The 8th of April, 1945, about five miles northwest of the city of Weimar, Nazi Germany. Buchenwald camp prisoners, using a secret short-wave transmitter and small generator, send the Morse code message: “To the Allies. To the army of General Patton. This is the Buchenwald concentration camp. SOS. We request help. They want to evacuate us. The SS want to destroy us.”

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Three minutes after the transmission, desperate prisoners receive the message: “Hold out. Rushing to your aid. Staff of Third Army.”

Three days later, on the 11th of April, the US 6th Armored Division liberates Buchenwald and finds more than 21,000 survivors who are weak and emaciated. Among them are nearly 1,000 minors, mostly teenagers—and a boy who is only 4 years old. The face of this young, teary-eyed boy, holding a crude wooden scooter, will become one of the iconic symbols of the Holocaust. His name is Joseph Schleifstein.

Joseph Schleifstein, the son of Jewish parents, was born on the 7th of March, 1941, in the Jewish ghetto in Sandomierz, which was located in German-occupied Poland. Joseph and his parents—father Izrael and mother Esther—lived in the Sandomierz Ghetto through its existence, from June 1942 through January 1943. After the liquidation of the ghetto, the family was moved to the Czestochowa ghetto, where Joseph’s parents were presumably put to work in one of the HASAG factory camps.

During the Second World War, HASAG became a Nazi arms-manufacturing conglomerate with dozens of factories across German-occupied Europe, using slave labor on a massive scale. Tens of thousands of Jews from Poland, and other prisoners, died producing munitions for HASAG.

Because Nazi guards would kill children who were too young to be used as laborers, Schleifstein’s parents placed Joseph in hiding in a cellar. In January 1945, when the HASAG camps were closed and their operations transferred to Germany, the Schleifsteins were deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where they arrived on January 20th, 1945.

On arrival, Joseph’s parents were sent to the right—to become slave laborers. Joseph was sent to the left, to the group of small children and elderly or otherwise deemed unfit for work, who were to be murdered immediately. In the general confusion of lining up, however, Joseph’s father found a large sack and, with a stern warning to keep absolutely quiet, placed his child in it. The sack, containing the father’s leather-crafting tools and some clothing, allowed Schleifstein to be smuggled into the camp, undetected by the guards.

Schleifstein’s mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and those who had lined up on the left were all murdered.

For a time, Schleifstein was hidden by his father with the help of two anti-fascist German prisoners, but he was eventually discovered. However, his life was spared—in part because the Germans valued Izrael’s craftsmanship, 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 there were formal inspections by visiting Nazi officials, Joseph had to be hidden. Despite this special treatment, at one point Joseph was lined up for execution, but his father intervened at the last moment to save him.

At Buchenwald, his father was valued for his service making saddles and harnesses. During his imprisonment, Joseph became very sick and for a time lived at a camp hospital.

The Buchenwald camp was liberated on the 11th of April, 1945, by the US 6th Armored Division. 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 them were crying, and some of them even fainted after seeing the dead bodies, starved survivors behind barbed wire fences, as well as a table display of paintings on human skins, lampshades made of human skin, various parts of the human body preserved in alcohol, and two heads which were 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, Gert Schramm, who had been imprisoned at Buchenwald from July 1944 until the liberation, remembered thinking, “Now have a look 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 Buchenwald 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 were Jews.

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 the other young children had nothing to wear.

The 4-year-old Joseph recalled the liberation with joy for several reasons. First, because from that day on he no longer had to hide. Secondly, because he started getting ‘lots more to eat and drink.’ And thirdly, Joseph remembers this with greatest glee, because there were ‘lots and lots’ of rides that the Americans gave him on their tanks and jeeps.

However, hundreds of boys who were liberated at Buchenwald fared much worse. They not only had experienced the brutality of the Holocaust, but 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 re-learn how to live in society. The boys of Buchenwald spent their childhoods surrounded by terror and death, and, as a result, they were rebellious against authority, full of anger, and under-educated. In fact, society viewed child survivors as damaged goods who would go on to become psychopaths.

The boys had to re-learn 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 re-learned 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 lost no time and tried desperately to seek Esther, but he did not find her. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee then helped them 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 11th to August 14th, 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; 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. Izrael 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. Schleifstein’s memories of being hidden in cellars and dark places haunted him for years, causing him “terrible nightmares,” giving him a fear of death and 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. Joseph Schleifstein’s 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 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. Today, in the face of Holocaust denialism and rising nationalist sentiment across Europe, it is more important than ever to share and preserve the lessons from this dark chapter of history—because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.