The boy in Buchenwald
It’s the summer holidays, and you can tell by the atmosphere on the streets of Malmö. The southernmost Swedish city is relaxed and casual in a moderate 70 degrees weather. Shorts, strollers and leisurely walking paces. Somewhere on the courtyard in an apartment complex, a couple of meters below an open balcony door, kids are playing. Their laughter is mixed with the afternoon rays of sunshine that penetrate through the shuttered blinds.
Leaning forward, 89 years old Nikolaus Grüner is sitting in his wide leather armchair.
”The feces and piss ran down from the upper bunks and over me, and eventually my clothes dissolved. Then came the itches, and I fell sick. I weighed a mere 25 kilos when we were freed.”
His gray hair is combed back and his dark brown eyes only look away when he’s searching in his memory for details, or in his vocabulary for words. His gestures are broad but precise. He hasn’t forgotten about a single day in the concentration camps of Germany, he says. They can’t be forgotten.
When American troops arrived to Buchenwald, its SS guards had left only days before. The Americans had lived the reality of the second world war for years, but the misery of the camp still shocked them. 21 000 people, double the amount that the camp was built for. One single latrine for them all to share. Dead laying on the ground, where they had collapsed. No water, no heating, and barracks built for a couple of dozen of horses, filled with thousands of emaciated people.
One of them, Nikolaus, suffering from tuberculosis.
Actually, you already know how bad he was suffering. You’ve seen him pictured.
The boy in the bottom left, with his ribs showing, looking frightened at the camera. Just a few days after his 16th birthday. That’s him.
The picture was taken on the 16th of April 1945, by Private Harry Miller of the 166th Signal Photographic Company, just five days after the camp was liberated. German SS soldiers started evacuating and abandoning their concentration camps in Poland in January that year, pushed back by the advancing Red Army, and they drove their prisoners on death marches west, to German camps. At the end of February, Buchenwald temporarily became the largest camp in existence, housing more than 110 000 prisoners. When the SS finally left Buchenwald as well, most of them had been evacuated to Dachau, Flossenbürg, and the Terezín ghetto. They left Nikolaus and 21 000 others behind.
The American soldiers, seeking to help the starved prisoners, gave them their own rations, but their digestive systems couldn’t handle food. They ate, and then they died. “The sight of those near death was almost beyond belief”, Private Hence J. Hill wrote in a letter to his wife. “Thighs the size of my arm, buttocks no longer visible, pelvic bones seen at any angle, as were other human bones. You can imagine the odor.”
Back home, in the Hungarian city Nyíregyháza, Nikolaus’ mother had run a grocery store. In April of 1944, their whole family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“They packed us in train cars without windows and locked them from the outside. The trip took four days and five nights. All we had been given was two empty buckets”, Nikolaus recalls.
When they arrived, they had to leave all their belongings in the car. Soldiers took the infants from the arms of their mothers, and left them there as well. Nikolaus was separated from his mom and little brother in the first selection they went through. He, his father and big brother were deemed fit to work.
He unbuttons his sleeve, rolls up his white shirt and shows his tattoo: A11 104. His father and brother got numbers 102 and 103. With hundreds of other men, they were rounded up in a big hall and an SS officer appeared. “If you work, you’ll do fine”, he said, and then he pointed to a window. Outside, a big bonfire was blazing. There, everything they had left in the car was burning, he said. Including the children. The day after, Nikolaus discovered that his mother and little brother had been sent to the gas chambers.
He asks me if I want coffee, and I seem to disappoint him by turning down the offer of a croissant. Later, I see it in a plastic bag in his kitchen and I understand he had bought just one, for me.
I open my laptop and tell him I want to talk about the picture. The first time Nikolaus saw it himself was in the War Museum of Copenhagen, sometime in the mid ’50s. He recognized himself immediately.
”I told them I was in the picture. They looked at me and said ‘you?’. They probably thought I was crazy. But I rolled up my sleeve and showed them the tattoo, and then they were all up in arms”, he says.
It is in January of 2013 that an online rumor starts to spread, claiming that the image of Nikolaus and the other victims of Buchenwald is a hoax. The argumentation is, as per usual for Holocaust deniers, simple enough that anyone can understand it. In a story as huge as that of the Second World War and the Holocaust, where so many millions of people were involved, all with their own perceptions, worldviews and wills, where so many events were stacked on each other, it is somehow considered a revelation to find a contradictory detail.
A blog with a name that plays on Winston Smith, the main character of George Orwell’s 1984, writes: “The Most Famous Holocaust Photo a Fraud”. The blogger found an issue of The New York Times Magazine from May of 1945 where the image is reprinted, and where the man standing on the right hand side of the picture is nowhere to be seen. The possibility that The New York Times Magazine edited the photo does not seem to bother the blogger. His finding is sufficient to impress his readers.
In the comments, they are overjoyed. ”Thank you very much for the time and money you invest to debunk the holo-forgeries. Great job”, one of them writes. Since then, this rumor has followed the picture in its tracks. Still today, if you do a Google search for “Buchenwald photo”, you’ll find people doubting it.
It all goes back to the blogger, who is constantly being referred to some sort of expert on the issue. He is not, however. All that he has done is present the edited version of this picture as the original one. Why The New York Times Magazine edited the image, we don’t know, but removing offensive things such as nudity was not wholly unknown in newsrooms in the 40’s.
However, the U.S. National Archives has this photo in its collection, and they kindly send me a copy of its negative. There, the truth about the picture can be seen, probably as black and white as the truth can ever be.
Back in Malmö, in his three-room apartment filled with laden book shelves, and where the courtyard outside the open balcony door has now gone quiet, Nikolaus leans back in his armchair, more than 70 years after the photography was taken. When he was freed, he was carried out of the camp on a stretcher and sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland. His lungs were ruined, filled with the coal he had been breathing while doing forced labour, but mentally he was doing even worse. It took him three years to understand he was not going to be taken away and led to the gas chambers.
Before being deported from Hungary by the Nazis, his father said to the family that they would all reassemble in Nyíregyháza when the war was over. When he was finally fit to stand on his legs, he discovered most of them were gone. He went back home all alone.
”I knocked on the door of our old house. A woman opened up and asked what I wanted. I told here I had been living there. ‘So why are you here? We sent you away to burn’, she said, and slammed the door shut in my face”, he says.
He has been living in Malmö since the ’60s and is passionately focused on keeping the truth about the Holocaust alive. When we talk about the deniers and what they’re claiming about the image of him being a hoax, he throws his hands up. They’re looking for fame, based on their hatred of Jews, he says. His glance, so clear and vivid, darkens and for a moment, there is no hint left of the warm smile that welcomed me.
“I pity them.”
READ ALSO: WHY I WROTE THIS ARTICLE
