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Polish Holocaust survivor Leon Weintraub turns 100

02.01.2026 09:00
Leon Weintraub, a survivor of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and Nazi German death camps including Auschwitz, marked his 100th birthday on Thursday.
The Litzmannstadt Ghetto, established by the Germans in February 1940, was the second-largest Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland during World War II, after the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Litzmannstadt Ghetto, established by the Germans in February 1940, was the second-largest Jewish ghetto in occupied Poland during World War II, after the Warsaw Ghetto.Photo: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Weintraub celebrated the milestone in Stockholm, where he has lived for decades.

A physician by training, he is one of the last living survivors of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and an honorary citizen of the central Polish city of Łódź.

He survived several Nazi camps, including Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Flossenbürg and Natzweiler-Struthof.

Łódź Mayor Hanna Zdanowska sent a congratulatory letter, calling Weintraub "one of the most important guardians of memory," and presented him with a special edition of The Promised Land, a novel by Polish Nobel Prize-winning author Władysław Reymont.

"A hundredth birthday is an absolutely special moment—a rare privilege and a great celebration of life," Zdanowska wrote.

"Today, we celebrate not only an impressive jubilee, but above all an extraordinary person whose life has been forever etched into the history of Łódź and the world," she added.

Born in Łódź in 1926, Weintraub lost his father as an infant. By the time World War II broke out, Weintraub had managed to finish six years of elementary school.

In the winter of 1939, he was deported with his mother and sisters to the Litzmannstadt Ghetto. In 1944, at the age of 18, Weintraub was sent to Auschwitz.

While there, he avoided death by joining a group of prisoners who were being sent to labour camps. He was transferred between several camps before the war ended.

After the war, Weintraub studied medicine in Göttingen, Germany, and later returned to Poland, where he worked as a gynecologist.

In 1969, amid an anti-Semitic campaign by Poland’s communist authorities, he was stripped of his job as head of a hospital ward and forced to leave the country.

He settled in Sweden and has lived in Stockholm ever since with his wife Evamaria.

Last year, after receiving honorary citizenship from Łódź, Weintraub said he had to leave Poland decades ago because rumours spread he was conducting medical experiments on Polish women.

"As an Auschwitz survivor, it was a humiliating experience,” he said.

Weintraub is one of the last living survivors of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto and the sole surviving member of his family deported there in 1940.

Of the roughly 80 members of his extended family, only 16 survived World War II, Polish state news agency PAP reported.

(pm/gs)

Source: PAP