Henry Schwarzbaum is dead. The Hamburg-born Holocaust survivor died in Potsdam at the age of 101, as BILD learned from the family. Schwarzbaum fell asleep peacefully on Monday night.
Schwarzbaum, whose Jewish family comes from Upper Silesia, grew up in the Polish city of Będzin, experienced the German invasion, the deportation and the death of his parents in the Auschwitz concentration camp, to which he himself was deported in August 1943. Just one day before the concentration camp was liberated (January 27, 1945), Schwarzbaum was transferred to Berlin-Siemensstadt via the Buchenau concentration camp as a forced laborer for the Siemens company, from where he was driven on a death march to just before Schwerin.
After liberation by the Allies, Schwarzbaum went to West Berlin, specializing in the export of art objects to America, especially to New York. In 1950 he emigrated to America and returned after only a year – out of a longing for home.
While dancing, he met his future (non-Jewish) wife, the two married and ran a thriving antiques and art business for decades. The marriage remained childless.
► Schwarzbaum was involved in school lectures and as a contemporary witness in court for the processing of the Holocaust and against forgetting the murder of the Jews during the Nazi dictatorship.
BILD chief reporter Hans-Jörg Vehlewald dedicated a documentary to his 100th birthday in February 2021, for which Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier received Schwarzbaum at Bellevue Palace.
Three months later, on May 18, 2021, the 100-year-old married his longtime girlfriend Etta Schiller (89), widow of the former Economics and Finance Minister Karl Schiller (1911-1994). The couple lived together in Potsdam.