Dr. Aleksander Schwarz sel.A.

Dr. Aleksander Schwarz was born in 1924 in Boryslaw, a small town on the edge of the Carpathians, not far from Lviv. His family was wealthy and owned an oil field. His father David Schwarz worked as a geologist and supported the social institutions of the Jewish community, which then had some 16,000 members.

The region had important oil deposits and refineries that were vital to the German occupiers' war effort. Many Jews from Boryslaw were forced into slave labour, others were deported. In 1941 the 17-year-old Aleksander Schwarz and his father were seized and taken to the Janowska camp. Located on the outskirts of Lviv, it was the largest camp in Eastern Galicia. It served as a transit camp for deportations to the Belzec and Treblinka extermination camps and was itself a place of extermination.

In November 1942 his father was shot before his eyes. His mother Salomea, his younger siblings and all other members of his family were murdered in Boryslaw. Aleksander Schwarz fought desperately to survive and escaped death several times. At the end of 1943 he managed to flee to the Carpathians, where he survived in the forests until the liberation by Soviet troops.

In a sanatorium in Poland he recovered from tuberculosis. He married, started a family and earned a doctorate in cybernetics. Because of rising antisemitism he left Poland and moved to Munich with his family in 1968.

His life's work

In 1993, after his first visit to Lviv, he founded an aid fund in Munich together with his wife and some friends, from which Leopolis e.V. emerged. In the same year he had a granite boulder erected in memory of the some 200,000 victims of the Janowska camp.

From then on he campaigned for a dignified memorial and supported the Jews still living in Lviv. Sustained by his deep faith, he made this tireless commitment his life's task. For his engagement he was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit of Germany.

Dr. Aleksander Schwarz died in November 2014. His life's work is carried on by Dr. Peter Summa-Lehmann and his son Dr. Mariusz Schwarz through Leopolis e.V.