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April 30, 2010
Survivor recalls hero
Leyson will speak about “Schindler’s list.”
JONATHON VAN MAREN
Leon Leyson was only 13 when he was transferred from the hell of Plaszow concentration camp to work in Oskar Schindler’s famous factory. Leyson credits Schindler with saving his life and that of most of his family. Although his two older brothers perished, his father, mother, another brother and a sister all survived the war working in Schindler’s factory.
“People who were received in Auschwitz,” Leyson recounted, “went through a selection. There was one person who decided who should live and who should die, and ... my mother was sent to the left to die. She was already in a barracks awaiting the gas chamber when Schindler found out not all the women were being sent to his factory.”
Schindler managed to persuade Nazi officials to release this group of women to his command. Leyson said that Schindler spent a lot of money bribing people to save individual lives.
Leyson is unequivocal that he and his family members survived because of one reason and one man. “We survived the war because the five of us were on Schindler’s list,” said the youngest of the so-called “Schindler Jews.” Leyson will speak here next month at an event organized by Chabad of Richmond.
Of the film that made the Schindler name familiar to millions – and the allegations of private indiscretions by the factory owner – Leyson is emphatic.
“I dismiss that,” he said. “You can always find something, you know: ‘He saved 1,200 people, but he was a womanizer. He saved 1,200 people but he drank a lot.’ It’s just irrelevant, absolutely irrelevant to what he accomplished. You don’t have to be a perfect human being to be a hero, you just have to do the right thing at the right time.
“There were so many of them who had many women and didn’t do anything,” he continued. “They didn’t do anything, they just kept killing people. They did the same thing as him, except they had a little thing on the side [while] they were murdering people on a daily basis.”
Schindler was exceptional, Leyson recounted in a telephone interview with the Independent from his home in California.
“When I met Oskar Schindler,” Leyson said, “it was just like meeting a different kind of human being. Before that, I met these people who simply accepted the Nazi ideology and treated us as non-human. I spent two and a half years in that situation and then I met
Oskar Schindler, who seemed like a different human being altogether. You could tell by the way he spoke to us, you could tell by the way he looked at us and how he treated us. He had a habit of entertaining a lot in his office and, after the guests left, he would come down to the factory floor and visit, just slowly walk through and stop and talk to people and make human contact.”
For the most part, Leyson approves of the film Schindler’s List.
“For the most part, it was very accurate,” he said. “The events that occurred were accurate, except that it’s still a movie, it’s not real life. The ghetto, the camp, you can’t show all the horrible atrocities that were committed on a daily basis – people being murdered, people being beaten, you know, you can’t show that in a movie, you can only show samples.”
It was actually the film’s release, Leyson said, that caused him to speak out about his own experiences, fulfilling a solemn commitment he had made to those who did not survive.
“The last request that people made,” Leyson said, “those who were about to die, was that those who survived, if they survived, would tell the world what had happened. Amidst all the insanity, there was one person, one human being who did the right thing at great risk to his own life.
“I was persuaded to tell my experiences because I was on Schindler’s list,” he said, “and little by little I continued speaking. Basically, it was time. It had been 40 years since I came to this country and I hadn’t told my experiences to anyone except my immediate family. If we were going to honor the request of those people who died that if we survived we would tell the world, then it was time for me to start.”
As much as has been accomplished since the dark days of the Holocaust, Leyson believes that people still have much to learn. “That’s why we need to talk all the more, to show what happened,” he said. “People should take a lesson from this, how to behave, how to act towards each other. Apparently, the lesson has not been learned yet, so we’ll just keep trying.”
Leyson is speaking on Monday, May 10, 7:30 p.m., at the Sheraton Vancouver Airport Hotel, 7551 Westminster Hwy., in Richmond. Tickets are $5-$180 and are available at 604-277-6427 or chabadrichmond.com/Leyson.
Jonathon Van Maren is a contributor to the Peak, Simon Fraser University’s student paper, and a member of Hillel.
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