going on behind the scenes, among the True Believers, in view of this latest accusation of fraud.

Antonin Kalina, the Communist prisoner at Buchenwald, who saved the orphan boys

Child survivors of Buchenwald from Block 66

This morning, I read a very nice article here about the “Boys of Buchenwald” who were saved in Block 66 by Antonin Kalina, a Communist prisoner in the camp. The photo above shows some of the boys, who are wearing clothes made for them out of German uniforms. Could the man in the back row be Antonin Kalina?  The boy in the center of the front row is 4-year-old Janek Szlajfaztajn (Joseph Schleifstein).

This quote is from the end of the article, which was written by Brad Rothchild:

After the war, Kalina returned to his home in Czechoslovakia and lived out the remainder of his life in obscurity. His boys began new lives in Israel, the United States, Australia and Europe; but they always remembered the Czech communist who risked his life in order to save theirs. Over the past few years, the surviving boys, along with the historian Kenneth Waltzer, have initiated a process to have Kalina recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. Providing testimonies and bearing witness for perhaps the final time, these survivors have been working to ensure that their rescuer receives the recognition that he deserves. As the decision drew near, exhaustive efforts were made on Kalina’s behalf in Israel by former Buchenwald boy and current member of the International Buchenwald Committee, Naftali Furst, and his life partner Tova Wagman.

This month, nearly 70 years after the end of the Holocaust and over 20 years since Antonin Kalina’s death, Yad Vashem granted him this honor. While there is no surviving member of the Kalina family to accept the medal that goes along with it, this honor is shared by the surviving boys of block 66, their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. May his memory be a blessing for them all.

There are a few details in Rothchild’s article which I believe are incorrect. He writes that Kalina “risked his life” in order to save the boys in Barrack 66.  This implies that the SS men at Buchenwald were trying to get their hands on these young boys, to kill them, but Kalina intervened and managed to save their lives, risking his own life in the process.

Rothchild wrote that “Thanks to Kalina’s efforts, unlike the other prisoners in Buchenwald, the boys of block 66 did not have to leave their barrack for roll call — instead of assembling with the rest of the camp twice a day no matter the conditions outside, the boys stayed inside.”

This contradicts what the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says here about Janek Sziafaztain, which I am quoting:

Josef (Janek) Szlajfaztajn (later Joseph Schleifstein) is the son of Izrael and Esther Schleifstein. He was born on March 7, 1941 in Sandomierz, Poland during the German occupation. The family remained in Sandomierz through its existence as a ghetto, from June 1942 through January 1943. After the liquidation of the ghetto the family was moved to Czestochowa, where Israel and Esther were presumably put to work in one of the HASAG factory camps. During this period Joseph was placed in hiding in the area. Israel was sent to work for the Letzium Work Camp in the Radom District working for a firm called Ralnik from October 1942 till September 1943. He worked in Makashin, near Sandomierz, from September till December 1943; in a HASAG ammunition factory in Kielc from December 1943 to approximately November 1944; and for a short time in Czestochowa. In January 1945, when the HASAG camps were closed and their operations transferred to Germany, the Schleifsteins were deported to Germany. Esther was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Izrael and Josef were taken to Buchenwald and arrived on January 20, 1945. Izrael successfully passed the selection process by concealing Josef in a large sack in which he carried his leather-working tools. The child could not remain concealed for long in the camp, but his life was spared, in part because the Germans valued Israel’s craftsmanship and in part because they took a liking to the child. The SS guards came to treat Joseph as a camp mascot, and even had him appear at roll calls wearing a child-sized striped uniform.

It could be that little 4-year-old Josef was the only one of the Buchenwald Boys who appeared at roll calls, since the SS guards treated him as the “camp mascot.”  However, this shows that the SS men at Buchenwald were not trying to kill the young boys in Block 66, as was implied in Rothchild’s article.

This quote is from Rothchild’s article:

Kalina, a political prisoner, had risen to a position of influence in the communist underground, which ran the day-to-day operations of the camp on behalf of the Nazi SS at Buchenwald. When the boys arrived at Buchenwald, Kalina knew that something must be done to protect them — as a true believer, Kalina saw in the boys the hope for a brighter future. He and his fellow prisoners decided to place the youths in a special barrack, far away from the main part of the camp, deep in the filthy quarantine area where the SS was loath to go. This barrack, number 66 in the “little camp” at Buchenwald, became known as the “kinderblock,” or children’s block. Antonin Kalina was the block elder. In this capacity, he went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the survival of the boys held there.

In all of the Nazi concentration camps, there was a quarantine section where all new prisoners were kept for a few weeks so as to prevent the spread of disease.  The quarantine camp at Buchenwald was called the “Little Camp.”

Every block (barrack) in all the Nazi concentration camps had a block elder, who lived in a tiny room in the barrack, and supervised the inmates.  The block elder was a Kapo (captain), a prisoner who assisted the Nazis in running the camp. This was the system in all the camps, not just at Buchenwald.

Buchenwald was one of the main camps for political prisoners, who were mainly captured Resistance fighters, aka illegal combatants.  It was not a “death camp” for Jews, although there were Jewish prisoners, especially after Auschwitz was evacuated and the surviving prisoners were brought to Germany.

Rothchild wrote about the “death march” to Buchenwald, but actually the Auschwitz prisoners were only marched as far as the German border, and then put on trains to be taken to camps in Germany. (Elie Wiesel tells about this in his book Night.)

When the Buchenwald camp was originally opened in 1937, the Nazis brought common criminals, from the Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin, to run the camp internally. But after the first Commandant, Karl Otto Koch, was relieved of his duties and sent to Majdanek, the new Commandant, Hermann Pister, allowed the Communists to take over the running of the camp.

The following quote is from Robert Abzug in his book Inside the Vicious Heart:

Meanwhile, in all this upheaval, the new commandant Hermann Pister allowed a German Communist prisoner group, some of them original inmates of the camp, to wrest power from the ‘greens.’ [The greens were common criminals who wore green triangles.] The Communist prisoners reduced the amount of black marketeering and other common corruption, cut down the amount of wanton sadism on the part of prisoner trustees (or Kapos), and made plans for the ultimate takeover of the camp in case of Nazi defeat. But in other ways the Communists merely shifted the ground of corruption to the assignment of work details, food, medical care, and ultimately life. From their takeover until the end of the war, favored treatment was often received on the basis of political loyalties. The Nazis for their part, gained from the Communist regime a more predictable work force and a greater sense of order.

In other words, the Communists at Buchenwald decided who would live and who would die.  It was not a question of which prisoners would be saved from the Nazis by the Communists.  The Nazis were not trying to kill the orphan boys of Buchenwald.

General Patton visited the Buchenwald camp on April 15, 1945, after the camp was liberated by the Communist prisoners, shortly before the arrival of American troops on April 11, 1945.
In the following quote from his autobiography, General Patton explained his understanding of the Nazi system of killing prisoners at Buchenwald, as told to him by the former inmates:

One of the most horrible points about this place was that all these executions were carried out by slaves. There was a further devilish arrangement of making the various groups select those who had to die. Each racial group had a certain number of men who represented it. These men had to select those from their group who would be killed locally, or sent to camps like Ohrdruf, which were termed “elimination camps.”

Ohrdruf was a sub-camp of Buchenwald; it was a forced labor camp, not “an elimination camp” or a death camp. It had underground factories where prisoners were forced to work in the German war industry.

The orphan boys in Block 66 were saved, by the Communists, from being sent to a sub-camp.  There were other young boys at Buchenwald, who were sent to the sub-camps to work.  I previously blogged here about Ben Helfgott, who was not an orphan when he arrived at Buchenwald; he was sent from the Buchenwald main camp to a sub-camp, but he still managed to survive.

Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald (Documentary about the orphans in the camp)

A documentary about four of the young boys in Block 66, the barracks for orphan boys at Buchenwald, was released in April 2012.  You can read about the film here.

Elie Wiesel is the most famous survivor of Buchenwald, but he is not among the four survivors who returned to Buchenwald for this documentary.  Elie was an orphan after his father died in the Buchenwald camp, but he claims that he was in Block 56, a barrack for adult men.  I previously blogged about Elie Wiesel in Buchenwald here.

Block 66 was located in “The Little Camp,” which was the quarantine camp where new arrivals had to spend time before entering the main part of the camp.  Most of the prisoners in the Little Camp were Jews who had been transferred to Buchenwald after they were evacuated from camps in what is now Poland. One of the narrators in the film refers to “The Little Camp” as “the death zone.”

The boys in Block 66 were protected by the Communist political prisoners who ran the camp. It is implied in the film that the Nazis were trying to kill all the prisoners at Buchenwald, and the Communists had to decide which prisoners that they would save. In the last days of World War II, before the Communists took over the Buchenwald camp completely and drove the Nazis out, the SS administrators of the camp ordered all the prisoners to report to the Appelplatz, from where they would be “death marched” out of the camp, or put on trains and taken to other concentration camps, such as Dachau.  A photo of the death train at Dachau is shown in the film. I previously blogged about a death march out of the Buchenwald camp here.

Ken Waltzer is one of the narrators in the YouTube video about the film.

Elie Wiesel at Buchenwald: “I was there, but I wasn’t there.”

On June 5, 2009, Elie Wiesel accompanied President Barack Obama on a trip to the Memorial Site on the grounds of the former Buchenwald concentration camp.  Obama made a televised speech, standing in front of the Jedem Das Seine gate, which was in the open position.  Standing (unseen) behind him was Bertrand Hertz, one of the Buchenwald orphans who survived.

Early in his speech, Obama said this:

We saw the area known as Little Camp where Elie and Bertrand were sent as boys. In fact, at the place that commemorates this camp, there is a photograph in which we can see a 16-year-old Elie in one of the bunks along with the others. We saw the ovens of the crematorium, the guard towers, the barbed wire fences, the foundations of barracks that once held people in the most unimaginable conditions.

Following Obama’s speech, Elie Wiesel stepped up to the podium, and said this:

Mr. President, Chancellor Merkel, Bertrand, ladies and gentlemen. As I came here today it was actually a way of coming and visiting my father’s grave — but he had no grave. His grave is somewhere in the sky. This has become in those years the largest cemetery of the Jewish people.  The day he died was one of the darkest in my life. He became sick, weak, and I was there. I was there when he suffered. I was there when he asked for help, for water. I was there to receive his last words. But I was not there when he called for me, although we were in the same block; he on the upper bed and I on the lower bed. He called my name, and I was too afraid to move. All of us were. And then he died. I was there, but I was not there.

What are we to make of this?  The reason that I dredged up this memory of Elie Wiesel’s words at Buchenwald is because the question of whether Elie was really an orphan at Buchenwald just won’t go away.  Now a new post, which questions Elie Wiesel’s claim to be a Buchenwald orphan, has just gone up on the Elie Wiesel Cons the World blog, which you can read here.

The remarkable story of Ben Helfgott, a Buchenwald survivor

I have recently become fascinated with the story of the orphan boys at the Buchenwald concentration camp. There were 904 boys under the age of 17 in the main camp, most of whom were fatherless.  However, Ben Helfgott was not one of the 904 boys in the Buchenwald main camp. The orphan boys in the main camp were protected by the Communist prisoners who prevented the SS staff from sending them to the sub-camps to work. Helfgott was not an orphan when he arrived at Buchenwald.

According to this website:

“Shortly after arriving in Buchenwald, Ben was separated from his father and sent to a sub-camp in Schlieben where anti-tank weapons were produced. Ben would never see his father again. He later learned that his father was shot on a death march while trying to escape.”  

Keeping up with the Wiesels…

No, the title of this blog post does not refer to a new TV reality show.  This is about the ongoing controversy regarding two men named Wiesel: Elie Wiesel and Lázár Wiesel.  Elie Wiesel is the author of the famous book, “Night,” that is currently assigned reading for every school kid in America.  Lázár Wiesel is the name of a young man from Elie Wiesel’s home town in Hungary, who was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp, the same place where Elie Wiesel claims to have been a prisoner in 1945.

Elie’s full name is Eliezer Wiesel and there has been some speculation that he and Lázár Wiesel might be the same person. Both were born around the same time in 1928 and both were allegedly liberated from the Buchenwald concentration camp on April 11, 1945.

There are documents which prove that Lázár Wiesel was one of the 904 “orphans” at Buchenwald and that he was sent to France in July 1945.  Elie Wiesel was living in France after World War II and he also claims to have been on that list of “orphans,” although there are no documents to prove his claim.  There are no documents to prove that Elie was registered in Buchenwald, or even that he was registered in Auschwitz.

Now a researcher has proved that Eliezer Wiesel and Lázár Wiesel are definitely not the same person because their signatures are not the same.  You can read all about it here.  Some people might say “So what?”  Others are outraged. Elie Wiesel is an icon; he has made millions off his books and speeches about the Holocaust, and has been awarded prizes for his stories.  But is he a fraud?

I believe that Elie Wiesel wrote the book “Night,” but there is no proof that he wrote the original book, that “Night” was based on.  You can read the three part essay entitled Shadowy Origins of “Night” here.

In 1948, America changed the laws which had previously limited the number of immigrants from Germany coming to America, and thousands of Holocaust survivors came here, while thousands of others emigrated to Israel.   Almost none of these survivors wrote books about their experience in the Nazi death camps in the 50s and 60s, probably because they did not want to be confronted by the obvious question: “How did you manage to survive when 6 million Jews were killed?”  Many people thought that the obvious answer to that question was that the survivors had co-operated with the Nazis.

In 1954, at a time when there was no market for Holocaust survivor books, Elie Wiesel allegedly wrote an 862 page book called Un di Velt Hot Gesvign (And the World Remained Silent). This 862 page book became the basis for the book “Night.”  Elie claims that he typed up this book, which was written  in Yiddish, while he was on an ocean voyage to Brazil in the Spring of 1954.  Yiddish is a dialect of German, but it is written with Hebrew letters.  In 1954, did they have typewriters with Hebrew letters on the keys, that would type from right to left, as Yiddish is written?

The researcher, who questions whether Elie Wiesel wrote the original book, brings up the question of where the author got enough typewriter ribbons to type up a 862 page book while he was in the middle of the ocean.  Never mind the typewriter ribbons — where did he get a Yiddish typewriter in France before he started his trip to Brazil?

Update, 10 p.m. Sept. 13, 2010

I have just been told that Elie Wiesel worked for a Yiddish newspaper in 1954, so  he probably had a Yiddish typewriter. There is a photo of a Yiddish typewriter included in part III of the article about Shadowy Origins of “Night” here.

A World War II vet’s memories of Buchenwald

In today’s online edition of The Register Guard, there is an article by Winston Ross about Bill Sarnoff, a U.S. navy man who was sent to Buchenwald for five days to help the survivors after the camp was liberated on April 11, 1945. Now 84 years old, Sarnoff told his story yesterday to more than 100 people who attended a Holocaust Remembrance Day event.