Leon Schwarzbaum never had his day in court after all. Last Friday the 101-year-old Shoah survivor was scheduled to testify in the trial of another 101-year-old, on trial accused of assisted murder in more than 3,000 cases as a former concentration camp guard.
Four days before his court appearance near Berlin, Schwarzbaum died. In his absence his lawyer read out how Schwarzbaum had survived three concentration camps – testimony that, nearly 80 years on, has lost none of its horror.
“The loading area is stuffed with naked people, they stretch their arms towards the sky, they cry – they scream, nobody could help them anymore,” wrote Schwarzbaum before he died.
In the end, Schwarzbaum’s absence from the courtroom made all the more powerful his appeal to the defendant: “I want to challenge you to tell us the historical truth. Speak here in this place about what you experienced – as I do for my side.”
Schwarzbaum is just one in a series of prominent survivors of the Nazi horror who have died recently. On Wednesday it was confirmed that Boris Romanchenko, a 96-year-old Ukrainian survivor of Nazi camps including Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, was killed by an explosion in Kharkiv. In Germany, the land of the perpetrators, each survivor death is a significant moment.
For Dr Barbara Köster, educational director of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the death of the last eyewitnesses is a “great emotional loss”, above all for young people.
“A real meeting with survivors is compelling for young people and formative in many ways for them,” she said.
Days before Schwarzbaum died, five months before her 100th birthday, Germany lost Inge Deutschkron. Born in Brandenburg, outside Berlin, Deutschkron survived the Nazi era in hiding. In a 2013 speech to the Bundestag she recalled finding her life’s calling as a journalist in post-war Bonn. There she met scores of people who “had simply erased from their memories the crimes for which the German state had set up its own murder machine – crimes they allowed happen”.
Determined to change that, Deutschkron became a pioneer in survivor encounters with school children; for the International Auschwitz Committee her work made her an “authority in humanity and memory”.
German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Inge Deutschkron’s mission to keep alive the memory of those persecuted and murdered now passes to those she trained, whom he called a “generation of witnesses of witnesses”.
At Berlin’s Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre, director Christina Glauning says her team are finding new and inventive ways to present the “everyday, ubiquitous nature” of Nazi forced labour and other crimes.
“Working with the second and third generations, who stand for the transgenerational memory of Nazi stories in families, will become more important in the future,” she said. “Historical sites, witnesses made of stone, are increasingly important as the starting point . . . but many are in a terrible condition and they must be secured urgently.”
Video recordings
Around Germany, archivists and museum curators have recorded thousands of hours of audio and video recordings of survivors and their life stories.
Some approaches are particularly inventive, such as a team in Munich who have devised a list of the 1,000 most common questions from children and young people. They are put to survivors over a week of interviews as two high-resolution cameras film their answers.
Visitors to a special Munich cinema don special glasses and, via a smartphone, can ask questions which – through speech recognition software – produces an instant, appropriate answer from a 3D hologram sitting in a chair before them.
“It will never replace the real, living survivor testimony,” said Eva Umlauf, who survived Auschwitz as a baby and is one of the first hologram interviewees, to 3sat television. “But it is the only way to pass this on, and that’s a good thing.”
Last October Schwarzbaum answered questions from an audience of young people, in conversation with film director Volker Schlöndorff.
Unknown to everyone at the time, this filmed interview – available soon online – proved to be Schwarzbaum’s final testimony.
“It was a privilege to spend two days with him,” said Schlöndorff. “It was only after his wife died that he talk[ed] about his experiences, then he spent 25 years visiting schools. With the filmed interview, at least his story can continue to be told.”
