The Child Survivor of Buchenwald

A seven-year-old prisoner, a father’s charge, and a chain that was not broken

Most Holocaust testimony we inherit comes from adults who lived it and remembered it as adults. The child survivors are a smaller, more fragile record: many were too young to hold the names and dates, and many did not survive at all. Yisrael Meir Lau was seven years and ten months old when American soldiers reached Buchenwald — the youngest known prisoner in the camp. That he lived to tell it, in precise and lifelong detail, makes his testimony rare in a specific wayUSHMM. That absence, and that survival, matter in three ways.

First, it puts a child at the center of the frame without turning him into a symbol. Lulek is not an emblem of innocence; he is a specific boy from Piotrków with a name, two brothers, and a place as heir to a rabbinic line thirty‑seven generations deep — the thirty‑eighth himself. The film insists on the particular: his dark, watchful eyes; the carts he pushed between furnaces; the potato pressed into his hand. Precision is a form of dignity.

Second, it is a story about being saved, not about saving oneself. A mother’s shove on a platform. An older brother who smuggled him in a sack. A Soviet prisoner who stole potatoes for him. An American chaplain who lifted him in his arms. At every step the boy was kept alive by someone else’s decision to protect him. The heroism in this story is almost entirely other people’s.

Third, it is a story about transmission. Before he was deported to Treblinka, Lulek’s father charged his elder son with a task larger than survival: to carry an unbroken chain of rabbis into the next generation. That the youngest son became Chief Rabbi of Israel fifty‑one years later is the answer the film builds toward — an answer secured not by the child but by the brother who kept the promise.

Piotrków, Treblinka, and the road to Buchenwald

A living Jewish city and its rabbi

Yisrael Meir Lau was born on 1 June 1937 in Piotrków Trybunalski, a Polish city with a deep and living Jewish community. His father, Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau, was the last chief rabbi of Piotrków and, by the family’s own reckoning, the thirty‑seventh generation in an unbroken line of rabbis. In October 1939 Piotrków became the site of the first Jewish ghetto in Nazi‑occupied Europe. Lulek was a small boy inside it, the youngest of three brothers — eleven years younger than Naftali, the eldestUSHMM.

In October 1942, as the ghetto was being liquidated, German police beat Rabbi Moshe Chaim Lau for refusing to shave his beard. He staggered, and he straightened. Before he was deported and murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp that same month, he gave his eldest son, Naftali, a charge that would become the spine of this whole story: he named himself the thirty‑seventh generation, said the Germans meant to break the chain, and told Naftali that if he survived he must be a father to Yisrael — the chain must not break.

The father’s charge — the primary source

The words of that charge survive because both surviving sons recorded them. Rabbi Lau set them down in his memoir Out of the Depths (Sterling, 2011), and his brother Naftali Lau‑Lavie gave his own account in Balaam’s Prophecy (Koren, 2015). The charge is the reason Naftali refused, again and again over the next years, to be separated from his little brother:

From roughly the age of five and a half, Lulek was put to forced labor, pushing iron‑wheeled glass carts between the furnaces of the Hortensja glass factory in Piotrków — work near heat that reached well over a hundred degrees. When the remaining prisoners were moved west in November 1944, the family was caught up in the deportation. On the platform, Chaya Lau pushed her seven‑year‑old into the men’s line beside Naftali. She was sent to Ravensbrück. She did not come back.

Buchenwald and the children’s block

After the separation, the brothers were held for a time at the HASAG forced‑labor camp at Częstochowa. As the Soviet advance neared, the surviving prisoners were transported west, and in January 1945 Naftali smuggled his little brother into the Buchenwald concentration camp, hidden in a sack wrapped inside a feather quilt. Lulek was placed in Block 8, one of the camp’s children’s blocks, which held Soviet prisoners of war and a small number of Jewish children. There a Soviet prisoner named Feodor Mikhailichenko, himself only about eighteen, fed the boy stolen potatoes and knit him earmuffs from wood splinters against the cold. Feodor protected Lulek as a Polish child — not as a Jewish one — and that distinction matters to telling the story honestly. Naftali, elsewhere in the camp, slipped his brother pieces of bread whenever he couldYV.

Liberation, 11 April 1945

On 11 April 1945, soldiers of the United States 6th Armored Division reached Buchenwald. Among the survivors was a boy of seven years and ten months — the youngest known prisoner in the camp. He was not found on a corpse pile; he was found in the shadow of a barrack doorway, a frightened child in clothes too big for him. Within days a United States Army chaplain, Rabbi Herschel Schacter, was moving through the barracks calling out in Yiddish, and the exchange that followed between the young chaplain and the child who had stopped laughing would become the most documented moment of Lulek’s survival — and the emotional center of the filmUSHMM.

From Écouis to Haifa to the office his father died for

After liberation, Yisrael was moved west with other child survivors to the OSE children’s home at Écouis in France, one of the transit points where Jewish relief organizations gathered orphaned children. From there he sailed for the Land of Israel aboard the RMS Mataroa, arriving at the port of Haifa on 15 July 1945 — three months and four days after Buchenwald’s gate opened. He was eight years oldUSHMM.

In Haifa he was raised by an aunt and uncle. At his bar mitzvah he entered a yeshiva in Jerusalem, and the rabbinic education his father’s line had carried for thirty‑seven generations resumed in him — the thirty‑eighth. He served as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel from 1993 to 2003, and since 2008 he has chaired the Council of Yad Vashem. His brother Naftali, who had kept him alive and steered him home, became an Israeli diplomat and journalist and served as Consul of Israel in New York.

The thesis: the brother, not the boy

It would be easy to tell this as the story of a miraculous child. The film refuses that. At every turn Lulek is saved — by his mother’s shove, his father’s foresight, his brother’s bread and sack, Feodor’s potato, Schacter’s arms. The chain of generations survived the Holocaust not because of the youngest son but because of the eldest, Naftali, who took a dying father’s charge and made it the work of his own life. When Rabbi Lau was installed as Chief Rabbi, his brother went with him to the Western WallYV.