Published: 14 April 2020
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THIS YEAR MARKS 75 YEARS since the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp and due to COVID-19 restrictions, the anniversary has been remembered with an online commemoration instead of the annual ‘Buchenwald Ball’.
Traditionally the anniversary celebration, on April 11, would include a commemorative dinner for survivors, their children and grandchildren.
Instead, this year the Buchenwald Ball committee (comprised of survivors’ families) created a video, Melbourne Buchenwald Boys 75th Birthday; Anniversary of Liberation of Buchenwald, which it shared on Saturday evening among the survivors and their families. A small number of the original 45 are still with us.
The Buchenwald Boys were teenage orphans and survivors of the camp who started new lives in Melbourne after WWII. They formed a deep, lifelong bond following their arrivals in the late 1940s, under the auspices of Jewish welfare. This friendship has seen them commemorate every April 11 with a ‘Buchenwald Ball’ to mark the day the camp was liberated.
“Every year our parents would always dress up for the Buchenwald Ball and when I was younger I never knew what it was,” says Dr Anita Frayman, the daughter of 93-year-old survivor, Joe Kaufman, who has researched and documented the story of her father and his friends.
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In 2005 her research culminated in the Melbourne Immigration Museum exhibition, The Buchenwald Boys: a story of survival. She is currently working on a soon-to-be-launched Buchenwald Boys website as part of Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation.
“With time I realised I was going to school with some of the Buchenwald Boys’ children and I started to ask, what does it mean to be a child of a Buchenwalder?’
“For me what it means is this example of resilience, commitment, perseverance, generosity and an ability to accept people as they are,” she says. “They just always felt this really important bond. They passed that onto us, onto the next generation.
“They came to Australia at a critical time of their lives, in their 20s, and they had lost their adolescence during the Holocaust. Being a bunch of boys, they had fun together and built their futures together. Unlike people who might have been 10 or 15 years older than them and had wives and children who were killed in the Holocaust, these boys came as young men,” she says.
The 75th anniversary video encapsulates a friendship that for some began in the barracks of Buchenwald, during the young men’s recuperation at sanatoriums or orphanages in France and Switzerland, or on the ships which brought them to Melbourne in 1948-49.
This connection endured to see the survivors become best men at each other’s weddings, find each other jobs, become extended family for one another and most recently, go into residential aged care together.
The video encompasses gratitude for friendship and sorrow for loved ones lost during the Holocaust through prayer, stories and a toast to life. It begins with a flickering candle and the haunting chant of El Maleh Rahamin (God full of compassion).
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After a recitation of the mourner’s prayer, Kaddish, by Mark Baker, son of Buchenwald Boy Yossl Baker, the video turns to the stories of the survivors, narrated by Anita Frayman.
It was important to the committee, she says, that the video reflect the traditional April 11 commemoration, which usually begins with a ceremony at Chevra Kadisha Cemetery in Springvale, Melbourne.
This has often taken place at the monument built by the Buchenwald Boys to commemorate their parents who were killed in the Holocaust and had no proper burial place. The chimney-shaped memorial has the survivors’ parents’ names on three sides, with the fourth side reserved for the Boys’ own names so they remain together in perpetuity.
Following the ceremony, stories of the Buchenwald Boys would be shared by three generations: the survivor generation, their children and their grandchildren. This would be followed by a special luncheon, known as the ball, with music, dancing and speeches.
“We have this combined commemoration and celebration so it’s to remember the past and celebrate,” Dr Frayman says. “We wanted the video to follow that sequence.”
The video concludes with the rousing Yiddish song Zog Nit Keymol. Written in response to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943, the song has long been considered a symbol of resistance against Nazi persecution and an anthem for Holocaust survivors.
“It’s a symbolic song of heroism, that’s why they sing it,’ says Dr Frayman. ‘They’ve always been a very joyful group of men, they dance and they sing songs and they’ve got their favourites. So we like to play those songs at the Buchenwald Ball.”
Towards the end of the video, Buchenwald Boy Shaya Chaskiel raises his glass to a camera in his backyard. “I hope next year the Coronavirus will be finished and we all will live still, and we’ll have a good l’chaim with my friends and the family,” he says. “L’chaim!”
To life.
To see the video, click here
Main photo: Mark Baker recites a prayer in the video, and photo of the Buchwenwald Boys after liberation
