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The "Buchenwald Child," a Polish-Jewish boy named Stefan Jerzy Zweig who was imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp until its liberation in April 1945, stood at the center of an East German narrative of Communist resistance to National Socialism. Historian Bill Niven uses the construction of this narrative to explore the use of memory in creating the ideological foundations of the GDR. Buchenwald was seen by the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the Communist Party of East Germany, as the most important center of Communist resistance from within the Nazi camp system. In the official version of the story, Stefan Zweig was saved by communists. This story became part of attempts to portray the GDR as the "better Germany." It was argued that while fascists were on the loose in West Germany, East Germany was built on a brave tradition of antifascism. As many scholars have pointed out, the official SED version of antifascism created a black-and-white sense of "us and them," "us" being East Germans, who were encouraged to see themselves as victims of the Nazis, "them" being Nazis who appeared all to have vanished or to have gone to the West after the war.
Niven's discussion of the historical events that provided the basis for East German myth making is subtle. As in most concentration camps, Buchenwald was divided into different prison populations that competed for the favor of the SS and domination over camp self-administration, while at the same time trying to organize resistance. Communist prisoners, who gained the upper hand in 1942, could be ruthless in trying to promote their own position, though some of them helped to save Jewish children. Stefan Zweig was saved also thanks to his parents, Zacharias and Sylwia...