Birnbaum was the second son of the Jewish philosopher Nathan Birnbaum and his wife Rosa Korngut. Birnbaum married Ernestine (Tina) Esther Helfmann, with whom he had two children: Rafael Zwi and Hana. Birnbaum lived in Berlin from 1911 until 1914, and again from 1919 until 1933.
In 1933 he emigrated to the Netherlands. In the spring of 1943 he was arrested by the Gestapo along with his relatives and transported on 10 March 1943 to a Nazi concentration camp, presumably Auschwitz. Menachem was seen alive and spoken to in Auschwitz in October 1944 by a Dutch Jewish survivor, who told about it to his brother Uriel Birnbaum in Holland after WW2. He must therefore have died between October 1944 and January 27, 1945, when Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviets. His family - Tina, Rafael Zwi, and Hana Birnbaum - were killed earlier, probably in Auschwitz as well.[1] It is likely that he died during or just before the Death March from Auschwitz in mid-January, 1945. This would mean that the theory of him dying in March 1943 in the Sobibor extermination camp is incorrect, a theory based solely on an unconfirmed assumption by the Red Cross that the trains from the German holding camp at Westerbork, Holland were sent to Sobibor on the day of his arrest and deportation.[2]
Kitty Zijlmans, Jüdische Künstler im Exil: Uriel und Menachem Birnbaum; in: Hans Wuerzner (Hg.), Österreichische Exilliteratur in den Niederlanden 1934-1940, Amsterdam 1986
^Cite for the three previous sentences: letter from Uriel Birnbaum to Regina Weinreich dated 6 January 1946, in the Beatrice Weinreich collection, University of Michigan library. Also letter dated 6 August 1945 from Henri van Leeuwen to S.A. Birnbaum in the Nathan and Solomon Birnbaum Archives Toronto.
