Hirsch Schwartzberg

Hirsch Schwartzberg (Szwarcberg, Schwarzberg) (October 28, 1907, in Vilna —October 17, 1987 in Ashdod) was a Jewish leader of Holocaust survivors (Yiddish: בפרייטה יידין אויף ברלין‎) under the American occupation of Berlin.

He was president of the Central Committee of Jewish Displaced Persons in Berlin. He controlled activities of two adjoining displaced-person camps in Berlin, in Düppel and Mariendorf. As a witness remembers, in the years of his leadership there was no riots or violence in the camps.

All of Schwartzberg's Family were killed in the World War II German genocide of European Jews, except himself, and his wife and son. They together survived the Vilna Ghetto. A couple weeks before its final liquidation, in September 1943, they escaped its liquidation, together with a few hundred other Jews from the ghetto, by gaining a work-permit for working in Karl Plagge's hastily expanded HKP 562 forced labor camp on Subačiaus Street in Vilnius. Albeit the survival rate was higher than in the liquidated Vilna ghetto, Plagge and some of his more benevolent officers could not avert the outcome, and most of the Jewish workers of the HKP were latter also liquidated mainly by Ukrainian and Estonian SS in July 1944 before the Russians occupied Vilna/Vilnius. Schwartzberg, with wife and son, survived this liquidation by switching to new hiding places during the night, as their previous ones got discovered and those caught then killed. Most of these hiding places were makeshift and often overfilled, which increased their likelihood of discovery.

For the Schwartzbergs and other surviving Jews the subsequent Soviet occupation was a liberation. But Vilnius/Vilna - before the German invasion - was a predominately Polish and Jewish city - after the genocide in Lithuania, the Vilna Jewish society and community to which Schwartzberg previously belonged did not exist anymore. Thus after the Schwartzbergs recuperated, and as the Red Army proceeded west-ward towards Berlin, Schwartzberg and his family also left Vilnius and moved west. To the city of Szczecin in Poland, and then three weeks after the German capitulation, to Berlin. An additional important calculation in Schwartzberg's decision to leave Vilna, his hometown, was also to avoid the forced migration east of many people in Lithuania by the Soviets, including surviving Jews. For a related reason, he lied about his place of birth, as being Lodz, Poland, on arriving into East Berlin. The Soviets had the policy then of repatriating people from the Baltics, often also shipping them further east. For this reason he took the additional precaution of misinforming the Soviets about his place of birth and that of his wife and child.

In February 1949 Schwartzberg, and his wife and son, immigrated to the United States.