Holocaust survivor Leon Weintraub: They dehumanized us

Leon Weintraub still remembers the day the Nazis marched on his hometown, Lodz in Poland, on September 9, 1939.

“There were endless lines of young, tall, healthy soldiers in green Wehrmacht uniforms. Just the thought of the sound of their spiked boots on the cobblestones still sends a chill down my spine,” he says. “They radiated so much power and would destroy anything in their path.”

Weintraub was only 13 years old at the time and had no idea of ​​the horrors that awaited him. He lived in a poor neighborhood with his four sisters and his mother, who ran a small laundry. His father had died when Leon was two. The close-knit family relied on each other. Leon was a bright boy.

"Reading books and watching movies were like a keyhole for me, allowing me to see another world," he says.

Thanks to a scholarship, Weintraub was able to attend high school. But that ended in February 1940, when he and his family were forcibly moved to the Lodz ghetto, where some 160 Jews were crammed together. Anyone who tried to escape was shot.

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The ghetto residents were subjected to hard physical labor. Leon worked in the metal section of an electrical factory. The “Judenrat,” the mandatory Jewish councils created under the Nazi occupation, told him that those who were useful to the Nazis were more likely to survive.

Many people in the ghetto died of disease and starvation. “That’s why the word ‘hunger’ has a very special place in my vocabulary, in my mind and in my being,” says Weintraub. Today, people often say they are hungry when they miss a meal, but “this is not real hunger, it is just an increased appetite.”

"For 5 years, 7 months and three weeks, except for one occasion, I literally suffered from hunger. I could not sleep because of the pressure of the pain in my stomach and I would wake up with the same feeling. My only thought was how to find something to eat to fill my stomach."

In the summer of 1944, the ghetto was closed. The district president, Friedrich Übelhöhe, had already circulated a letter to the Nazi leaders in 1939, in which he wrote: “The creation of the ghetto is, of course, only a temporary measure. I reserve the right to decide when and by what means the ghetto and the city of Łódź will be cleansed of Jews. In any case, the ultimate goal must be the eradication of this plague.”

However, the ghetto residents were cynically promised that they would be allowed to work elsewhere "for the good of the Third Reich."

Like many others, Leon Weintraub was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The Nazis claimed it was just another ghetto.

“Then the freight train arrived, better suited to transporting cattle than people,” Weintraub recalls. “We were packed so tightly we could only stand. The doors were closed, there was no food, nothing to drink. Night fell, then dawn again, and then night fell again.” The smell from the bucket used as a toilet was overwhelming.

At one point, the doors were forced open and someone shouted, “Out, out.” Weintraub remembers not yet understanding where the Nazis were taking him. He called out to his mother, “See you inside.” But he soon realized he had ended up in another ghetto.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that the barbed wire fence was electrified. Weintraub saw his mother for the last time during the so-called “selection.” SS officers made life-or-death decisions with a simple gesture: “Finger on the right: unfit for work; finger on the left: death,” Weintraub recounts. His mother was killed in the gas chamber that same day.

For 18-year-old Leon, the finger pointed to the right. “And then the process of dehumanization began,” he recalls. People were stripped, washed, shaved, and disinfected. “We were robbed of any human will. They controlled us, and we had no choice but to follow orders.”

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When Leon Weintraub thinks of Auschwitz, the smell of burning flesh comes to mind first. “I didn’t know,” he says, “that the tall chimneys and thick black smoke were burning human beings.” However, he says he emotionally isolated himself from reality as a form of self-protection: “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to cope.”

By chance, he survived the death camp. The young men of Block 10, where he was held, were already scheduled to be sent to the gas chamber. When the guards were not around, Weintraub joined a group of naked prisoners who were being sent to work at the Gross-Rosen camp. He had just had his prisoner number drawn on his arm. “When we got to the clothing depot, luckily no one checked me, otherwise I would have died.”

The last image of "Auschwitz" he carries with him is the body of a woman who had committed suicide, hanging from an electric fence.

The next stops for the young Weintraub were the concentration camps “Gross-Rosen”, “Flossenbürg” and “Natzweiler-Struthof”. The images of the sadistic atrocities of the Nazis are deeply engraved in his memory: brutal arbitrary beatings of passing prisoners, humiliations and hangings of internees.
"Every time I come to Flossenbürg, my legs shake," he says. "I stand up for a few seconds, because I'm transported back to that winter, feeling that cold wind. The whole crowd moves around the appellate square. It's an apocalyptic sight."

Shortly before the end of the war, Weintraub was transported on a train that was supposed to sink in Lake Constance. But the locomotive was shot down by French planes and Leon managed to escape. When he encountered a French soldier, he realized that his ordeal was over. At the time, the 19-year-old weighed only 35 kilograms and was suffering from typhus. He mourned the loss of his family until he accidentally learned that three of his sisters had survived the Bergen-Belsen camp. “And then I became human again. It was the beginning of my journey towards life,” he says.

After experiencing illness and death, Weintraub chose to become a gynecologist and obstetrician. He wanted to dedicate his life to bringing new life into the world.

In 1946, the British military government allowed him to study in Göttingen, Germany, the country of the perpetrators. As a doctor, he was confronted directly with the lack of valid scientific evidence for Nazi racial ideology.

In 1950 he returned to his homeland, but in 1969 he emigrated to Sweden due to the growing spread of anti-Semitism in Poland. He began to advocate for the importance of memory, seeing it as an obligation to his murdered family members and the millions of innocent victims. He warned that allowing their memory to fade would be like taking their lives a second time.

"A lifetime has passed and many young people today no longer know what the Holocaust was," he says. "It's terrible that there are people who are still calling for pogroms and that people are afraid to go out into the streets."

Despite everything, Weintraub remains optimistic:

"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 build a peaceful future together."