Posthumous testimony of survival

ROBERT KRELL

I met Leon Leyson on several occasions in California well before I spent some precious personal time with him when he visited Vancouver as guest speaker at the Holocaust Symposium for High School Students organized annually by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. He returned to speak at a large local community event, as well.

Leon faced 500 students on two successive days and offered his eyewitness testimony. Leon was known to be the youngest member on Schindler’s List and, as perhaps its last survivor, felt a special responsibility to be sure that Oskar Schindler not be forgotten. His account as told to the students was mesmerizing and so meaningful that I expressed my hope that he was writing his memoirs. He assured me that he had begun and was being assisted by Prof. Marilyn Harran and his wife of 47 years, Elisabeth. Harran is the founding director of the Rodgers Centre for Holocaust Education at Chapman University in Orange County and professor of religious studies and history. Elisabeth B. Leyson was professor of English and an administrator at Fullerton College. Leon was in good hands.

It is not easy to talk of such emotionally laden experiences but writing them down may be even more difficult. After all, Leon already mastered five languages before he learned English. It is one thing to learn to speak, quite another to write in a newly acquired language. Leon’s history was available from recordings made by Sophie Sartain and that information and further interviews were gathered for a remarkable new book, The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Impossible Became Possible … on Schindler’s List (Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2013), a memoir by Leon Leyson with Harran and Elisabeth B. Leyson.

Leon was born in Narewka, Poland, on Sept. 15, 1929. The year is important in that Leon was only 10 years old when the war broke out and that meant he had to survive for six years under German oppression. Contrast that with the German occupation of Hungary, where he would have been 15 years old in 1944 facing one year of German domination. In neither situation did a Jewish child or adolescent stand a good chance of survival, given that in Nazi-occupied countries only seven percent of Jewish children survived. In total, an estimated one-and-one-half million Jewish children were murdered. Even counting children rescued before war broke out, as well as some rescued during the war, fewer than one in 10 lived.

Leon’s story is, therefore, one of incredible luck, to which he frequently alludes. It is a theme common to children who survived. All required adult help. Besides my rescuers who hid me, we relied on the cooperative silence of dozens more who knew of me. It took only one betrayer, one Nazi sympathizer to endanger a Jewish child. (And the hiders.)

Leon’s earliest perspectives are those appropriate to childhood. He provides the contrast of a rather idyllic upbringing versus the annual Easter week ritual of being pelted with stones for being a “Christ-killer” and questions how he can be held to account for an event 2,000 years earlier.

He spoke Yiddish at home, Polish in public, Hebrew in religious school and learned German from his parents. German became the most useful to his survival.

In 1938, the family moved to Krakow, where Leon’s father worked. Compared with Narewka, this was a big city with about 60,000 Jews, one-quarter of the city’s population. The news in 1938 was ominous, war was imminent and broke out on Sept. 1, 1939, and, by Sept. 6, 1939, Krakow was occupied. Leon was about to turn 10.

One evening, two Gestapo burst into their home, beat his father bloody, and hauled him away. Leon and his brother searched for him and finally located him in St. Michael’s prison. Several weeks later, he was miraculously released but he was no longer the confident man he had been. He had already seen and experienced too much. A Nazi needed a safe opened. Leon’s father, handy with tools, did it efficiently. He was hired. The Nazi was Oskar Schindler.

The Leyson family survived a series of moves, from their home to the ghetto, various deportations, avoiding one by hiding in a crawl space with his mother and two other children for almost two days without food or water. It behooves us to pause a moment to contemplate such a situation. After all, when Jews fast on the Day of Atonement it lasts for 25 hours. Try to imagine such a fast without an opportunity to eat or drink for another day or two.

When the entire Krakow ghetto was liquidated, whoever remained was sent to Plaszow. There, Amon Goeth ruled, and killed. Leon visited the infirmary to get a bandage for a leg wound. Shortly after Leon left, Goeth entered the infirmary and shot every patient there. One day, the impulsive sadistic Goeth showed up at a work detail and ordered everyone to be lashed 25 times while being forced to count the strokes. Leon, a mere boy, survived this also. That evening, he risked his life to visit his father’s barracks. Not yet 15, he had finally “cracked,” and cried in front of his father. His father did not comfort him, leaving Leon to guess as to the reason.

Who can know? What good were tears? I remember a story. When I was placed with my hiders, a non-Jewish friend of my parents was sent to report on me. His observation: “Robbie looks healthy and he does not cry.” That is true. I did not cry for nearly three years. We children knew somehow that it served no purpose. Leon’s father could not do anything for him, tears or no tears.

The Nazi businessman, Schindler, managed to create a sub-camp factory and enlist a number of Jewish workers to work for him, thereby protecting them with work passes. His efforts led to reuniting Leon, his brother, David, and both parents. His sister, Pesza, was known to be alive but nothing was known of Tsalig or Hershel, his two older brothers.

On Oct. 15, 1944, father, David and Leon were packed into a cattle car bound for Schindler’s new factory. But they ended up in Gross-Rosen, another hellish camp, where they barely survived, then were mysteriously sent to Brunnlitz in Sudetenland where the new factory sat unfinished. Schindler went on a separate rescue mission to save the “Schindler women” whose train had been diverted to Auschwitz, Leon’s mother among them. She had been hours from certain death.

As the Russians approached, Schindler fled to avoid capture by the Soviets and on May 8, 1945, Schindler’s 1,200 Jews were freed. In Krakow, only a few thousand Jews remained of the 60,000 who had lived there. Hershel had been murdered upon his return to Narewka and Tsaleg was killed in Belzec.

After three years in a displaced persons camp, the Leysons emigrated to America and, at age 19, Leon began life in California. He learned English, completed trade-school courses and was drafted into the army. He had no complaints, thinking when ordered to do something tough, “I won’t be shot for that.” Speaking German, Polish and Russian, he expected to serve in Germany or Poland. Instead, he was sent to Okinawa. He returned to earn a master’s degree in education and taught high school for 39 years.

In those years, Leon did not speak of his experiences. Having told part of his story to one person about what it was like to starve in a ghetto, the response was, “We had rationing here, too.” This was precisely the response my mother encountered in Canada when asked one day what it had been like in Holland where, among other things, the Hunger Winter of 1945 took thousands of lives. When she mentioned living on tulip bulbs, she was quickly silenced with the tragedies of life in wartime Canada: sugar and butter had been rationed.

In 1965, Schindler visited Los Angeles and Leon met him, expecting not to be recognized at age 35, compared with the former 15-year-old who looked a sickly 10. But Schindler greeted him, “You’re little Leyson.” Even then, Schindler did not disappoint him.

And, years later, when the film Schindler’s List was made, Leon finally agreed to an interview about his experiences and began to speak to appreciative audiences of high school students and various religious groups and philanthropic organizations. Leon married Lis, raised a family of two children and three grandchildren.

Leon passed away in January 2013, shortly before the publication of his book. The foregoing is but a taste of the marvelous telling of this precious story. It is powerful and succinct and can be read easily in one sitting. And then one can think about it for a lifetime. I believe it to be appropriate, perhaps necessary reading, for teenagers who undoubtedly will be able to identify with a child/adolescent who lived through the experiences at their age now. In fact, I would recommend that young people read it at the time of reading The Diary of Anne Frank.

Robert Krell, MD, is professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, and founding president of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

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