Michael Wieck (19 July 1928 – 27 February 2021) was a German violinist and author. Wieck's memoir, Zeugnis vom Untergang Königsbergs (Witness to the fall of Königsberg), was published in 1989. In it he relates his and his partly Jewish family's sufferings under the Nazis and, after the German defeat, under the Soviets. This moving story was translated into English in 2003 under the title A Childhood Under Hitler and Stalin: Memoirs of a "Certified Jew", and in 2004 into Russian as Закат Кёнигсберга (Sunset of Königsberg). A revised Russian edition was published in 2015. Biography Wieck was born in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). He was the son of two Königsberg musicians who were widely known before the Nazi era, Kurt Wieck and Hedwig Wieck-Hulisch. They were founders of the popular Königsberger Streichquartett (Königsberg String Quartet). Wieck was a grand-nephew of Clara Schumann (née Wieck). After consultation with a local rabbi, his Jewish mother and his nominally Protestant, but in religious matters indifferent, father decided to bring up their children, Michael and his sister, Miriam (born 1925), as Jews and enrolled them with the Jewish congregation in Königsberg. According to Jewish religious law a person born from a Jewish mother is Jewish by birth. Following promulgation of the 1935 anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, Wieck and his sister were categorized, not as Mischlinge (mixed race), but as Geltungsjuden ("persons considered to be Jewish"), who in some cases were spared from the Holocaust. After Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, the Wiecks experienced the gradual ramping-up of anti-Semitic discrimination and oppression. First Michael and Miriam were ejected from public schools and sent to Jewish schools. Later they were forbidden to attend classes at all. In 1938 Miriam was sent to a boarding school in Scotland in a Kindertransport, taking the place of another German-Jewish girl who had gone to the United States. As a result, she survived the war. Shortly thereafter, young Michael Wieck was compelled to work in factories. In mid-1941 Wieck celebrated his Bar Mitzva in the small Orthodox synagogue Adass Jisroel, since the main Jewish synogogue of Königsberg had been destroyed in the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938. During the pogrom perpetrators vandalized the interior of the Orthodox synagogue hall, but spared it from arson because it was housed in a residential building. Later the congregation restored a prayer hall in the