Voyage to Ottawa: Through an online search at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The original is housed in the Online Archives (OuSArchiv) of the ITS (International Tracing Service) at Arolsen, Germany. Copies are also available at the USHMM and other repositories.
Name of the exhibit: Buchenwald Prisoner Information Form
Submitted by: Judy Young
Date of origin: Created on 16th July 1944 and used until April 1945
Origin of the object: Buchenwald – Kommando Wille
Description: This document is one of several registration documents my father, Georg (Gyorgy) Balazs, had to fill in and sign when he arrived at Buchenwald in mid-July 1944. He was transferred there from Auschwitz with 2500 Hungarian Jewish men. He had been deported from Ujpest-Budapest to Auschwitz in the first week of July and within a few days transported to Buchenwald.
He did hard labour in a subcamp of Buchenwald, Rehmsdorf, attached to a work group called “Commando Wille” and survived until early April 1945 when the Nazis started evacuating the camp in advance of the imminent arrival of US troops.
According to a friend of his who survived, my father died when the train that was transporting some of the prisoners from Buchenwald to Theresienstadt was bombed by the Allies (!). He was killed either in the bombing itself or in the massacre of the survivors who were trying to escape in a forest nearby where the guards were assisted by local SS members and other citizens. This document and others like it at the Arolsen Archives (run by the International Red Cross after WWII) only became available to researchers in 2007 after pressure by the USHMM and other organizations finally forced the Archives to be opened up.