Former Nazi camp prisoner finds his saviour’s family
Published 24 September, 2008, 06:37
After a search lasting more than 60 years, Israel's former Chief Rabbi has traced the family of a Soviet soldier who saved his life in the Buchenwald concentration camp. They lost contact after being freed and the only thing the child remembered was the soldier's name.
This story started in Buchenwald, where a captive Soviet soldier helped the 5-year-old Jewish boy to survive in a Nazi concentration camp.
The boy, who grew up to become Israel Meir Lau – the chief rabbi of Israel in 1993-2003 – spent decades searching for his savior.
“He is the hero of my childhood. When the American army stormed the camp – the Germans started shooting back. There was shelling all around us. Fyodor threw me on the ground and covered me with his own body. He saved my life. Another time, he knitted me a headband from the sweater of a dead man. Every morning at 4am, we were thrown outside in the freezing cold for the roll-call. But I would wear the headband Fyodor had knitted for me. I had one, even though he didn’t,” Meir Lau recalls.
Lau sent official requests to the Soviet government to help him find the man. On a visit to the USSR in 1989 he asked the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for help, but all in vain.
Finally, in June this year, Israel Meir Lau heard on the radio that U.S. and British historians had revealed the names of prisoners at Buchenwald.
But it was already too late: Fyodor Mikhalchenko had died two years before.
Still, the Chief rabbi of Russia Berl Lazar was able to help Israel Meir Lau connect with the Russian soldier's family.
“We finally found his daughter. She remembered that her father used to talk about that boy from the camp. He wanted to adopt him. We mustn't forget how Soviet soldiers rescued Jews during the war. It’s an amazing story,” Lazar says.
The soldier's relatives showed the rabbi a video made during Fyodor’s visit to Buchenwald not long before his death.
So seventy years on, the wartime story came full circle.
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