Why Auschwitz sign's theft chilled me

The "Arbeit macht frei" promise on the gates of Auschwitz must stand as a reminder of the lies on which the Holocaust was built

The theft of the "Arbeit macht frei" sign from the gates of Auschwitz extermination camp is more than sinister. It is an act of abuse against the world's most powerful testament of the depths of depravity to which man is capable of sinking.

The Holocaust was a terror of such magnitude that its repercussions still drive the actions of people not born when the crematoria of Auschwitz and the other camps belched forth their obscene fumes. My own family was not immune from its effects. An uncle, Bernard, a joiner by trade, was one of the first British soldiers to enter Belsen, the camp in Germany to which remaining occupants of the extermination camps were force marched in the dying days of the war. What he saw there was so seared into his memory that he suffered periodic mental illness for the rest of his life.

Other witnesses emerged with a determination to reveal to the world evidence of the systematic slaughter. Among them were inmates of the camps themselves. Survivors of the Holocaust have played a key part in its influence on contemporary politics. They overcame unspeakable trauma to deliver the lessons of the Holocaust to succeeding generations, speaking in schools, colleges and universities, addressing public meetings and placing their ordeals on record.

I have been privileged to know some of them. Leon Greenman, who died last year, is believed to be the only English Jew sent to Auschwitz. In his 90s Leon was still addressing packed public meetings at which he would display his tattooed concentration camp number, 98288. He was driven by an awareness of the importance of his role as a first-hand witness of the atrocities, and of his duty to testify while he could.

Members of Leeds-based Holocaust Survivors' Friendship Association continue the work. I am proud to number among my friends activists Arek Hersh, Trude Silman, and Eugene Black, all Holocaust survivors. Their courage is beyond admiration. But their numbers are dwindling. The youngest are in their late 70s and were teenagers when they fell victim to the Nazis' final purge of Jews in the latter days of the war.

I cannot imagine the feelings of Holocaust survivors when they saw the reports of the theft of the words "Arbeit macht frei" ("Work sets you free") from the gates of Auschwitz. Many read them at first hand as they entered the camp in 1944 when the last huge swathe of victims was despatched from Hungary.

The theft of this symbol filled me with horror, reminding me of the continuing attempt by Holocaust deniers and apologists to erase evidence of the depravity of nazism. Indeed, the theft risked symbolising the nazism's resurgence, and the continuing growth of racism embraced and promoted by organisations such as the British National party. With the sign now returned and five suspects arrested, however, reports are quoting the district police chief denying that those responsible are members of a neo-Nazi group.

It is worth remembering that now, as in the 1930s and 40s, lies are the foundation on which the philosophy of racism is built. The Holocaust itself depended on deceit for its implementation: promises of relocation, a new life in the east, and at Auschwitz the words "Work sets you free." Even as the victims of the gas chamber were undressing for their "shower" they were told to memorise the numbered hook on which they had hanged their clothes, in order to reclaim them afterwards.

The preservation of Auschwitz is vital. It is the world's most powerful remaining symbol of the ultimate outcome of racism.

Peter Lazenby
Comment is free

Guardian obituary for Leon Greenman

While confined in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in 1943, Leon Greenman, who has died aged 97, vowed that if he ever survived, he would spend the rest of his life testifying about nazism. But it was not until 17 years after his release from the Buchenwald concentration camp - in the early 1960s as he listened to Colin Jordan, then one of the new coterie of British Nazis, expressing the views that had led to the destruction of his life and that of his family - that this mission began to be realised. Leon then started giving the talks that would define the rest of his life. He believed that if he could tell enough people the truth about nazism, then it could never happen again.

Leon was one of six children - three brothers and three sisters - born in Whitechapel, in the East End of London. His family background was Dutch-Jewish; his mother died when he was two. His paternal grandparents were Dutch and when his father remarried he took his children to live with them in Rotterdam. Leon's stepmother beat him, as did his Dutch teachers. By the 1920s he had returned to London and was apprenticed to a barber in Forest Gate.

He was keen on boxing and on singing. In the 1930s he joined an amateur operatic society where he met Esther "Else" van Dam. In 1935 they married at Stepney Green synagogue, and spent their honeymoon in Rotterdam, staying with Else's grandmother. This was to be a decisive moment in Leon's life. Else decided to stay, to look after her grandmother. He commuted between Britain and Holland, working in his father-in-law's book business.

In 1938, fearing that war was approaching, Leon decided to bring Else home to Britain. The night he arrived in the Netherlands to collect her, the young couple heard Neville Chamberlain on the radio - following the British prime minister's meeting with Hitler in Munich - in which Chamberlain had spoken of "peace for our time". Reassured, Leon decided to stay. The British consul told him that if war came, as a British national he would be evacuated. On March 17 1940 their son Barnett ("Barney") was born. On May 10 the Germans invaded the Netherlands. The British embassy staff fled.

But Leon believed that, as an Englishman, and under the Geneva Convention on treatment of enemy civilians, he and his family would be protected from Hitler's race laws which were being rigorously applied. By late April 1942 the Nazis had enforced the wearing of the yellow star of David on Jews in the Netherlands and France. Leon had meanwhile given his family's savings and passports to non-Jewish friends for safe keeping. His friends, scared of reprisals for helping Jews, burnt the documents.

Leon's efforts to get new papers to prove his nationality failed. On October 8 1942 Leon, Else, Barney and their grandmother were rounded up and taken to Westerbork, a Nazi concentration camp in the Netherlands. In mid-January 1943 they were told they were being deported to a Polish "work camp". As British citizens, Leon informed the camp commandant that they should not be deported. He was told they had to go. Years later he discovered that the commandant had found the Greenmans' replacement papers after the family had left. By then they were en route to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

In his autobiography, An Englishman in Auschwitz (2001), Greenman describes how "the women were separated from the men: Else and Barney were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women ... I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me, too, for she threw me a kiss and held our child up for me to see. What was going through her mind, I will never know. Perhaps she was pleased that the journey had come to an end. We had been promised that we could meet at the weekends..."

Else, her grandmother and Barney were sent straight to the gas chambers. Leon's last sighting of them was as they were taken away in an open truck. Else had made capes with peaked hoods for herself and Barney from bright red velvet curtains. Leon saw the two splashes of red. He called out, but his wife never heard him or looked back.

"I thought they must be still alive," Greenman told the Guardian's Stephen Moss in 2005. The thought that he would see them again kept him going.

Leon had been selected for work. After six weeks in Birkenau he was taken to the main camp at Auschwitz. There, despite his protestations of "I am an Englishman, I should not be here", he was subjected to "medical" experimentation. He was convinced that it was his skills that saved him, earning extra food for shaving prisoners and singing for the kapos - prisoners chosen by the Nazis to head work gangs - in the evening. He believed the physique he had developed while training as a boxer enabled him to survive the selections held to weed out and murder the weak and sick. And he fought to survive, in that hope that Else and Barney might still be alive.

In September 1943 Leon was sent to the Monowitz industrial complex within Auschwitz. By January 1945, as the Red Army advanced, the Nazis began moving the slave labourers westwards. Leon and others were force-marched 90km to Gliwice in southern Poland and then, in open cattle trucks in freezing conditions, to Buchenwald, near Weimar. On April 11 1945 he was liberated by the US army. Of the 700 people transported from Westerbork, Leon was one of only two survivors.

He never remarried. In London he started to rebuild his life. He became a tradesman, travelling the country with a suitcase full of bric-a-brac, and a singer. Then came the afternoon in Trafalgar Square.

I first met Leon in 1992 on an Anti-Nazi League counter-demonstration against a meeting in London by the Holocaust denier, David Irving. A homemade badge on Leon's coat read "Auschwitz - Never Again" and "98288", the number tattooed on his arm in the camps. He was an inspirational speaker, and people were moved by his courage and dignity. He spoke at schools, synagogues, trade union and student meetings. He spoke about Jews, the Roma, communists, homosexuals and all the others persecuted and exterminated by the Nazis, and asked people to continue his fight.

I often saw him addressing schoolchildren. Sometimes, the teachers would be nervous that the classes would become restless, as Leon usually talked for more than an hour. Yet, even with the most difficult pupils, he would hold their attention.

He led many delegations to Auschwitz - I went with him four times and there were three Anti-Nazi League visits. He was impatient to ensure we learned as much as possible. He once told me that he wished he could live near the camp, to guide groups around it each day. He marched too, against the British National party and the National Front. Unity and organisation could defeat Nazis, he would say, and that they had to be confronted wherever they tried to gain a foothold. You could never argue with Leon that he should take things easy as he got older. In 1993 he took part in the demonstration to shut down the BNP headquarters in Welling, Kent. As mounted police charged the demonstrators, he had to be lifted over a garden wall for safety. In 1993, following the election of a BNP councillor in east London, a death threat arrived - thrown through his living room window, attached to a brick. He had mesh shutters installed in his Ilford house as a protection. In 2003 local fascists sent him a Christmas card telling him he would make a lovely lampshade.

There was a permanent exhibition of Leon's life at the Jewish Museum in north London, which will be back, in a new form when the museum reopens during the next year. He also contributed to the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust exhibition. He was awarded the OBE in 1998.

Leon was quite extraordinary, and he moved all those who met him. I shared endless car journeys with him, where he would tell jokes and sing and he also described how lonely he was. Had it not been for those terrible events, he would have happily lived the quiet life of a husband, father and grandfather. Leon had that option stolen from him. But he fought so that others would be free to enjoy it.

Recently, when I visited him in hospital, his mood had turned weary, but then we spoke of our campaigning times. He smiled. "Those," he said, "were the days, when we were fighting the Nazis". What a fighter he was.

Leon Greenman, campaigner and witness to the Holocaust, born December 18 1910; died March 6 2008

Guardian

Leon Greenman OBE, Auschwitz survivor 98288 (1910 – 2008)

The very sad news has reached us of the death of Leon Greenman at the great age of 97. I won't say anything about Mr Greenman's personal story which is pretty well covered in the Guardian piece from 2005 (below), but I will say that I had the very great pleasure of meeting and talking to him when he came to Lancaster a few years ago to speak at a meeting of the then Anti-Nazi League. Despite even then being over eighty, one was immediately struck by his boundless energy where it concerned travelling anywhere to spread the word about the Nazis and the Holocaust, what it had meant to him personally and what it means now to fight and keep on fighting to keep the menace of the far-right at bay.

Lancaster Town Hall saw its biggest ever public meeting on the night he came to talk to us and there wasn't a single person in the audience who wasn't deeply affected by what he had to say. Nor was there anyone who wasn't impressed by his complete devotion to his task and the constant work he put into it. If we had a hundred Leon Greenman's, the fight against the far-right would be over in no time. Read the quote from him at the end of this article and remember it whenever you find your energy flagging. It should inspire all of us.

Leon Greenman

On January 27 1945, Soviet soldiers advancing through Poland discovered the largest and most lethal of Hitler's death camps: Auschwitz. Sixty years on, a survivor of the camp tells Stephen Moss his story

The first thing you notice about Leon Greenman's large but shabby terraced house in Ilford is that it has mesh shutters. He had them put up 10 years ago, soon after the National Front threw bricks through the windows. Two years ago, he received a Christmas card from the local fascists telling him he would make a lovely lampshade. Don't tell Greenman that nazism is a dry-as-dust historical phenomenon.

Greenman is an amazing 94, living alone in one room of his cold house; a room piled with papers and portraits of the wife and child he lost in the Holocaust, and of mementoes of his postwar days as a singer of ballads. The other rooms in the house are, he says, full of the goods he used to sell on street stalls, once the Beatles had done for the world of dance bands. He retired from the markets more than 20 years ago, so maybe the ladies' handbags in the locked-up rooms are back in fashion now.

The most poignant portrait on his living-room wall is of his son, Barnett "Barney" Greenman, born on March 17 1940; gassed in Auschwitz two and a half years later. Child and victim of war. Long, curly hair and a gorgeous, girlish face, thrusting a hand to a future that was to be denied him. Even now, had he lived, Barney would be only 64. The Holocaust. Greenman, small, wiry, a boxer in his youth, fought on, has spent 60 years combating racism, was awarded the OBE for his struggle, but in truth never recovered from that blow.

He was born in London, one of six children, but his paternal grandparents were Dutch and his father took the family to live in Rotterdam when Leon was five. His mother had died three years earlier and his father, struggling with his large family, had married his housekeeper. She beat Leon; the schoolmasters beat Leon; he took up boxing, a pocket battleship, unsinkable. He worked in a barber's shop and later in his wife Else's father's book business, commuting between London and Rotterdam.

Greenman's failure to leave Rotterdam before the Nazi occupation of Holland in May 1940 was a catalogue of catastrophes. He intended to leave in 1938 but was reassured by the Munich agreement; the British consul told him that, as a British passport holder, he would be evacuated in the event of war, but when war came, the embassy staff fled; he gave his passport to a friend for safe keeping; the friend panicked and burned it. Greenman was paperless, stateless, friendless. In October 1942, he and his wife and son were taken to the nearby Westerbork concentration camp. Four months later, they were moved to Auschwitz. Greenman was one of 700 Dutch Jews in that consignment; he and one other man survived.

In his book, An Englishman in Auschwitz, Greenman describes his arrival in Birkenau. "The women were separated from the men: Else and Barney were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women ... I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me, too, for she threw me a kiss and held our child up for me to see. What was going through her mind, I will never know. Perhaps she was pleased that the journey had come to an end. We had been promised that we could meet at the weekends after our work was done. We will have a lot to talk about, I thought to myself."

"I thought they must be still alive," says Greenman now. "I didn't know they were gassed within hours. I didn't know about gassing. In my mind, there was nothing wrong with them. I told myself I would find them. They were somewhere in the camp. We'll wait and see. That went on day after day after day. The thought that I would see them again kept me going."

Greenman's hairdressing helped him survive: one of his jobs in the camp was to shave the inmates' beards. In September 1943, he was sent to the work camp at Monowitz, where he was employed as a builder, extending the camp. "You were there to work and to die," he says, "and the big fellers went quicker than the little ones." Greenman is a little over five feet tall and built for survival. He endured almost a year and a half in Monowitz, then a 60-mile death march to Gleiwitz, and a nightmarish five-day journey in open cattle trucks to Buchenwald, from which he was liberated by American forces on April 11 1945. A tiny man with the largest of hearts, in this tiny, paper-strewn room that contains the century.

Guardian

“Young and old alike must learn about the Holocaust as warning against the dangers of racism. There is no difference in colour or religion. If I had survived to betray the dead it would have been better not to survive. We must not forget. Please do not forget.”

Leon Greenman