On April 11, 1945, the 4th Armored Division of General George S. Patton’s Third Army rolled through the gates of Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, and liberated more than 21,000 emaciated survivors — among them a four-year-old Jewish boy named Joseph Schleifstein, whose tear-streaked face and crude wooden scooter would become one of the most haunting and enduring images of the Holocaust.
The child’s survival stands as one of the most improbable stories to emerge from the Nazi killing machine, a tale of parental cunning, luck, and the strange affection that even SS guards could show toward a toddler smuggled into a camp where at least 56,000 men were murdered.
Joseph Schleifstein was born on March 7, 1941, in the Jewish ghetto of Zawiercie in German-occupied Poland, the son of Israel and Esther Schleifstein. The family lived in the Zawiercie ghetto from June 1942 until its liquidation in January 1943, when they were moved to the Czestochowa ghetto.
There, his parents were put to work in one of the HASAG factory camps. During World War II, HASAG became a Nazi arms manufacturing conglomerate with dozens of factories across occupied Europe, using slave labor on a massive scale. Tens of thousands of Jews from Poland and other prisoners died producing munitions for the company.
Because Nazi guards would 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 children too young to be used as laborers, Joseph’s parents hid him in a cellar beginning in January 1945. When the HASAG camps were closed and their operations transferred to Germany, the Schleifsteins were deported to Buchenwald, arriving on January 20, 1945.
On arrival, Joseph’s parents were sent to the right to become slave laborers, while Joseph was sent to the left — the group of small children, the elderly, and others deemed unfit for work who were to be murdered immediately. In the general confusion of the lineup, his father found a large sack.
With a stern warning to keep absolutely quiet, Israel Schleifstein placed his child inside the sack, which also contained his leather-crafting tools and some clothing. The bundle allowed Joseph to be smuggled into the camp undetected by the guards. His mother was sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and those who had lined up on the left were all murdered.
For a time, Joseph was hidden by his father with the help of two anti-fascist German prisoners, but he was eventually discovered. His life was spared in part because the Germans valued Israel’s craftsmanship as a saddle and harness maker, and in part because they took a liking to the child.
The SS guards came to treat Joseph as a camp mascot and even had him appear at morning roll calls wearing a child-sized striped uniform. During these roll calls, he would salute the guard and report all prisoners accounted for. Nonetheless, when formal inspections by visiting Nazi officials took place, Joseph had to be hidden.
Despite this special treatment, the danger never receded. At one point, Joseph was lined up for execution, but his father intervened at the last moment to save him. During his imprisonment, the boy became very sick and for a time lived at the camp hospital.
Three days before liberation, prisoners using a secret shortwave transmitter and a small generator sent a Morse code message to the Allies from Buchenwald. The desperate appeal reached Patton’s Third Army, and the reply came back within minutes: hold out, help is rushing to you.
When the Americans arrived, they found more than 21,000 survivors, weak and emaciated. Among them were nearly 1,000 minors, mostly teenagers — and one boy who was only four years old. Joseph Schleifstein was photographed numerous times when the camp was liberated.
In many pictures, the boys are dressed in outfits made from uniforms of German soldiers because, due to a clothing shortage, he and other young children had nothing else to wear. The four-year-old recalled the liberation with joy for several reasons.
First, because from that day on he no longer had to hide. Second, because he started getting lots more to eat and drink. And third, Joseph remembers with the greatest glee, because there were lots and lots of rides that the Americans gave him on their tanks and jeeps.
After General Patton toured the camp, he ordered the mayor of the nearby city of Weimar to bring 1,000 citizens to Buchenwald to be shown the crematorium and other evidence of Nazi atrocities. The Americans wanted to ensure that the German people would take responsibility for Nazi crimes instead of dismissing them as atrocity propaganda.
Many of the visitors were crying, and some even fainted after seeing the dead bodies, the starved survivors behind barbed wire fences, and a table displaying paintings on human skin, lampshades made of human skin, various parts of the human body preserved in alcohol, and two heads shrunk to one-fifth of their normal size.
When the thousand citizens from Weimar visited Buchenwald, they claimed, “We did not know what was going on.” However, many survivors did not believe them. Years after the end of the war, one survivor who had been imprisoned at Buchenwald from July 1944 until liberation remembered thinking: now have a look at what happened here with your acquiescence.
Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries of Europe in Buchenwald. Exact mortality figures for the site can only be estimated, as camp authorities never registered a significant number of the prisoners. The SS murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system, some 11,000 of them Jews.
Hundreds of boys liberated at Buchenwald fared much worse than Joseph. They had not only experienced the brutality of the Holocaust but had also lost their parents. One of them later said, “I had just lost my father and I had witnessed my brother’s murder right next to me.”
The inhuman treatment they had received meant the boys needed to relearn how to live in society. The boys of Buchenwald spent their childhood surrounded by terror and death, and as a result they were rebellious against authority, full of anger, and undereducated. Society viewed child survivors as damaged goods who would go on to become psychopaths.
The boys had to relearn everything. Even their meals proved challenging. Their extreme hunger and inexperience with ordinary behavior robbed them of table manners.
They threw food, shoved it in their pockets to save for later, and gorged themselves, clearing their plates in a matter of minutes. With the help of benevolent guardians who gave consistent discipline, the boys slowly relearned how to behave.
Once it was time to leave the orphanage and go out on their own, many of the boys moved to Australia or Canada to distance themselves from their awful pasts. Joseph’s father wasted no time and tried desperately to find Esther, but he did not find her.
The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee then helped him go to Switzerland for a recuperative period, and after a few months they returned to Germany to look for Joseph’s mother again. Miraculously, she had survived the Holocaust too, and they found her in Dachau in southern Germany, where the family settled.
Joseph also took part in the Buchenwald camp trial held in Dachau, Germany, by an American military tribunal from April 11 to August 14, 1947. He testified for the prosecution against the defendants, 31 former guards and camp officials. Of the 31 defendants, which included four inmates accused of crimes against other inmates, 22 were sentenced to death and the rest were sentenced to prison.
In 1948, the Schleifstein family immigrated to the United States. While living there, Joseph was interviewed by a journalist and photographed wearing his Buchenwald uniform. In the end, the family settled in Brooklyn, where Joseph’s brother Benjamin was born in 1950.
Israel Schleifstein died in 1956 and his wife Esther in 1997.
Later, however, Schleifstein did not talk about his experiences, even with his own children, until decades later. His memories of being hidden in cellars and dark places haunted him for years, causing terrible nightmares, giving him a fear of death and a lifelong aversion to being in the dark.
Today, Joseph Schleifstein is the father of two children. He retired in 1997 following 25 years at an American telecommunications company. His story was an inspiration for the 1997 movie “Life is Beautiful,” which won three Academy Awards.
Even though the Nazis tried to murder all the Jews, they were unsuccessful. Joseph’s revenge is not only that he survived and also took part in the Buchenwald camp trial, which resulted in the execution of 11 Nazi criminals, but that his legacy and his bravery will go on through his two children.
Eight decades since the Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust, only a few of those who survived are still alive to bear witness. In the face of Holocaust denialism and rising nationalist sentiments across Europe, historians and survivors alike say it is more important than ever to share and preserve the lessons from this dark chapter of history.
The image of the small boy in a striped uniform, clutching a wooden scooter in a liberated camp, remains a searing reminder of what was lost and what was saved. As one historian noted, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.