Leon Weintraub still remembers the day German troops entered his hometown of Łódź on September 9, 1939. He was 13. The advancing columns of young soldiers in green Wehrmacht uniforms—hobnailed boots on cobblestones—left a lasting, chilling impression: a display of force that seemed intent on crushing anything in its path.
Born into a poor, close family after 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 who loved books and films, he says reading and cinema offered him a glimpse of another world. A scholarship allowed him to attend high school until February 1940, when his family was forced into the Łódź ghetto. Some 160,000 Jews were crowded into the enclosed quarter; escape meant almost certain death.
Inside the ghetto inmates were organized for labor. Weintraub worked in the metal section of an electrical workshop. The Judenrat, the Jewish council imposed by the occupiers, told people that those judged useful to the Germans had a better chance of survival. Yet disease and chronic starvation were constant. Weintraub describes hunger not as a temporary discomfort but as a defining condition of daily life: for years he remembers waking and sleeping with an aching emptiness in his stomach, his thoughts consumed by how to find food.
In the summer of 1944 the ghetto was sealed. Nazi authorities had always treated the ghetto as a temporary measure en route to the larger goal of removing Jews from the city. Promises of work “for the Reich” were often a cover for deportations. Weintraub and many others were loaded into freight cars fitted more for animals than people—packed standing, locked in, without food or water, the stench from primitive toilets overpowering. Days and nights blurred.
They arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where Weintraub at first mistook the camp for another ghetto. Then the selections began. From the corner of his eye he noticed electrified wire. At selection his mother was taken to the gas chamber that same day. He recalls the chilling gestures of the SS: a thumb to the right meant you were unfit for work; a thumb to the left meant your life was temporarily spared for labor. At 18, Leon’s thumb pointed left, and the systematic stripping of identity began.
New arrivals were made to undress, shower, have heads shaved, and be disinfected. Weintraub says the aim was to break people’s spirit: prisoners were robbed of personal agency and forced to obey. The most persistent image that returned to him from Auschwitz is the smell of burning flesh. To survive mentally, he often shut off parts of his awareness; he believes that without such psychological protection, he could not have endured.
By chance he avoided being sent immediately to the gas chambers. When guards were absent he slipped into a group being transferred to forced labor at Gross-Rosen. Newly tattooed and naked, he passed through the clothing depot; no one checked him, and that oversight saved his life. He also carries the haunting memory of seeing a woman who had hanged herself on an electrified fence.
After Auschwitz he was moved through a chain of camps—Gross-Rosen, Flossenbürg and Natzweiler-Struthof—where arbitrary beatings, public humiliations and executions were commonplace. He still feels the shock of returning to certain places: the roll-call squares, the cold winter winds, the crowd moving as one under watchful guards. The images can still make his legs tremble.
As the war neared its end he was put on a transport intended to be scuttled in Lake Constance. The train’s locomotive was attacked by French aircraft; in the confusion Weintraub escaped. When he encountered a French soldier, the long nightmare finally broke. At liberation he weighed roughly 35 kilograms and was weakened by typhus. He mourned his family, but by chance learned that three of his sisters had survived Bergen-Belsen. They were reunited in a displaced persons camp there, and Weintraub says that being with them was the moment he felt human again—the start of his recovery.
Determined to make life after so much death meaningful, he trained as a gynecologist and obstetrician, dedicating himself to bringing new life into the world. In 1946 the British military government arranged for him to study medicine in Göttingen, Germany—returning to the country of the perpetrators. There, as a physician, he saw firsthand how little scientific basis there had ever been for Nazi racial theories. He returned to Poland in 1950 but left for Sweden in 1969 amid a resurgence of antisemitism.
Weintraub has long argued that remembering the Holocaust is a duty to the murdered and their descendants. He fears that forgetting would be a second theft of victims’ lives. To preserve testimony for future generations he took the unusual step of recording his account as a hologram. He worries that many young people today do not understand what the Holocaust was and that calls for violence and renewed pogroms are resurfacing. He finds it alarming that people fear wearing a kippah in public.
Despite the trauma he endured, Weintraub remains an optimist. He believes common sense and humanity can eventually prevail, that societies can move beyond accusations and conflict and work toward a peaceful future together.
This piece was originally written in German. The interview with Leon Weintraub was conducted by Matthias Hummelsiep.