Albrecht Weinberg, a survivor of multiple Nazi concentration camps, passed away earlier this week, aged 101, Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
Weinberg, despite losing much of his family in the Holocaust, returned to live in Germany 14 years ago.
Weinberg, who was born in Rhauderfehn in 1925, passed away in the town of Leer, not far from his birthplace in northwest Germany. This was just weeks after a film about his life, "Es ist immer in meinem Kopf" ("It is always in my head"), premiered, AP noted.
The Mayor of Leer, Claus-Peter Horst, eulogized Weinberg, saying, “Since returning from New York to his East Frisian home 14 years ago, Albrecht recounted tirelessly and with incredible energy his terrible experiences during the Nazi era and warned again and again against forgetting."
Weinberg survived multiple concentration and death camps, including Auschwitz, Mittelbau-Dora, and Bergen-Belsen. He was also subject to multiple death marches near the end of the war, according to AP.
Israel's Ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, also eulogized Weinberg on X/Twitter, saying that while Weinberg is no longer with us, "he remains with us forever."
"Albrecht was a bridge – between past and present, between pain and hope, between the dead he could never forget and the young people he encouraged to seek the truth. Whoever met him could never forget him," Prosor wrote, adding that he got to know Weinberg well.
The next generation can only read it out of the book
He would tirelessly teach students and others about his life experiences and the horrors of the Holocaust.
“I sleep with it, I wake up with it, I sweat, I have nightmares; that is my present,” he said last year, adding that he was deeply concerned about what could happen in the near future, after he is gone. Weinberg believed that the loss of a generation of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust was a dangerous inevitability.
“When my generation is not in this world anymore, when we disappear from the world, then the next generation can only read it out of the book,” he said.
In 2017, Weinberg was awarded Germany's Order of Merit, but recently returned it in protest against Germany's new migration policies pushed by a right-wing party, which turn away migrants at the border.