Israel – From prison brothels to slave labor camps, 15 scholars concluded a two-week probe Thursday of an untapped repository of millions of Nazi records, and hailed it as a rich vein of raw material that will deepen the study of the Holocaust.
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Among the striking revelations was the identification of the man who rescued an eight-year-old in Buchenwald concentration camp, Yisrael Meir Lau, the boy who later became Israel’s chief rabbi.
It was the first concentrated academic sweep of the long-private archive administered by the International Tracing Service since it opened its doors last November to Holocaust survivors, victims relatives and historical researchers.
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The opening of the files to scholars followed a series of stories on the archive by The Associated Press, which was the first news organization to be granted extensive access to the long-restricted files.
German historian Christel Trouve said the nameless millions of forced laborers began to take shape as individual people as she studied small labor camps – which existed in astonishing numbers.
Lau, who now serves as Tel Aviv’s chief rabbi, had said his rescuer was a person called Fyodor from Rostow. Kenneth Waltzer of Michigan State University found it was Fyodor Michajlitschenko, 18, arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, who gave the small boy ear warmers and treated him like a son in Block 8 until the camp’s liberation.
“A lot of us found the collections here, approached in the appropriate way, really opened up new significant scholarly lines of inquiry,” said Waltzer, who is director of his university’s Jewish Studies department.
…And just in time… When the [vast] majority of Holocaust survivors (those that were of work-capable age) are passing on! The only thing left [of the history of the Holocaust] will be the [verbal] recordings of the [actual] survivors and the archives of that [unfortunate] era!!
The only thing left?
sixteen miles worth of shelf space holds a lot of records.
Both my parents were freed from Buchenwald. I requested their records and received copies of the Buchenwald records. Farflichtege Nazis kept great records. You can go to http://www.ushmm.org and request the records. I think Yad Vashem also has them.