Film focuses on heroes of war

PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN

Leon Kahn, a Vancouver man who passed away last year, is the subject of a new film produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Kahn's remarkable story is being told as part of a new film, Unlikely Heroes: Stories of Jewish Resistance, which premières in Vancouver next week.

The film is an often-harrowing remembrance by seven survivors of the Nazi war on the Jews. The stories vary, but Kahn's is among the most dramatic and gripping. When the Jews of Eishishkes, the Kahn family's hometown in Lithuania, were ordered to appear en masse at the synagogue the day before Rosh Hashanah in 1939, young Leon and his brother Benjamin fled instead to the overgrown old Catholic cemetery, where they became witnesses to a mass slaughter. In the interview, which took place in Vancouver not long before Kahn passed away, he recalled how Benjamin and he saw wagonloads of women and children arrive in the nearby field, where they were forced to undress and line up against a ditch, where the women were shot. "We couldn't believe what we were seeing."

Kahn told the interviewers that his brother wouldn't stand up amid the cemetery's tall brush to see the slaughter and kept pulling on Leon to look away from the horrible sight, but Leon refused. "I could see my aunt. I could see my aunt's daughter, my first cousin. My cousin was the most beautiful girl in town and they dragged her into the bush and they were raping her and finally they killed her too. And all that was left were the children." Then Leon watched as the children were picked up, one by one, shot, and thrown in the ditch with the women.

Elsewhere, the men of the village were meeting a similar fate. But while Leon and Benjamin were hiding in the cemetery, their parents, sister and grandmother had similarly escaped the massacre and the family was reunited. They fled to a town in Poland where they were taken in by relatives but, before long, the Jews of that town were rounded up, too. This time, the family hid for a time in an attic and emerged to find that the town's Jews who had survived had been moved into a ghetto.

"We were saying prayers that you only say on Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah and nothing happened," Kahn recalled. "I cannot understand where God was."
Faced with seeking refuge again, Leon Kahn's grandmother was too elderly to continue and Leon's mother refused to leave her mother. They would never meet again.

Taking to the woods, Kahn, his father, sister and brother met up with about 100 other people in hiding. Before long, Benjamin, too, was killed and the horrors took even more grisly turns.

A partisan force emerged among the Jews who remained at large and Leon joined up. The group was ill-prepared at first, but eventually succeeded in a number of sabotage efforts against power lines, telephone poles, dairies, trains and fuel tankers headed for the front.

But the German army was not the only enemy the partisans faced. Their first major battle was with another group of partisans – Polish resistance fighters who were as anti-Semitic as they were anti-Nazi. During the battle, Leon evaded the gunshots of the Poles as the Jews fled, but his father was not as lucky. As Leon's father lay dying, he asked where his daughter was.

"I turned my head and I could see that my sister was running at the end of the forest and right behind her two or three Poles chasing her," Kahn recalls in the film. "I could see the Pole running up to her with a bayonette on his rifle and it just went right through her."

Leon kept this information to himself and did his best to ease his father's last moments.

Leon Kahn continued his battle with the partisans and survived the war, the only member of his family to do so, and assisted the liberating forces after 1945 to help bring to justice the Nazis, the Lithuanians and others who had assisted in killing the Jews of Eishishkes.

Unlikely Heroes is produced by Richard Trank and Rabbi Marvin Hier. Hier, a former rabbi of Vancouver's Schara Tzedeck Synagogue, is the founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. The film is narrated by Sir Ben Kingsley.

The film's other subjects each tell stories related to resisting the Nazis in some way. They include Pinchas Rosenbaum, the son of a rabbi who disguised himself as a Nazi in the Hungarian Arrow Cross in order to rescue Jews. Willy Perl, an Austrian Jew, went over the head of Adolf Eichmann, presenting a plan to Eichmann's superiors in Berlin to transport Jews out of Germany to Palestine; 40,000 Jews were saved before Perl's plan was halted. Friedl Dicker Brandeis was an artist who inspired the children of Theresienstadt, who had lost their parents and were themselves headed for Auschwitz, to express their pain through art.

The film also tells the story of Robert Clary who, at 14 years of age, secretly entertained the Jews in the camps where he was interned. He viewed his performances as a respite from the hell of the camps and a unique form of performance as resistance. Recha Sternbuch was a rabbi's daughter who brought hundreds of refugees into her Swiss border town, sheltered and fed them. The film tells of one occasion when she snuck to the border and returned with three saved Jews, arriving too late to see her own son's bar mitzvah.

After the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Anna Heilman was deported to Auschwitz, where she was forced to work in a munitions factory and where she became part of a plot to steal gunpowder that eventually led to the destruction of Birkenau's infamous Crematorium No. 4 in October 1944. Heilman is the only survivor of plot to destroy Crematorium No. 4, most of the plotters having been hanged in front of the other inmates after the explosion.

Unlikely Heroes draws upon rare film footage that has come to light recently from archives in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and the former Soviet Union. It screens at Oakridge Centre, Sunday, May 30, 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $18 for members of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre or the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre; $25 for the general public. A book launch for a newly re-released edition of Leon Kahn's memoirs No Time to Mourn will take place at the film screening.

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