Having grown up in a working-class district in Vienna Neustadt, Franz Leitner was first arrested at the age of 18 for membership in the illegal Communist youth association. The Gestapo committed him to Buchenwald after the outbreak of war. Here he joined the organized resistance effort of the political inmates. It was they who nominated him to serve as the block senior of the ‘children’s block’. Along with fellow inmates, he took responsibility for improving the young prisoners’ living conditions.
‘And I often, well, kind of asked one or the other of them where their parents were, what had happened to them. Then, well, they said, very dryly, that their parents had been killed during bombing, by bombs, that they had been shot to death, that they were in other concentration camps. And never once during my time there did I see one of those children cry, much less the adolescents. They were, so to speak, somehow already used to the conditions at their young age.’
Franz Leitner in the documentary Sonst wären wir verloren: Buchenwaldkinder Berichten (Otherwise We’d Be Lost: Buchenwald Children Report), Peter Rocha, DEFA, 1982
