At the age of 97, Holocaust survivor Leon Weintraub never tires of telling his very personal story in public during and after the Nazi era. It is the story of reconciliation after unspeakable suffering. In view of the resurgent xenophobic currents today, he also always understands his descriptions as a reminder that the atrocities of the Holocaust, which ended in the concentration camps and began with racism and anti-Semitism, should not be repeated.
Weintraub, who was born in Lodz, will talk about what he experienced on May 17th at the Hochschule Niederrhein. Starting at 4:00 PM in the lecture hall of Audimax V2 on the Mönchengladbach campus, those interested will have the opportunity to hear one of the few surviving contemporary witnesses of National Socialism. Admission is free. The event is organized jointly with the Catholic University Center LAKUM and the NS Documentation Center of the City of Krefeld Villa Merländer.
Advance registration with the subject "Lecture Weintraub" to ns-doku(at)krefeld.de is requested. However, spontaneous drop-ins are also welcome. Those who cannot be there can follow the lecture via zoom stream from home: https: //hs-niederrhein.zoom.us/j/62835851886; Meeting-ID: 628 3585 1886; ID/password: 656376.
Background: After the Wehrmacht invaded Poland, Leon Weintraub was forced to live and work with his Jewish family in the Litzmannstadt ghetto starting in 1940. When the ghetto was dissolved in August 1944, he was deported at the age of 18 to the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.
He was able to escape murder only by joining, unnoticed by the SS and the kapos, a group of prisoners selected to work at Gross-Rosen, where he spent several months full of punishment and in constant fear of imminent extermination. He finally managed to escape on one of the last transports.
