Leslie Schwartz

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Leslie Schwartz, entrance to the Mainz synagogue, May 2015

Leslie Schwartz (born January 12, 1930 in Baktalórántháza , † May 12, 2020 in Miami ) was a Hungarian-American survivor of the Holocaust .

Life

Leslie Schwartz (actually Laszlo Schwartz) was born in 1930 as the eldest son of Hungarian Jews in a small town east of Debrecen . He had a sister, Judith, who was two years his junior. His father, who had had polio since his youth, owned a cosmetics store. The father died when Leslie was eight years old; the mother remarried in 1939. Leslie's relationship with his stepfather was fraught with conflict.

In 1940 the Jewish school Leslie attended was closed and he had to go to a Catholic school. From 1943 the harassment against the Hungarian Jews increased. In 1943 he lost his Hungarian citizenship by law. He narrowly escaped deportation to Ukraine. In March 1944 the German Wehrmacht occupied Hungary ( Operation Margarete ). In April the family was evicted from the small town of Baktalórántháza and taken to the Kisvarda ghetto . In May the whole family was deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. In the selection after the arrival, the family was separated. His mother and sister Judith survived Auschwitz, but were victims of a British torpedo on a cruiser carrying prisoners on the Baltic Sea. The six-month-old half-sister Eva was murdered in Auschwitz. Leslie came to the “children's barracks” and was given the red number 5730.

With the help of a friend he was sent to the Birkenau labor camp and later to the Dachau concentration camp . From there he was used to clear rubble after Allied bombings in the Bavarian capital, Munich . In April 1944 he weighed only 34 kg. Finally he came to Mühldorf am Inn , where he had to do forced labor in the Mühldorfer Hart building the bunker for the production of the Me 262 .

As the Allies drew nearer, many prisoners were put on trains and taken away. On April 27, such a train stopped at the Poing station . Leslie was one of 3,600 Jewish prisoners who were transported by train to Seeshaupt from the Mühldorf Concentration Camp External Command , as the camp was closed. While staying in Poing, the rumor spread that the Second World War was over. Many prisoners fled and were shot while trying to escape. Leslie initially stayed on a farm. However, he was shot and hit in the neck by gunmen from a nearby Hitler Youth camp.

Finally, on April 30, 1945, Leslie was liberated by US troops near the Tutzing train station. At the beginning of May he was operated on in a military hospital by a German military doctor. Leslie was able to recover physically in a camp for displaced persons near Feldafing (only there he could be treated for typhus).

There he received a letter from his uncle asking him to come to the USA. In the late summer of 1945 he first returned to his Hungarian homeland, which was occupied by Soviet troops. Very soon he decided to travel to the USA to see his relatives. He went back to Germany and initially stayed in the Föhrenwald camp . On July 27, 1946, he took a train from Munich to Bremen and boarded a ship destined for New York City .

In 1951 he married Jeannine Schwartz. Six years later, their only son, Garry, was born. Leslie Schwartz earned his living first as an employee of an insurance company and after 1972 as the manager of his own printing company in New York. Tony Curtis aka Bernhard Schwartz was his cousin.

Leslie later married a second time; his wife Annette comes from Münster . Since 1984 the Schwartz couple lived in the Münster children's home from spring to autumn . The rest of the year they spent in New York City or Florida .

Since the publication of his memoirs (2007 in Danish, 2010 in German and 2013 in English), he has given readings, given lectures and sought dialogue with young people in particular. To this end had him Max Mannheimer encouraged knew him from their time together in the Dachau concentration camp.

Leslie Schwartz died in Miami on May 12, 2020.

Honors

Publications

  • At overleve helvede - En af de sidste overlevende fra Auschwitz . 2007, ISBN 978-8-756-78073-5
  • Through the hell of Auschwitz and Dachau. A boy fights for survival. Lit Verlag 2010
  • Surviving the Hell of Auschwitz and Dachau: A Teenage Struggle Toward Freedom From Hatred , Lit Verlag 2013, ISBN 978-3-643-90368-6

literature

  • Christian Gerlach , Götz Aly : The Last Chapter: The Murder of the Hungarian Jews 1944-1945 , Frankfurt am Main 2004.
  • Peter Müller: The bunker area in Mühldorfer Hart: armaments mania and human suffering. History Association Heimatbund , Mühldorf am Inn 2000, ISBN 3-930033-17-8 .
  • Edith Raim: The Dachau concentration camp external commandos Kaufering and Mühldorf - armaments buildings and forced labor in the last year of the war 1944-45 . Dissertation, Landsberg 1992, ISBN 3-920216-56-3 .

Movies

  • Beatrice Sonhüter: "The Mühldorf Death Train - Encounters against Forgetting" BR 2012 documentary
  • Walter Steffen: "Endstation Seeshaupt", documentary 2010

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Westfälische Nachrichten online May 16, 2020: [1]
  2. ↑ Press release , Bavarian Ministry of Culture of July 1, 2013, accessed on June 11, 2014
  3. ↑ https://www.km.bayern.de/pressemitteilung/8550/.html
personal data
SURNAME Schwartz, Leslie
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schwartz, Laszlo (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian-American Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH January 12, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Baktalórántháza
DATE OF DEATH May 12, 2020
Place of death Miami