BERLIN (AP) — Leon Schwarzbaum, a survivor of the Nazis' death camp at Auschwitz and a lifelong fighter for justice for the victims of the Holocaust, has died. He was 101.
Schwarzbaum died early Monday in Potsdam near Berlin.
The International Auschwitz Committee said on its website: "It is with great sadness, respect and gratitude that Holocaust survivors around the world bid farewell to their friend, fellow sufferer and companion Leon Schwarzbaum, who in the last decades of his life became one of the most important contemporary witnesses of the Shoah."
Schwarzbaum was the only one in his family to survive the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.
He was born in 1921 in Hamburg, Germany. He grew up in Bedzin, Poland, and he, alongside his family, was deported to Auschwitz in 1943, the Associated Press reported.
After the war, he lived in Berlin where he worked as an art and antique dealer.
He was married twice but never had any children, daily newspaper Bild reported.
Schwarzbaum's story came to life when in 2018 film director Hans Erich Viet made a movie about him titled “The Last of the Jolly Boys."