Lower Thirds: 

0:03	Report by Matti Hummelsiep
0:27 Leon Weintraub, Holocaust Survivor

Script:

In the wonderfully fair month of May,
as all the flower-buds burst,
then in my heart
love arose.

Leon Weintraub never lost his love for the German language. 
Not even the Nazis could take that away from him.
He was 13 years old when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.
A few days later, the Wehrmacht marched into his hometown of Lodz. 

+++Leon Weintraub+++
The memory of the sound of nail-studded boots on cobblestones still sends a chill down my spine.

Lodz was renamed Litzmannstadt by the occupiers and they forced the Jewish population into a ghetto.
Around 160,000 people were crammed into a tiny space.
Anyone who tried to escape was shot.
Though only a teenager, Weintraub was forced to do hard labor — as this document testifies.
The ghetto was closed by the Nazis in 1944. They forced into cattle cars more than 65,000 Jews, including Leon Weintraub, his mother and his sisters. They were brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

+++Leon Weintraub+++
Once you were at the front, you got the infamous thumbs up: thumb to the right, unfit for work, death. Thumb to the left, deferred death. You were left alive as a disposable object.
The sisters and Leon were sent to the "left." His mother was sent to the gas chamber. 

+++Leon Weintraub+++
In Auschwitz, I smelled the intense stench of burnt flesh. But I had no idea that these tall chimneys, this thick black smoke, were burnt human beings.

The Nazis murdered more than 1.1 million people in Auschwitz.
Leon Weintraub survived—by chance, as he says. 
Leon Weintraub fears that people have not learned from the history of the Holocaust. So he recounts his story while he still can.+++