Leon Schwarzbaum, a survivor of the Nazis' death 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, near Berlin, the International Auschwitz Committee reported on its website. No cause of death was given, the AP reports. "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 said.
Schwarzbaum was the only one of his family to survive the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and a subcamp Sachsenhausen, the Auschwitz committee said. He became known to a wider audience when film director Hans Erich Viet made a movie in 2018 about his life. The Last of the Jolly Boys was shot with Schwarzbaum himself at original locations. Schwarzbaum was born in 1921 to a Polish-Jewish family in Hamburg in northern Germany. He grew up in Bedzin, Poland, from where the family was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 after the ghetto there was dissolved. After the war, he lived in Berlin, working as an art and antiques dealer. He was married twice but had no children.
Well into his 90s, Schwarzbaum appeared on German television to speak about the sufferings he endured at Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. He visited schools in Germany regularly to tell the children 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,” said Christoph Heubner, 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."
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