Guest Blogger Franziska Müller – Dachau Memorial Site

In the course of my voluntary year I was trained to be a guide at the Dachau Memorial Site (image below)  and already did guided tours with students. I also accompany Abba Naor, a 89-year old Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, to contemporary witness talks.

During our conversations I became very interested in what life in general was like for children and young adults during the time 1933 to 1945.   As I was offered to give a guided tour particularly with the topic “Children and young adults in the Dachau Concentration Camp” I immediately started my research.

I searched the archive of the Memorial Site for information to that specific topic and came across a very popular photograph in that content: probably taken by an American soldier. It shows prisoners of the Dachau Concentration Camp waving and laughing at the 29^th of April 1945, the day when they were liberated. Taking a closer look one could see that the four boys in the foreground seemed very young and I wanted to know who they were and what had happened to them after the war. After some research it turned out that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum had more information on those boys and they were kind enough to send me files, mainly collected by the International Tracing Service. Bit by bit I began to trace back what had happened to the boys and I found out that all of them had emigrated and started a new life.

Still, some parts were missing and so I decided to do what people my age are known for: I searched YouTube…coincidentally I found a few videos of two of the survivors named George Scott and Stephen Ross. Since the video of George Scott was uploaded by the Holocaust Museum of Montreal, I contacted them and soon was forwarded to Dr. Carson Phillips whom I want to thank  for sharing so much information with me. It turned out that Mr. Scott is a speaker for the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre and from the interview transcript and the video I got the missing information, the same as with Mr. Ross.

In the end I did my guided tour and I was glad to be able to tell my audience more about those young boys, not only about their childhood but also about two men that made it their business to tell the younger generation their story.

photos © KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau