The children's block in Barrack 66
In January 1945 prisoners set up a second children's block at the far end of the Small Camp and kept the boys in it alive. 904 children and young people were in Buchenwald when it was liberated.
A barrack at the bottom of the Small Camp
In January 1945 a children's block was established in Barrack 66, at the lower end of the Kleines Lager — the worst quarter of a camp that was by then catastrophically overcrowded with prisoners evacuated from the east.[1] Political functionary prisoners arranged it together with Jewish prisoners, as a second children's block after an existing one.
Who kept them alive
Functionary prisoners around the Czech communist Antonín Kalina looked after the boys: they obtained extra food, clothing and fuel.[1] Every one of those verbs describes something taken from somewhere else inside a system designed to have no surplus, by men who would have been killed for it. This is what prisoner self-administration could be turned into when the people holding the posts decided to use them that way.
904
When the camp was liberated on 11 April 1945 there were 904 children and young people in it.[1] A short country road separated the town from a barrack in which a Czech communist was hiding several hundred boys.
Sources
- Block 66 — Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1918–2005 • communist • block elder • Righteous Among the Nations
Block 8 was the earlier of the camp's children's blocks; Barrack 66 was set up as a second one in January 1945.
Historic sites
Historic sites
Buchenwald, 99427 Weimar
Barrack 66 stood at the lower end of the Small Camp, on the grounds the memorial preserves.
Period
1933–1945
The rescue of children inside the camp, in its last and most overcrowded winter.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
From July 1937 the SS had prisoners build a camp on the Ettersberg, the wooded hill above the town. 277,800 people from more than fifty countries were held there; 56,000 did not survive.
The block was improvised inside the camp built eight years earlier by its first prisoners.
On 11 April 1945, with armoured divisions of the US Third Army approaching, the SS were ordered out and armed prisoners took the camp gate.
904 children and young people were in the camp on the day it was liberated.
Bruno Apitz's novel appeared in 1958 and a DEFA film followed in 1963. For a decade afterwards it was easier to tell Buchenwald's story through a novel than to research it.
The rescue of children in the camp is documented history; the novel is what fiction made of it.