Hirsch Schwarzberg

Hirsch Schwarzberg in the office in Düppel-Zentrum

Hirsch Schwarzberg , also Hirsch Szwarcberg and Hirsch Schwartzberg ( October 28, 1907 in Vilnius - October 17, 1987 in Ashdod ) was a Lithuanian Jewish leading activist of the Holocaust survivors ( Yiddish : בפרייטה יידין אויף ברלין) under the American occupation forces in Berlin.

He was the President of the Central Committee of Jewish Displaced Persons in Berlin and oversaw the activities of two neighboring displaced persons camps in Berlin, in Düppel and Mariendorf. According to a contemporary witness, there were neither uprisings nor outbreaks of violence in the camps during the years of his supervisory activity.

Life

The entire Schwarzberg family was murdered during the Second World War in the German genocide of European Jews, with the exception of himself, his wife and their son. Together they survived the Vilnius ghetto . A few weeks before this was finally dissolved in September 1943, they fled the ghetto together with a few hundred other Jews because they were given a work permit in Karl Plagge's rapidly expanded Army Motor Vehicle Park (HKP) 562 on Subačiaus Street in Vilnius. Even if the survival rate there was higher than in the dissolved Vilna ghetto, Plagge and some of his more benevolent officers could not prevent most of the Jewish workers of the HKP from being murdered later, predominantly by Ukrainians and Estonians of the SS, in July 1944, before the Russians Vilnius occupied. Schwarzberg and his wife survived this liquidation by fling to a new hiding place overnight, while their previous hiding place was discovered and those hiding there were murdered. Most of these hiding spots were makeshift and often overcrowded, which dramatically increased the likelihood of their discovery.

For the Schwarzbergs and other surviving Jews, the subsequent Soviet siege was a liberation. Before the German invasion, Vilnius was a predominantly Polish and Jewish city - after the genocide in Lithuania , the Jewish society and community in Vilnius, to which Schwarzberg had previously belonged, no longer existed. After the Schwarzbergs had recovered and the Red Army advanced west / Berlin, Schwarzberg and his family also left Vilnius and moved to the west; first to Stettin in Poland, and then, three weeks after the German surrender, to Berlin. Another important motivation in relation to Schwarzberg's decision to leave Vilnius, his hometown, was to avoid the Soviet-ordered forced migration to the east that many people in Lithuania experienced, including surviving Jews. For the same reason he lied about his place of birth, naming Łódź (Poland) when he reached East Berlin. The Soviets pursued a policy of repatriating people from the Baltic States, often shipping them further to the east. For this reason he took the precaution and withheld from the Soviets his true place of birth and that of his wife and child. In February 1949, Schwarzberg emigrated to the United States with his wife and son.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Gertrude Samuels: Passport to Nowhere: The Story of a Great Truck Driver. In: The Canadian Jewish Review. November 19, 1948, p. 2. (originally from New York Times Magazine. September 19, 1948) ( November 8, 2013 memento on the Internet Archive )
2. ^ Rabbi Mayer Abramowitz - The Jewish Federation of North America ( Memento of November 8, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ DP CHIEF ARRIVES IN LAND OF CHOICE; Modern 'Solomon' Who Helped Thousands in Camps Weeps With Happiness on Dock. In: The New York Times. February 17, 1949
4. ↑ HAVING OWN ROOM ELATES DP LEADER; Hirsch Schwartzberg See's Symbol of Freedom in His First Privacy in Years. In: The New York Times. February 18, 1949
5. ↑ Angelika Königseder: Escape to Berlin. Jewish Displaced Persons 1945–1948. Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-926893-47-8