Reconciliation with Evil

From 1940, Leon Weintraub (born 1926) was forced by the Nazis to live with his family in the Litzmannstadt ghetto and perform forced labour. The skills he learnt there probably saved him from death: when the ghetto was dissolved in 1944, the prisoners were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and killed. Weintraub, however, managed to pass himself off as a labour prisoner and thus escape being murdered. In the turmoil of the final months of the war, he survived several of the Nazis' brutal deportation operations until he finally managed to escape on one of the transports. Most of his family did not survive the Holocaust. In conversations with journalist Magda Jaros, Leon Weintraub talks about his childhood in ?ód? and his life after the war: his medical studies in Göttingen, his career in Poland and his emigration to Sweden due to the anti-Semitic March riots in 1968. It is the story of reconciliation after unspeakable suffering-but also a warning. »Despite the horrors that Leon Weintraub experienced in his life, he constantly believes that dialogue and mutual respect are the way to improve the world. And these are not just words, but are followed by actions. He constantly repeats to all close and familiar people that everyone should approach everyone with respect, because religion, nationality or skin color do not count, but the human-human relationship is the most important. The determination with which he wants to convey his message to Poles, Germans and Jews who have been united and divided by history, arouses my great admiration.« Joanna Podolska, director of the Dialogue Center Marek Edelman in ?ód?

Leon Weintraub, born on 1 January 1926 in the Jewish slum in Lodz, was a prisoner in the Litzmannstadt ghetto and in the concentration camps Auschwitz-Birkenau, Groß-Rosen, Flossenbürg and Offenburg/external detachment of the Natzweiler concentration camp. After the war, he studied medicine in Göttingen and became a specialist in obstetrics and gynaecology at a clinic in Warsaw. In 1966, he became senior physician at the district hospital in Otwock near Warsaw until he was forced to emigrate to Sweden in 1969 due to rising anti-Semitism. As a contemporary witness, he has been campaigning for years for the memory of the Holocaust with lectures in schools and memorials. Magda Jaros studied philology at the University of Lodz and works as a freelance journalist, including for Twój STYL [Your STYLE], the most renowned and highly regarded lifestyle magazine in Poland. Former President Aleksander Kwasniewski, composer Krzysztof Penderecki, boxer Dariusz Tiger Michalczewski and actors George Clooney and Andy Garcia were among those who answered her questions. Although Magda now lives in Warsaw, she is still closely connected to her family in Lodz and describes herself as a »Lodz local patriot«. Reconciliation with Evil emerged from numerous video conversations with Leon Weintraub in 2020, the year of the pandemic.