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).
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.
[2]: 81 The Wieck family experienced the pain of parting with emigrating Jewish relatives and friends – most acutely when the Nazi regime in October 1941 began systematic deportations of German Jews to ghettos and concentration camps.
Of the 316,000 people who lived there before the war, perhaps 100,000 remained, and Wieck estimated that about half of these were to die of hunger, disease, or maltreatment before the last Germans were allowed (or forced) to leave in 1949-50.
Wieck's incarceration in a Soviet prison camp near Königsberg-Rothenstein, and the story of how he and his parents barely managed to eke out an existence thereafter in Kaliningrad – as the city was renamed in July 1946 – occupy the second half of his book.
Regarding human nature and humankind’s potential for good and evil, he said: All people, be they musicians or politicians, Germans or New Zealanders, Jews or Christians, the persecutors or the persecuted, are frighteningly the same irrespective of different temperaments, ideals and conventions.
The award is named after Otto Hirsch (1885-1941), a German-Jewish lawyer and politician from Stuttgart who was imprisoned by the Nazis and ultimately tortured to death at Mauthausen Concentration Camp in German-annexed Austria.
In presenting the award on behalf of German President Joachim Gauck, Stuttgart Mayor Fritz Kuhn said that, in his life and work, "Wieck combines cultural, social, political and musical commitment.