While channel surfing on New Year's Eve I stumbled onto a terrific WWII Veteran's testimony of his experiences in WWII as a machinegunner in Patton's 3rd Army, which included being among the soldiers who liberated Buchanwald KZ in 1945. His name is Leo Hymas. He was speaking to a group of Central Washington University students who are majoring in business, and the title of his presentation was "Making Ethical Decisions." He spoke very little about business, but very much about making the right choices in life. Many times he pointed upward towards the sky as he spoke of "answering to a Higher Authority then man." One such example he gave involved being ordered by a Lt. to take an M1 carbine and kill a small group of German soldiers who had just surrendered. Leo refused. After Germany surrendered Leo found himself on a ship heading for Japan, who had not. I found quite a bit more about him by just Google searching the name Leo Hymas.

Photos you may not have seen!!

See how they prettied up the Front Gate.

Buchwald Barrracks at Liberation.

Ebensee Austria - Prisoners to be buried.

I pray the world will never forget

Top/Sgtleo

My brother and I recently spoke about the things our Dad told us about Buchenwald and I've been thinking a lot about it lately.

I came across a 10 minute documentary that I thought was pretty good.

http://vimeo.com/4117759

It's the 27th January 2010 today. 65th birthday of Auschwitz-Birkenau !!!!! liberation! Remember

Vee

They talked about this on Fox News yesterday. It was nice to see it acknowledged and remembered.

I am replying to a posting by Dogdaddy including a photo of a young boy and a man taken at Buchenwald. I'm writing a book on the rescue of children and youths at Buchenwald and can identify the boy as Josef Shliefstein from Sandomierz, born 1941, and his father, Israel Schleifstein, a leather craftsman. They arrived at Buchenwald after having been in a series of Hasag (ammunition) factory camps for several years on January 20 from Czestochowa. The father bribed the way for the child to remain in the prior camps. Here the boy was registered as a political prisoner.

Josef was one of the two youngest children found at Buchenwald, each born 1941, each just 4 years old. The other was Stefan Jerzy Zweig (Juschu) from Cracow.

These two were among over 900 children and youths found at the camp among 21,000 surviving prisoners. They had been rescued by an internal effort by the clandestine underground. They had been clustered in barracks and prevented from being sent out. They were watched over in the camp, a story to be told in the volume I'm writing.

After the war, Shliefstein, father and son, were reunited with the boy's mother, and came to NYC (she didn't die at Buchenwald or anywhere else). Josef grew up in NYC, attended NYC schools, worked for IBM, is now retired....

kenwaltzer

Hi Gang,

I wanted to share this photo with you. I'm sure you will recognize the face of the little boy if you've ever watched a documentary about the Liberation of Buchanwald. It came from the estate of the GI who took the photo, who wrote the description on the back.

 

Dogdaddy

 

Ken:

Enjoyed talking with you via email, and even more delighted you were able to post this information here for Dogdaddy and the rest of our readers.

Thanks so much. What a fascinating story.

Do you have an approximate publishing date for your book?

How did you get involved in this exact topic?

Many thanks,

Marion

I responded to Ken's email yesterday through my personal email address