(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)October 1, 2014

(MAHWAH, NJ) – Director Rob Cohen and Executive Producer Steven Moskovic screened and led a discussion of their film, Kinderblock 66, at Ramapo College of New Jersey on September 30, 2014. The College’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Communication Arts’ Cinematheque Series co-sponsored the program that was attended by over 150 students, faculty and members of the public.

The film centers around four survivors, including Moskovic’s father, who survived the horrors of Kinderblock 66, a section of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. The section was designated for the roughly 2,000 teenage boys and young men who were separated from their families and sent to the camp.

Video recordings from when the survivors returned in 2000 for the 65th anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation and archival footage provide a window into their ordeal and their lives before and after the Holocaust. The film also tells the remarkable story of the boys’ rescuer, Czech Communist political prisoner Antonin Kalina.

Kalina and his fellow prisoners helped to place the boys and young men in a special barrack, far away from the main part of Buchenwald. Because of their actions, 900 of the original group lived to experience the liberation.For his selfless deed, Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Authiority and museum, included Kalina as a “Righteous Among the Nations,” a list of non-Jews who have been proven to have selflessly worked to save Jews during the Holocaust.

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