Stefan Jerzy Zweig

Stefan Jerzy Zweig (born January 28, 1941) is an author and cameraman. He is known as the Buchenwald child from the novel by Bruno Apitz, Naked Among Wolves. He survived Buchenwald concentration camp at age four under protection from his father and other prisoners.

Stefan Jerzy Zweig was born in Kraków. He lived with his parents, Helena and Dr. Zacharias Zweig and his sister, Sylwia Zweig in the Kraków ghetto. The family was split up in August 1944. His mother and sister perished in Auschwitz.

Zweig and his father were brought to Buchenwald in 1944, when Zweig was just three years old. He was arrested with the notation, "Polit Pole Jude" (political Polish Jewish) and was given the prisoner number 67509.

Willi Bleicher and Robert Siewert, prisoner functionaries, took care of Zweig's welfare. When scheduled to be sent to Auschwitz just a few weeks after arriving, he was hidden in the typhus ward of the infirmary. Later, his name appeared on a transport list and was switched with that of Willi Blum, a 16-year-old Romani boy who was killed in his place. Through such interventions, Zweig was able to survive until Buchenwald was liberated.

Because of an illness, Zweig stayed in Europe until 1949, living in Poland, Switzerland and France before moving to Israel with his father, where his father found work as a clerk in the Finance Ministry. Zweig graduated from school and completed his military service in the Israeli army. He then studied mathematics at the University of Tel Aviv. With help from former Résistance member and French Buchenwald survivor, Pierre Sudreau, he received a stipend to continue his studies in Lyon at the Institute for Applied Polytechnology in summer 1963.

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