Leon Scharzbaum, a survivor of the Nazis’ demise camp at Auschwitz and a lifelong fighter for justice for the victims of the Holocaust, has died. He was 101.
Schwarzbaum died early Monday in Potsdam close to Berlin, the International Auschwitz Committee reported on its web site. No explanation for demise was given.
“It is with great sadness, respect and gratitude that Holocaust survivors around the world bid farewell to their friend, fellow sufferer and companion Leon Schwarzbaum, who in the last decades of his life became one of the most important contemporary witnesses of the Shoah,” the committee mentioned.
Schwarzbaum was the one one in all his household to outlive the focus camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a subcamp Sachsenhausen, the Auschwitz committee mentioned.
He turned recognized to a wider viewers when movie director Hans Erich Viet made a film in 2018 about his life. “The Last of the Jolly Boys” was shot with Schwarzbaum himself at authentic places.
Auschwitz survivor Leon Schwarzbaum reveals his tattooed quantity to the photographer as he waits to enter the courtroom room for the judgment on the path towards former SS guard Oskar Groening in Lueneburg, Germany, July 15, 2015. (AP)
Schwarzbaum was born in 1921 to a Polish-Jewish household in Hamburg in northern Germany. He grew up in Bedzin, Poland, from the place the household was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 after the ghetto there was dissolved.
After the battle, he lived in Berlin for a few years the place he labored as an artwork and antiques supplier. He was married twice, however had no youngsters, every day newspaper Bild reported.
Well into his 90s, Schwarzbaum nonetheless appeared on German tv to talk about the insufferable sufferings he lived via at Auschwitz and the opposite focus camps he was deported to. He additionally visited faculties in Germany frequently to inform the youngsters about his life.
“Especially in his last years, Leon Schwarzbaum was driven again and again by the urge to remember his parents who were murdered in Auschwitz and all the other victims of the Holocaust. He spoke on their behalf,” mentioned Christoph Heubner, the Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee.
“But he was also driven by his anger at the fact that so few SS perpetrators ever saw the inside of a German courtroom,” Heubner added, referring to the Nazis’ brutal paramilitary group.
In 2016, he gave testimony on the trial towards former Auschwitz demise guard Reinhold Hanning in Germany.
In an 2019 interview with the Associated Press at his Berlin condominium, which was lined with work and outdated back-and-white footage of his 35 relations who perished within the Holocaust, Schwarzbaum expressed deep fear in regards to the reemergence of antisemitism throughout Europe.
“If things get worse, I would not want to live through such times again,” he mentioned. “I would immigrate to Israel right away.”
In a letter of condolence to Schwarzbaum’s widow, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier mentioned that “we are losing a wonderful human being and an important eyewitness to history.”
“Leon Schwarzbaum experienced himself what it means when a criminal regime suspends human rights and human dignity,” Steinmeier mentioned, praising him for testifying about “Germany’s darkest period” after the battle and warning in regards to the risks of far-right extremism and xenophobia.
