The Buchenwald child

In the German Democratic Republic, the story of the rescue from Buchenwald of Stefan Jerzy Zweig, a Jewish boy born in the Kraków ghetto in January 1941, had the same significance as the diary of Anne Frank in the West. Zweig's rescue was ascribed solely to the communist inmates of Buchenwald; however, the boy survived primarily due to the heroic efforts of his father, Zacharias Zweig, who smuggled his son into the camp, albeit with some assistance on the part of communist prisoners. The myth of a Jewish boy rescued by communists was created by former communist prisoners themselves as early as 1945-46; one of their goals was to divert accusations that some of them collaborated with the SS guard. This myth supported another myth - that of the "self-liberation" of Buchenwald by communist prisoners in April 1945, just before the camp was liberated by the Americans. In 1958, Bruno Apitz published his novel "Nackt unter Wölfen", based on Zweig's story; it was followed in 1960 by a TV film and in 1963 by Frank Beyer's film of the same title. In 1961, Zacharias Zweig gave a testimony to Yad Vashem. In 1964, a German translation of Zweig's testimony was serialized in "Berliner Zeitung am Abend"; after intervention by the authorities, the newspaper made many excisions from the text. Dwells on the story of the novel and of the reception of Beyer's film, as well as on the postwar biography of Stefan Jerzy Zweig and the deconstruction of this myth in reunited Germany. Dwells, also, on the transformation of the Buchenwald Memorial throughout its history and on East German literature dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)