Leon Weintraub is flexible, pain and sore in the back. He was born exactly a century ago. Still, it's still almost how you can imagine him climbing ice-covered poles to pull power lines. A skill that saved his life in the German labor camp.
When Weintraub enters the auditorium of the Montessori high school in Berlin, the murmur subsides. Dressed in a dark suit, blue, well-ironed shirt and a blue-speckled bow tie, he sits down in the prepared armchair.
For an hour and a half, Weintraub speaks. In neat German, he tells about the ghetto in Lodz, the transport to Auschwitz, the liberation when the prisoner transport suddenly stopped in a forest in the Black Forest. From time to time he looks at the clock to check that the timetable is correct.
Weintraub's voice is low, but distinct. The teenagers sit dead silent.
Since 1969, Polish-born Leon Weintraub has lived in Sweden. He speaks fluent Swedish, but German and Polish are his heart languages. When we meet after his lecture to the school students, he quotes his favorite poet Heinrich Heine from memory: "Du hast Diamanten und Perlen / hast alles, was Menschenbegehr..."
Before Weintraub turns off the lamp in the evening, he often reads Heinrich Heine, "to calm me down and feel good". His other favorite is the Polish poet Julian Tuwim.
- I have grown up and matured in German literature.
Leon does not understand why he should boycott the German language because of the crimes of the Nazis.
- I am a rational person. I don't start from feelings. A language is above all accusations.
The poor Jewish boy Leon was thirteen years old when the German army marched into his hometown of Lodz. It was September 8, 1939.
- They marched in along the main street, column after column. Young soldiers dressed in green uniforms. They had boots with spiked soles that thundered against the cobblestones. I still shudder when I think about it.
The Weintraub family was poor. The mother was a widow and supported the youngest Leon and his four older sisters by running a two-room laundry, where they also lived.
Over thirty percent of the inhabitants of Lodz were Jews. After the German invasion, they were immediately curfewed at night and their property was confiscated. The town was renamed Litzmannstadt.
- We had almost nothing, but everything of value we would leave behind. At the beginning of 1940 we were all forced to move into the ghetto. I got a job as an electrician, laying electrical wires.
All five siblings were forced to work for the Germans. They were paid in bread rations – two kilos of bread per person per week. Every morning, Leon's older sister cut up a quarter of a kilo of bread per person.
- We told ourselves that we were safe in the ghetto, as long as we worked and were useful to the Germans. We said to each other: The main thing is that we are together.
We understood that something was terribly wrong. Do you transport people to a new workplace in this way?
In 1944, the Germans began to empty the ghetto. They deported the old, sick and small children. Later it would appear that they were forced into hermetically sealed trucks where they were suffocated to death with the help of exhaust fumes.
In the summer, the Nazis decided that the ghetto would be dissolved. Leon built a hiding place behind the wardrobe. A gap between wall and furniture where the whole family was accommodated. They managed to stay hidden during several house searches.
- The last time we hid, a German policeman said: If we find someone, we shoot immediately. Then mom yelled "Don't shoot!" and we came out of hiding.
The transport to Auschwitz will never be forgotten by Leon Weintraub.
- We were squeezed so tightly into the goods train that you couldn't sit down. In the far left corner stood a large, open vessel. The toilet. It was disgusting.
Most of all, Leon remembers the silence that prevailed throughout the trip.
- We understood that something was terribly wrong. Do you transport people to a new workplace in this way? If it is really about us continuing to manufacture useful goods for the Wehrmacht?
Three days later, on August 19, 1944, they arrived. The doors opened with a jerk. Men dressed in grey-white robes with broad stripes shouted "Raus, raus!" (Out, Out!)
- I jumped down on the ground and helped mother to get down. Then one of the guards grabbed my backpack. I yelled, "My stamp collection!" He replied mockingly. "Here you don't need any stamps."
Leon's sisters were sent to the women's barracks, the mother and aunt were gassed to death immediately. Leon didn't know that. Black smoke and the stench of burnt flesh from the crematoria, he certainly felt day and night. But the scope of the killing dawned on him later.
Leon was placed in youth block 10, where he knew no one. The 18-year-old was alone.
"I looked around – no guards."
He had been in Auschwitz for a few weeks when he saw a group of naked men between blocks 16 and 18.
- I asked what was on. They said they would be sent outside the camp to work. I looked around – no guards. Quickly I undressed and pushed myself deep into the group of naked men.
A few weeks later, the entire youth block 10 was gassed to death.
The other men in the group had already been registered and had numbers tattooed on their left forearms. The Germans never discovered that Leon was missing a number tattoo.
The prisoners were sent to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in German Silesia. (Today the area belongs to Poland.) There, Leon continued to work as an electrician. As the front approached, the forced laborers were moved to Flossenbürg and to Natzweiler-Struthof, which was in occupied French territory.
They were forced to walk the distances between the camps, without provisions. Those who couldn't take it were shot.
One morning at the end of April 1945, the prisoners were placed on a train to be sent on.
- Suddenly we heard aircraft engines overhead and explosions. The train stopped and we were driven out into the forest. We walked for a while, until we realized: The guards are gone.
The SS men had taken off their uniforms and fled. The prisoners found their skull-embellished visors thrown in a bush.
They wandered further into the forest – the Black Forest in southwestern Germany – and finally encountered an armed soldier. He pointed the gun at the exhausted men. They pointed to their prisoner uniforms and the letters KL (Concentration Layer).
Then the soldier held out his hand.
- Comment ça va?
A French soldier. The prisoners were free.
Leon weighed 35 kilos.
After the war, Weintraub recovered three of his four sisters, who had survived Bergen-Belsen. He entered the medical faculty of the University of Göttingen, despite the fact that he had not even finished high school and could not speak German properly.
- I had a strong desire to work with people. I wanted to help people to life, after all the death I had been through.
How did you manage to persuade the university to study medicine, without school grades?
- All external circumstances were a mishap. I just looked straight ahead. I knew that I didn't really have any prerequisites to study to be a doctor. Therefore, I must make triple efforts.
In addition, all German universities in the occupation zones had to reserve some study places for survivors of the concentration camps. Leon Weintraub passed all the exams and eventually moved back to Poland. He became a gynecologist and chief physician in Warsaw.
In 1969, he moved to Sweden, after losing his job and being forced to renounce his Polish citizenship. This is because of an anti-Semitic wave in Poland.
Since then he has often returned to Germany. Leon's wife Eva-Maria is German and he has many German friends. It's a favor to make friends after you turn 90, he says.
- Germany is a democracy and a rule of law. It is a wonderful sign that in Germany there is hardly a place that does not have a memorial to what was done in the name of the Germans. Plaques on walls, stumbling blocks.
In Heidenau, AFD and CDU politicians have now decided not to build any more stumbling blocks.
- It is absolutely reprehensible. It is not about all Germans being in debt, but about taking responsibility for what was done to Jews and other people, in the name of the Germans. Of course, today's Germans are not to blame, but the fact that this has happened cannot be taken away. The only thing you can do is be aware of this. Educate and enlighten people so it never happens again.
That the radical right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) has now won several state elections worries Weintraub.
- I call them "No alternative for Germany". The worst thing that could happen to Germany is if they took power.
Weintraub himself has met members of the AFD when he visited the state parliament for Lower Saxony in Hannover in 2024.
- The organizers warned me that the AFD group is there. They wondered if I was scared. I replied that if there is anyone who should feel fear, it is the AFD.
At the same time, says Weintraub, he has nothing against meeting right-wing radicals.
- I am happy to meet them. Otherwise, I often have the feeling that I am preaching to the already saved.
Despite his gentle persona, Weintraub is not afraid of conflict. When he met elected officials from the AFD in Hannover, he raised his book "To be reconciled with evil" in the lectern and said: "I hope you read it and change your mind."
He calls himself an eternal optimist.
- Just that I'm alive is reason enough to be an optimist! That they didn't manage to catch me. That I was stronger, I had enough strength to survive everything they did to me.
A few years ago, Weintraub visited Nuremberg, the scene of Nazi mass meetings in the 1930s. He was photographed on the balcony where Hitler stood to face the masses on the Zeppelin field.
- I stood and looked out over the empty field. And felt deep satisfaction. They are all gone, and I live.
