In the final years of World War II, many of the children who had survived the Jewish ghetto and time in the Nazi camps were sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where they were housed together in Kinderblock 66. In his profoundly moving film, executive producer Steven Moskovic joins his father Alex and several other survivors on a journey to reunite at Buchenwald for a commemoration of the liberation of the camp by Allied forces. The stories of the men who survived the camp cover a wide range of experiences, providing an important reminder that survival is only the beginning of a new story.

I had the great pleasure of speaking with Steven Moskovic, executive producer of this amazing film and very personal film. He told me, “This is a story about survival. We follow the lives of four men who, as adolescents, were incarcerated in Nazi concentration camps. We talk about their journey, how they were saved by the communist underground and how they were reborn on April 11, 1945 and started new lives.”

The film tells their stories from those early harrowing experiences to the present. “My father was one of those boys,” Steven reveals. “I knew very little of the details until June of 2009 when I visited Buchenwald for the first time. There I learned about this barrack where they housed boys, segregating them from the general population of the camp. This protected the boys from the harsh German winters; most of them didn’t have shoes or proper clothing. But the guards would beat them and torture them. The Communist underground, which acted as middle-management in the camp, put these boys together to do all they could to protect them and saved over 900 of them.”

This is a film for audiences that go to documentaries hoping to discover a hidden piece of history from a very personal point of view.

Steven says, “I guarantee that for people who come to this film, this will be a brand new story to them. We premiered the film in German and the majority of the people there had no idea about this story. This story is a triumphing of good over evil. And sometimes in triumphing over evil, there’s a lot of luck involved. Audiences will learn the intimate thoughts of these boys. We don’t focus on the horrors. We focus more on the emotions.”

Interesting fact: The musical score for this film was provided by Chris Hajian, who also scored FIRST POSITION.

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