Alex Moskovic

Alex Moskovic was born in 1931 in the eastern part of Slovakia - in Sobrance. As a thirteen-year-old boy, the Nazis dragged him and his family to the Uzhhorod ghetto and then to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Here Alex was separated from the rest of his family. When he met the dreaded doctor Josef Mengele, his blue eyes saved his life, even if it meant undergoing perverted experiments by the criminal doctor. Although small and weak, he ended up in a labor camp.

As the Soviet Army approached Auschwitz in the winter of 1945, Alex Moskovic and thousands of other exhausted prisoners found themselves in one of the infamous death marches. "I met my father and my brother Zoltán in the crowd. I was happy I wasn't alone. I survived the march thanks to that. We reached Buchenwald, where my father and Zoltán fell ill. First my brother died and later also my father. In three days, American soldiers liberated the camp.” Alex Moskovic had a happier fate; in Buchenwald he found himself in Block 66, where Antonín Kalina, a communist from Třebíč, was a block elder. He not only provided the children in his block with food, but thanks to the courageous handling of documents, he helped the young prisoners to survive. Later, it was Alex Moskovic who initiated making the film Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald, where he documented the heroism of his saviour.

From his entire large family, he survived the horrors of World War II as the only one, forty of his relatives perished during the Holocaust. After the liberation, young Alex Moskovic had nowhere to go and no one to return to, so in July 1946 he decided to emigrate to the United States. There, he worked in the television industry as an editor for ABC Sports for thirty years - winning the prestigious Emmy Award ten times during his career. The idea to make a documentary about a children's block came to Moskovic in 2009 in Buchenwald, during a joint visit to the concentration camp with his son Steve. The film was completed in 2012 and the actual realization of the important documentary took more than two years.

Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald was made by Moskovic's son Steve - a successful producer and director, along with Brad Rothschild and Paul Turlick. The documentary features Alex Moskovic and his three former fellow prisoners from the children's block: Naftali Ďuro Fürst, Israel Laszlo Lazar and Pavel Kohn. Until his death, Alex Moskovic lectured on the Holocaust and life in a concentration camp at various schools and universities. He promoted his saviour Antonin Kalina to be awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

Alex Moskovic died on September 14, 2019.