| Liberated prisoners of the Buchenwald Konzentrationslager (KZ; “Concentration Camp”) in sleeping boxes 26 to 28 of Block 56 in the “Little Camp.” The “Little Camp” was liberated on April 11, 1945, with the rest of Buchenwald. 5 days after the liberation of Buchenwald, Private Harry Miller (???? – ????) of the United States 3rd Army’s 166th Signal Photographic Company entered block 56. He decided to take a photo showing the many emaciated and naked inmates crowded in their bunks, and other views of the inmates. Standing on the right: Simon L. Toncman (September 4, 1915 – September 29, 1972), prison number 126692, a Dutch prisoner listed as a Büroangestellte (“office worker”). Simon L. Toncman was born in Oss, Netherlands. He trained as an accountant. In 1942, he was deported to Auschwitz. He survived the selection, more than 2 years of camp life, and the death march that brought him in early 1945 to Buchenwald. Toncman returned to Oss, Netherlands and married Auschwitz survivor Judith “Jet” Kalker (July 28, 1923 – March 29, 2001). They had 4 children after the war. Lower bunk 1st from left – Miklos Grüner (born April 6, 1928), prison number 120762. Grüner has claimed Elie Wiesel, also in this photo, is not the same person who was in Buchenwald with him. 4th from left – Max Hamburger (1920 – 2012), prison number 137348, a Dutch prisoner who weighed only 28 kilograms (60 pounds) at the time. He came from Ohrdruf on a death march after surviving Auschwitz, where his mother was killed. After spending a considerable period of time recuperating from tuberculosis and the atrocities of war, Max Hamburger became a psychiatrist with some influence in the public sphere. He continued telling people about his experiences and counseled other victims of persecution, although he admits that he never found anybody who could counsel him on his own trauma. 2nd row, 3rd from left – Willi Moritz Kessler (October 18, 1925 – September 3, 1993), prison number 120570, lost 20 of his family in the Holocaust. The boy just after him was prisoner 100,000 at Auschwitz and was tattooed with a laurel around his number and then shot. Both his brothers were sent to Jawischowitz subcamp, where the brothers had to work in the mine. There he had to witness how his brothers were eventually gassed. Both Adolf and Oskar were ultimately declared unfit for work and murdered. At the time of this photo, he weighed 32 kilograms (70 pounds). Willi Kessler fought the German government for compensation for his abuse in the Konzentrationslager system. He died from complications related to long term effects of his wartime experience. 4th from left, Dutch prisoner Hermann “Harry” Leefsma (July 11, 1924 – September 21, 2002), prison number 130305; arrested on August 18, 1942, in Leeuwarden Netherlands, he was 1 of 2 people out of 1,500 to survive transport from Westerbork to Annaberg in January 1943. He was sent to Okmuut where he was reunited with his father. In January 1944 they were both sent to Auschwitz. In a 16-day forced march starting January 21, 1945, the Leefsmas started for Buchenwald. On the 6th day his father was executed for not keeping up. At Buchenwald, he was tortured with his toenails pulled out. In a coma for a month, he didn’t remember liberation. His mother found him, and they reunited for the 1st time in 3 years. He immigrated to California in 1974. 7th from left Elie Wiesel, prison number 123565; when he was 15, with the rest of his family, along with the rest of the town’s Jewish population, were placed in 1 of the 2 confinement ghettos set up in Máramarossziget (Sighet), the town where he had been born and raised. In May 1944, the Hungarian authorities, under German pressure, began to deport the Jewish community to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where up to 90 percent of the people were murdered on arrival. Immediately after they were sent to Auschwitz, his mother and his younger sister were murdered in the gas chambers. Wiesel and his father were selected to perform labor so long as they remained able-bodied, after which they were to be murdered in the gas chambers. Wiesel and his father were later deported to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. Until that transfer, his primary motivation for trying to survive Auschwitz was knowing that his father was still alive: “I knew that if I died, he would die.” After they were taken to Buchenwald, his father died before the camp was liberated. In Night, Wiesel recalled the shame he felt when he heard his father being beaten and was unable to help. After the war, his memoir Night becomes an international critically acclaimed best seller, and he speaks for human rights until his death. 3rd row, 3rd from left – Paul Argiewicz (August 6, 1925 – December 11, 2013), prison number 126259; arrested in the Bielsko Ghetto for stealing bread, he was deported without his family; the rest of them died in the Holocaust, except for his sister. Reunited after the war, they immigrated to the United States. He joined the United States Air Force and was shot down over Korea and spent another year incarcerated in a Chinese prisoner of war camp. 5th from left – Naftalie Furst, arrest no. 120041; Naftali Fürst was born in Bratislava in 1932. After the war, he immigrated to Israel in 1949 and initially worked as a carpenter in a kibbutz. He then learned the photography trade, but founded several driving schools. Most recently, he ran a wholesale drug business in Israel. “I did not accept any money from the reparations from Germany. Nothing at all. You can’t make up for that with money,” he said. 6th from left – Leonardus “Leo” Groen (March 29, 1912 – October 7, 1985), arrest no. 129244; a diamond cutter from Amsterdam, Groen was arrested on August 8, 1944. After initial internment in Westerbork, he was sent to Auschwitz and when it closed he was interned at Gross Rosen; arrived at Buchenwald on February 10, 1945. After being evacuated from Buchenwald following the liberation, he was admitted to the Emma Hospital in Eindhoven. Later he worked for De Waarheid, the newspaper of the Communist Party of the Netherlands. 4th row, 4th from left – Mel Mermelstein (September 25, 1926 – January 28, 2022), arrest no. 130508; Mermelstein was born in Örösveg, Czechoslovakia. Before World War II broke out, Mermelstein lived in Munkacs, occupied by Hungary in 1938. On May 19, 1944, he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Mermelstein spent a little less than 1 year at Auschwitz. In January 1945, he was sent on a forced death march with 3,200 other prisoners to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. From there he was sent on a train without food or water to Buchenwald concentration camp, where he arrived suffering with typhus and weighing only 32 kilograms (70 pounds). He spent 2 months at Buchenwald until he was liberated by American troops on April 11, 1945. His parents, 2 sisters, and a brother were murdered in the Holocaust. Before his father’s death, Mermelstein had promised his father he would tell everyone what the Nazis were doing. He is best known for his litigation with the Holocaust-denying Institute for Historical Review over evidence of gas chambers in German concentration camps during World War II. The legal dispute was resolved in Mermelstein’s favor, without the court giving an opinion on the merits of the dispute, since it ruled that the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz is a legally indisputable fact. This photo has become an iconic representation of the Holocaust; often reprinted, it illustrates the conditions in the Konzentrationslager system. The photo was distributed nationally on April 28 and 29, 1945; for reasons unknown, possibly because they were working with wire copies of low resolution, the New York Times cropped out Simon L. Toncman on April 30 and then airbrushed him out on May 6, leading to speculative conspiracy theories about the provenance of this photo. The Buchenwald Museum and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum agree this is the original presentation of this view. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0575.jpg |
| Image Size | 685.89 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2916 x 2348 |
| Photographer | Harry Miller |
| Photographer Title | United States Army Signal Corps |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 23, 1945 |
| Location | Konzentrationslager Buchenwald |
| City | Weimar |
| State or Province | Thuringia |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | National Archives and Records Administration |
| Record Number | NWDNS-208-AA-206K-31 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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