The Polish Jewish Zweig family had to move into the Kraków ghetto in 1941. Zacharias Zweig and his three-year-old son Stefan Jerzy were transported to Buchenwald concentration camp at the beginning of August 1944. Prisoners from the illegal camp committee—including Willi Bleicher and Robert Siewert—took the boy into their care.
At the end of September 1944, he and eleven other children were under threat of deportation to Auschwitz. Prisoner functionaries from the camp office, who had to compile transport lists for the SS, replaced their names with twelve others, including Willy Blum, a 16-year-old Sinti boy.
Stefan Jerzy Zweig was hidden among prisoners with typhus and then smuggled into the “Little Camp.” There, he was hidden by his father until Buchenwald’s liberation on April 11, 1945. Stefan Zweig was the youngest of 900 surviving children. In 1949 he moved to Israel with his father.
The East German writer Bruno Apitz published a novel based on his story in 1958, entitled “Naked Among Wolves.” A film adaptation was made by Frank Beyer in 1963.