Dr. Aleksander Schwarz sel.A.

Dr. Aleksander Schwarz was born 1924 in Boryslaw, a small town on the edge of the Carpathians not far from Lviv. He came from an affluent family that owned an oil field. David Schwarz, his father, worked as a geologist. David was a regular contributor to the charitable organizations that eased the lives of the local 16,000 member Jewish community. The region's oil deposits and refineries at the time were of strategic importance to the German war machine. Many of the Jews from Boryslaw were forced to work as slave laborers; others were deported. In 1941, David and Aleksander Schwarz were arrested and taken to the Yanivsky labor camp on the outskirts of Lviv. Yanivsky was the largest such internment camp in Eastern Galicia. Not only did it serve as a transit center for deportations to the Belzic and Treblinka extermination camps, but it was a death camp as well. In November 1942, before the eyes of his son, David Schwarz was shot and killed. Aleksander's mother Salomea, his younger brothers and sisters, and his entire extended family, were all murdered in Boryslaw.

Aleksander Schwarz desperately struggled to stay alive. He narrowly eluded death again and again. At the end of 1943 he escaped into the Carpathians and lived in the woods until Soviet troops liberated the Ukraine. He recovered from tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Poland. There he later married and earned his PhD as cyberneticist. In response to a growing wave of antisemitism, Dr. Aleksander Schwarz and his family left Poland in 1968, moving to Munich.

In 1993, following his first return visit to Lviv, Aleksander Schwarz initiated, together with his wife and a circle of Munich friends, a relief fund.

Since then Aleksander Schwarz, based on his own harrowing experiences, has worked to establish a memorial site at Lviv, and continues to support the remaining Jews in the region. In 1993 he was able to erect a granite memorial dedicated to the 200,000 victims who perished at the Yanivsky labor camp.

Dr. Aleksander Schwarz has made his commitment to the Jews of the Ukraine his central lifetime task – in deep regard of the Jewish religion. For his untiring dedication he received the Bundesverdienstkreuz (German Federal Cross of Merit).