Beyond the Fence: Memories of Buchenwald (2008)

April 11, 1945. 3:15 in the afternoon. Five miles outside of Weimar, Germany. The inmates of the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp rise up from the horror of their imprisonment and liberate themselves from their brutal Nazi captors. Shortly thereafter US Army troops and the Red Cross entered the camp to secure it and support those who survived. Beyond the Fence: Memories of Buchenwald examines the liberation of Buchenwald through the eyes of its survivors and those soldiers who helped to liberate them. Leon Bass, a 19-year-old black soldier, was among the first to enter Buchenwald. He enlisted in the army to fight for his country, but the US Army's policy of segregation denied him the rights he was fighting to protect. Mr. Bass was an angry, young, Black soldier when he entered Buchenwald where he came face to face with what calls 'the walking dead'. Among the thousands of inmates at Buchenwald was Robbie Waisman, a 14-year-old Polish Jew, who later discover that the his entire family had murdered at the hands of Nazi tyranny. Mr. Waisman eventually immigrated to Canada and slowly put his life back together over the next six decades. Later in life, Robbie Waisman and Leon Bass met again and fostered a great and lasting friendship that endures to this day. Beyond the Fence focuses on the shared history of persecution and suffering that Robbie and Leon experienced -- in essence, the reality that each could have found himself on either side of that barbed wire fence surrounding Buchenwald.