Stefan Jerzy Zweig (M / Poland, 1941), Holocaust survivor

Stefan Jerzy Zweig (M / Poland, 1941), Holocaust survivor.

KEYWORDS : <Poland> <Krakow Ghetto> <Buchenwald> <Liberation of Buchenwald>

MEMOIRS : Naked Among Wolves (1958), by Bruno Apitz -- Mein Vater, was machst du hier...?, by Zacharias Zweig -- The Buchelwald Child (2007), by Bill Niven -- Tränen allein genügen nicht (2005), by Zacharias Zweig and Stefan Jerzy Zweig

Biography

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Stefan Jerzy Zweig was born in Krakow, Poland in 1941. He lived with his parents, Helena and Dr. Zacharias Zweig and his sister, Sylwia Zweig in the Krakow Ghetto. The family was split up in August 1944. His mother and sister were murdered in Auschwitz.

Zweig and his father were brought to Buchenwald in 1944, when Zweig was just three years old. He was arrested with the notation, "Polit Pole Jude" (political Polish Jewish) and was given the prisoner number 67509.

At age 4, he was with Joseph Schleifstein the youngest Holocaust survivor of Buchenwald. They were hidden in the prisoner infirmary in the small camp.

His story inspired Austrian novelist Bruno Apitz's novel Nackt unter Wölfen (1958).

Buchenwald Film (7:30)

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Romek Wajsman, Stefan Jerzy Zweig e David Perlmutter a Buchenwald (1945) [fotoarchiv.buchenwald.de]

Book : Naked Among Wolves (1958), by Bruno Apitz

Bruno Apitz, Nackt unter Wölfen (Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1958). English ed.: Naked Among Wolves, translated by Edith Anderson (Berlin: Seven Seas Publishers, 1960).

A semi-biographical novel, written by Holocaust survivor Bruno Apitz (1900-1979).

The novel tells the story of prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp who risk their lives to hide a young Polish-Jewish boy. Apitz himself had been imprisoned in Buchenwald as a communist from 1937 to 1945. The boy, whose name in the novel is Stefan Cyliak, was revealed to be based on Stefan Jerzy Zweig after publication of the novel.

Translated into over 30 languages, winning worldwide recognition.

Adapted three times for a film--by Georg Leopold (1960), Frank Beyer (1963), and Philipp Kadelbach (2015). The role of Stefan Jerzy was played by child actors (Jürgen Strauch in 1963).

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USHMM Oral History Collection

Stefan Zweig, born in 1941 in Kraków, Poland, describes his childhood and family in Warsaw and Kraków; life in Kraków after the German invasion in 1939; being sent to the ghetto; his belief in the importance of Holocaust-related literature; his deportation to Buchenwald with his father; and his feelings about former Nazi sympathizers.

Book : Mein Vater, was machst du hier...? (1987), by Zacharias Zweig

Zacharias Zweig, Mein Vater, was machst du hier...?. Zwischen Buchenwald und Auschwitz ("My father, what are you doing here...? Between Buchenwald and Auschwitz")

Book : The Buchelwald Child (1991), by Bill Niven

William John Niven, The Buchenwald Child: Truth, Fiction, and Propaganda (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1991).

"At the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp, communist prisoners organized resistance against the SS and even planned an uprising. They helped rescue a three-year-old Jewish boy, Stefan Jerzy Zweig, from certain death in the gas chambers. After the war, his story became a focus for the German Democratic Republic's celebration of its resistance to the Nazis. Now Bill Niven tells the true story of Stefan Zweig: what actually happened to him in Buchenwald, how he was protected, and at what price. He explores the (mis)representation of Zweig's rescue in East Germany and what this reveals about that country's understanding of its Nazi past. Finally he looks at the telling of the Zweig rescue story since German unification: a story told in the GDR to praise communists has become a story used to condemn them."--Publisher description.

William John Niven was Professor of Contemporary German History at the Nottingham Trent University, UK.