One reason I still have some hope that some of the survivors may yet be alive to see my father’s pictures from Buchenwald is that several hundred boys were imprisoned in the camp when Dr. Robert Schwartz arrive in April 1945 with his medical company.
As Ken Waltzer writes (below) 400 of the children were taken by train to Paris after liberation. Sadly, one of the most famous, Elie Wiesel ,just died. However, Professor Ken Waltzer FACEBOOK is writing an important book, the story of the boys imprisoned n the “Kinderblock.”
As Hugh Schwartz continues his effort to destroy the pictures, he will not even affirm they still exist or where they are. I wonder if any of those children, surviving till now as adults, might recognize my Dad if we could show them the pictures?
One inmate who is no longer alive is Gustav Schiller, a Polish Jewish Communist, in Buchenwald 1940-1945, Schiller was deputy block elder of kinderblock 66 and a special figure in the story of rescue of youths at Buchenwald. Here he appears on film at the train that took over 400 Buchenwald boys to France June 1945 for rehabilitation (lower right of pic). Dr. Waltzer writes, “USHMM just helped me get his postwar correspondence with the ITS Tracing Service. In June-July 1955, he applied for a certificate of incarceration from his home in East Berlin where he had gone after liberation, after seeking for a time unsuccessfully immediately after the war to get to the U.S.. Word has it he died in East Berlin in the 1960s…..”