Leon Weintraub can still remember the day the Nazis marched into his Polish hometown of Łódź on September 9, 1939. “There they came, seemingly endless rows of tall, healthy young soldiers in green Wehrmacht uniforms. The thought of the sound of their hobnail boots on the cobblestones still sends a cold shiver down my spine,” he tells DW. “They exuded so much power and would smash anything that stood in their way.”
He was 13. Born into a poor, close-knit family—his father died when Leon was about two—he lived with his mother, who ran a small laundry, and his four sisters. A bright boy, he loved books and films: “Reading books and watching movies were like a peephole for me, allowing me to get a glimpse at another world.”
Thanks to a scholarship, Weintraub attended high school until February 1940, when he and his family were forced into the Łódź ghetto. Some 160,000 Jews were crammed there; anyone attempting escape risked being shot. Residents were put to work, and Weintraub labored in the metal department of an electrical workshop. The Judenrat—the compulsory Jewish council—told inmates that those deemed useful to the Nazis had better chances of survival.
Disease and hunger were constant. “So, the word ‘hunger’ has a very special place in my vocabulary, my mind, and my being,” Weintraub says. He stresses that what he endured was not the casual hunger many describe today: “For five years, seven months, and three weeks, except for one occasion, I literally suffered from starvation. I couldn’t fall asleep because of the painful pressure in my stomach, and I woke up with it. My only thought was how to get something to eat to fill my stomach.”
In the summer of 1944 the ghetto was closed. Local Nazi officials had always seen the ghetto as temporary, a step toward “cleansing” the city of Jews. Residents were cynically promised work “for the good of the Third Reich,” but many were deported instead. Weintraub was sent on a freight train more suited to cattle than people: locked in, standing room only, no food or water, stench from the makeshift toilet overwhelming. Night followed day and then night again.
Arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, he at first thought it was just another ghetto. But selections began. From the corner of his eye he spotted electrified barbed wire. At the so-called selection his mother was sent to the gas chamber that same day. Weintraub recalls the SS officers’ gestures: “Thumb to the right: unfit for work; thumb to the left: death on hold.” For 18-year-old Leon the thumb pointed left, and the process of dehumanization began.
“We were stripped naked, showered, shaved, and disinfected,” he says. “We were robbed of all human will. They controlled us, and we had no choice but to follow orders.” When he thinks of Auschwitz, the smell of burnt flesh is the image that remains most vivid. He says he cocooned himself from some realities as a form of self-preservation: “Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to endure it.”
By pure chance Weintraub escaped the gas chamber. Young inmates in Block 10 were destined for death, but when guards were absent he blended with a group being transferred to work at Gross-Rosen. Newly tattooed, they were naked and shuttled through the clothing depot; “fortunately, no one checked me; otherwise, I would have been dead,” he says. One final, haunting image he carries is of a woman who had hanged herself on an electric fence.
After Auschwitz he passed through Gross‑Rosen, Flossenbürg and Natzweiler‑Struthof. He remembers arbitrary brutal beatings, public humiliations and hangings. “Every time I come to Flossenbürg, my legs tremble,” he says. “I freeze for a few seconds because I am transported back to that winter, feeling that cold wind. The entire crowd moves across the roll call square. It’s an apocalyptic image.”
Near the war’s end he was placed on a train intended to be sunk in Lake Constance. The locomotive was attacked by French aircraft; in the chaos Weintraub escaped and, when he met a French soldier, he realized his ordeal was over. Weighing about 35 kg and suffering from typhus, the 19‑year‑old mourned his family until by chance he learned three of his sisters had survived Bergen‑Belsen. Reuniting with them in a displaced persons camp in Bergen‑Belsen, he says, “And that’s when I became human again. It was the beginning of my journey back to life.”
Weintraub chose to become a gynecologist and obstetrician, dedicated to bringing new life into the world after witnessing so much death. In 1946 the British military government arranged for him to study in Göttingen, Germany—the land of the perpetrators—where, as a physician, he saw firsthand the lack of scientific basis for Nazi racial ideology. He returned to Poland in 1950 but emigrated to Sweden in 1969 amid rising antisemitism there.
He has long advocated remembrance as a duty to his murdered relatives and the millions of victims. He warns that letting memory fade would be like robbing them of their lives a second time. That conviction led him to preserve his testimony as a hologram. “Barely a human lifetime has passed, and many young people today no longer know what the Holocaust was,” he says. “It’s terrible that there are people calling for pogroms once again, and that people are afraid to go out on the street wearing a kippah.”
Despite everything, Weintraub remains an optimist: “I am convinced that at some point common sense will prevail and humanity will realize that it is time to stop accusing and fighting each other and to build a peaceful future together.”
This article was originally written in German. The interview with Leon Weintraub was conducted by Matthias Hummelsiep.