Buchenwald was a concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all countries in Europe there.
Karl was the fourth of six children born to Roman Catholic parents in the village of Wampersdorf in eastern Austria. The Stojkas belonged to a tribe of Roma ("Gypsies") called the Lowara Roma, who made their living as itinerant horse traders. They lived in a traveling family wagon, and spent winters in Austria's capital of Vienna. Karl's ancestors had lived in Austria for more than 200 years.
1933-39: Karl grew up used to freedom, travel and hard work. In March 1938 his family's wagon was parked for the winter in a Vienna campground, when Germany annexed Austria just before his seventh birthday. The Germans ordered his family to stay put. Karl's parents converted their wagon into a wooden house, but he wasn't used to having permanent walls around him. His father and oldest sister began working in a factory, and Karl started grade school.
1940-44: By 1943 Karl's family had been deported to a Nazi camp in Birkenau for thousands of Roma. Now they were enclosed by barbed wire. By August 1944 only 2,000 Roma were left alive; 918 of them were put on a transport to Buchenwald to do forced labor. There the Germans decided that 200 of them were incapable of working and were to be sent back to Birkenau. Karl was one of them; they thought he was too young. But his brother and uncle insisted that he was 14 but a dwarf. Karl got to stay. The rest were returned to be gassed.
Karl was later deported to the Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was freed near Roetz, Germany, by American troops on April 24, 1945. After the war, he returned to Vienna.
Item ViewAfter secondary school, Franz studied painting at Duesseldorf's Academy of Fine Arts, eventually shifting to art education. He joined an avant-garde group rebelling against traditional painting. Later, he taught art to high school students. For Franz the drift towards fascism was frightening, as was the increasing antisemitism. But being only half Jewish, he did not feel worried about his personal safety.
1933-39: Hitler became chancellor of Germany on Franz's thirtieth birthday. Five months later Franz was arrested. By Nazi law he was classified as "Mischlinge" (mixed race) and banned from painting, exhibiting or teaching. His wife was barred from teaching because she was "intermarried with a non-Aryan." A museum director employed Franz secretly, but the Gestapo found out; Franz was fired. The Nazis assigned him to factory work after the war began.
1940-44: Franz and his wife managed to help the anti-Nazi underground. But then his wife was ordered to Berlin to work in a military hospital. In 1943 Allied bombing destroyed the Monjaus' home and nearly all of Franz's artwork. Then his mother, a Jew converted to Catholicism, was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto. The bombings continued. Franz went into hiding when the Nazis began deporting "Mischlinge." He was denounced in fall 1944, interned at a "work education camp," and then deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp.
Franz died in Buchenwald's medical experiment barracks on February 28, 1945. The last note to his wife, smuggled out of the camp, read, "I am in Buchenwald. All the best. Franz."
Item ViewAfter studying medicine at Wayne State University in Michigan, Harold joined the army in 1942. He was attached to the 107th Evacuation Hospital. The unit trained in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and then tracked the US First Army after the June 1944 Normandy invasion. Harold was attached to the US Third Army under George S. Patton in December. He went to Buchenwald shortly after the SS guards fled the camp in April 1945.
Item ViewBen was born in a small village in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania in Romania. When he was an infant, his family moved to the United States. Ben attended Harvard University, where he studied criminal law. Ben graduated from Harvard University Law School in 1943. He joined a US anti-aircraft artillery battalion that was training in preparation for an Allied invasion of western Europe. At the end of World War II in Europe, Ben was transferred to the war crimes investigation branch of the US Army. He was charged with gathering evidence against and apprehending alleged Nazi war criminals. He ultimately became chief US prosecutor in The Einsatzgruppen Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.
Describes the process of collecting evidence (including evidence of crimes in the Buchenwald camp) and issuing arrest warrants
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