Holocaust survivor Stefan Jerzy Zweig is dead

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Stefan Jerzy Zweig (recording from 2006)

Photo: Horst Rudel / IMAGO

Holocaust survivor Stefan Jerzy Zweig, known for the successful novel "Naked Among Wolves," is dead. The man, who was saved from murder by other inmates in the Buchenwald concentration camp as a toddler, died on February 6th in Vienna at the age of 83 the news agency dpa found out. The Austrian magazine “Profil” had previously reported on the death of the man, whose story served as the basis for several books and television films.

Zweig was born on January 28, 1941 in Kraków, the son of a lawyer. He spent the first months of his life in, among other places, the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, which the German occupiers had set up. During an eviction and killing operation in the ghetto, his father Zacharias Zweig had the two-year-old child anesthetized by a doctor and hid him in a backpack.

The boy was sent to a forced labor camp along with his father, mother and his older sister. There he also had to be hidden from the SS - with Polish families in the area or under rubbish on a manure cart, as his father recorded in written memories.

After imprisonment in another camp, the Zweig family was separated. Zweig's mother and sister were sent to their deaths in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The three-year-old boy and his father were taken to Buchenwald.

This is where the story of “Naked Among Wolves” begins. The novel by author Bruno Apitz, himself a Buchenwald survivor, became a bestseller and school reading material in the GDR with its descriptions of communist prisoners who protected the toddler and saved him from death. With around two million copies sold, it was probably the socialist state's most popular novel. Stefan Jerzy Zweig became known as the “Buchenwald Child” through the novel.

In his novel, Apitz describes how four-year-old Stefan Jerzy Zweig was the only child to survive the Buchenwald concentration camp, but he omits the fact that after the camp was liberated, another 903 children and young people were found living there.

The book, published in 1958 and made into a film several times, also left out the important role that Zacharias Zweig played alongside the political prisoners in the boy's survival. Decades later, the question of how his son was saved from a planned children's transport to the Auschwitz concentration camp became an issue again. Stefan Jerzy Zweig was removed from the transport list at the last moment.

An older Sinto boy named Willy Blum was ultimately sent to his death with the list number intended for Zweig. A memorial plaque for Zweig in Buchenwald was subsequently dismantled and replaced with a plaque in which he is mentioned anonymously as one of the thousands of children who were deported to this concentration camp.

Zweig's story of survival in court

In 2006, Zweig sued the author Hans Joachim Schädlich because a character in his novel "Anders" said that Zweig could not admit that he survived because of the murder of another. Zweig felt personally attacked. He was convinced that, as a victim of the Nazi regime, he “does not owe Schädlich and his publisher any account of his persecution,” the complaint said.

A few years later, Zweig also went to court against the term “victim exchange,” which the then director of the Buchenwald Memorial had used in connection with Zweig’s rescue. Both cases ended in a settlement.

These debates had a positive effect on the memory of Willy Blum. His fate was finally discovered. In her book “The Child on the List,” the historian Annette Leo uses camp documents to describe how the 16-year-old volunteered to be transported to Auschwitz to accompany his little brother.

After the war, Zweig lived in Israel, France, the GDR and finally in Austria, where he worked as a cameraman. He suffered from the psychological and physical consequences of his imprisonment throughout his life. He later managed to tell his story himself. In 2005 he self-published his biography entitled “Tears Alone Are Not Enough.”

dpa/löw