I

Spotlight

New Global Archives

MSU professor explores Nazi atrocities.

Bad Arolsen, Germany

M

ichigan State University profes-
sor Kenneth Waltzer, director
of Jewish studies, is part of a
group of 16 scholars from North America,
Europe and Israel who have traveled to
Bad Arolsen, Germany,
to be the first to exam-
ine the newly opened
Red Cross International
Tracing Service Archives.
Waltzer and the others
will examine concentra-
tion camp, deportation,
transport and ghetto
Kenneth
records; forced and slave
Waltzer
labor records; postwar
displaced persons and migration records;
and ITS institutional records at an inter-
national workshop to identify rich new
opportunities for scholarly research.
The group will then produce a report
and recommendations to be published

by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
which is sponsoring the workshop that
runs through June 26.
After World War II and the Allied libera-
tion of the German concentration camps,
German records were collected and
subsequently deposited in the Red Cross
archives. Until recently, only Holocaust
survivors and former forced and slave
laborers and their families were able
to request records and only indirectly
through the Red Cross; survivors could
not see the records themselves and schol-
ars were not permitted access.
A recent agreement among the 11
nations represented on a committee over-
seeing the archives now permits scholars
to examine the materials and allows for
the digitized distribution (between 2008
and 2011) of copies of the records to key
research institutions in these nations.
Waltzer's area of study focuses on the
children of Buchenwald concentration
camp, where U.S. soldiers discovered 904

boys among the 21,000 surviving prison-
ers. Among them were 16-year-old Elie
Wiesel from Sighet, Romania, later a Nobel
Laureate, and 8-year-old Israel Meir Lau,
later chief Ashkenazi rabbi of Israel.
Among the records at the ITS are mate-
rials related to Anne Frank's deportation
to Auschwitz, Schindler's List, numerous
camp records and transportation lists, and
lists of prisoners who were killed or sub-
jected to medical experiments. Holdings
include postwar interviews with newly
liberated prisoners.
Waltzer will study these records to bet-
ter understand the flow of people trans-
ported from factory labor camps and from
death and concentration camps in Nazi-
occupied Poland to Buchenwald (near
Weimar, Germany) and their place in the
history of the Holocaust and Nazi camp
system. Such research will supplement his
interviews with survivors who were liber-
ated at Buchenwald on April 11, 1945.
"In this Internet age, it is relatively easy

to find former Buchenwald boys, contact
and interview them,"Waltzer said. "They
live mostly in the U.S., Canada, Israel,
England, France, Germany and Australia.
Many have written their memoirs in
recent years or made video testimonies or
engaged in Holocaust education.
"I have collected more than 80 mem-
oirs and new interviews, and there are
more than 100 testimonies at the Shoah
Foundation Institute Visual History
Archive and another 15 at the Holocaust
Memorial in Australia.
"Being able to use the additional mate-
rials at ITS in Bad Arolsen will strengthen
such memoir, testimony and oral history
work and may suggest additional lines of
inquiry about the experiences of youths in
the camps!"
For more information, and to follow
Waltzer's research and read his journal as
he participates in the workshop, visit the
special report at: special.newsroom.msu.
edu/holocaust.

❑

July 9 -Sept 7

Wed/Thurs: 8 p.m. - $15

Fri: 9 p.m. - $20

Sat: 8 p.m. & 10 p.m. - $20

Sun: 4 p.m. & 8 p.m. - $15

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42705 Grand River Avenue Novi, MI 48375

248.348.4448 1 www.secondcity.com

1408560

June 26 a 2008

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