Leon Scharzbaum, a survivor of the Nazis’ loss of life camp at Auschwitz and a lifelong fighter for justice for the sufferers of the Holocaust, has died. He used to be 101.
Schwarzbaum died early Monday in Potsdam close to Berlin, the World Auschwitz Committee reported on its site. No reason behind loss of life used to be given.
“It’s with nice disappointment, appreciate and gratitude that Holocaust survivors around the globe bid farewell to their buddy, fellow victim and significant other Leon Schwarzbaum, who within the closing many years of his lifestyles changed into one of the essential recent witnesses of the Shoah,” the committee stated.
Schwarzbaum used to be the one one in every of his circle of relatives to live on the focus camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a subcamp Sachsenhausen, the Auschwitz committee stated.
He changed into identified to a much broader target market when movie director Hans Erich Viet made a film in 2018 about his lifestyles. “The Remaining of the Jolly Boys” used to be shot with Schwarzbaum himself at unique places.
Auschwitz survivor Leon Schwarzbaum presentations his tattooed quantity to the photographer as he waits to go into the court docket room for the judgment on the path towards former SS guard Oskar Groening in Lueneburg, Germany, July 15, 2015. (AP)
Schwarzbaum used to be born in 1921 to a Polish-Jewish circle of relatives in Hamburg in northern Germany. He grew up in Bedzin, Poland, from the place the circle of relatives used to be deported to Auschwitz in 1943 after the ghetto there used to be dissolved.
After the warfare, he lived in Berlin for a few years the place he labored as an artwork and antiques broker. He used to be married two times, however had no youngsters, day-to-day newspaper Bild reported.
Neatly into his 90s, Schwarzbaum nonetheless seemed on German tv to talk about the insufferable sufferings he lived thru at Auschwitz and the opposite focus camps he used to be deported to. He additionally visited colleges in Germany frequently to inform the kids about his lifestyles.
“Particularly in his closing years, Leon Schwarzbaum used to be pushed over and over by way of the urge to keep in mind his oldsters who had been murdered in Auschwitz and the entire different sufferers of the Holocaust. He spoke on their behalf,” stated Christoph Heubner, the Govt Vice President of the World Auschwitz Committee.
“However he used to be additionally pushed by way of his anger at the truth that so few SS perpetrators ever noticed the interior of a German court,” Heubner added, regarding the Nazis’ brutal paramilitary group.
In 2016, he gave testimony on the trial towards former Auschwitz loss of life guard Reinhold Hanning in Germany.
In an 2019 interview with the Related Press at his Berlin condominium, which used to be lined with art work and previous back-and-white footage of his 35 family members who perished within the Holocaust, Schwarzbaum expressed deep fear in regards to the reemergence of antisemitism throughout Europe.
“If issues worsen, I’d no longer wish to reside thru such instances once more,” he stated. “I’d immigrate to Israel in an instant.”
In a letter of condolence to Schwarzbaum’s widow, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated that “we’re dropping a beautiful human being and crucial eyewitness to historical past.”
“Leon Schwarzbaum skilled himself what it method when a prison regime suspends human rights and human dignity,” Steinmeier stated, praising him for attesting about “Germany’s darkest length” after the warfare and caution in regards to the risks of far-right extremism and xenophobia.