David Schwarz
David Schwarz (b. 9 December 1928 in Poland; d. 7 November 2008) was a Polish-Jewish liberal debater and editor in Sweden.[1]
Life
Schwarz was born in 1928 in Poland, into a Jewish home. During World War II, he was placed in the Buchenwald, Nordhausen, Dora and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Like many other inmates in the concentration camps, he suffered from both typhus and tuberculosis. In 1950 he moved to Sweden. The first years in Sweden were spent in sanatoriums due to tuberculosis. When Schwarz recovered, he initially lived on social welfare but later came to study at Stockholm University.
Over time, the immigration question became central to his life, a question through which Schwarz came to have a significant influence on the development of Swedish society. As a diligent debater in the press and as editor of the magazine Invandrare och minoriteter (Immigrants and minorities), he was deeply involved in Swedish immigration policy from the 1960s.[2] He has been described as "the first who, from an immigrant perspective, started a debate about the situation of refugees in society".[3]
He early on pointed out that the transformation of Sweden into a country of immigrants will have consequences, that it was a new era. He was against assimilation. Schwarz believed that one could integrate and at the same time retain one's own background and cultural uniqueness. He published several books in the 1970s.
External links
References
- ↑ Debattören Schwarz är död
- ↑ Hur Sverige blev en mångkultur, M.Eckehart
- ↑ Hans Lorentz, Forskning om mångkulturalism i Sverige utifrån ett pedagogiskt perspektiv: en överblick och historisk tillbakablick 1950-2000, Pedagogiska rapporter nr 2001:77
