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Oct. 13, 2006
A child of Schindler
Youngest on the list to talk in Vancouver.
PAT JOHNSON
For 1,200 Jews, the German industrialist Oskar Schindler was a
savior. The story is widely known now, immortalized by Steven Spielberg's
epic Schindler's List: a member of the Nazi party, a war
profiteer, confronted with the reality of the Final Solution, risks
his own life and livelihood to save the lives of those Jews co-opted
to work in his enamelware plant.
Of the hundreds of Jews whose lives were saved by the heroic Schindler,
the youngest was Leon Leyson, who came to the factory at the age
of 13 and survived the war, he says, for that reason alone. Leyson,
now a retired Orange County, Calif., high school teacher, will be
in Vancouver next week to speak at the opening of a new exhibit
exploring the story of the Schindlerjuden, Schindler's Jews.
Leyson became one of the lucky survivors along with most of his
immediate family. His father, mother, a sister and brother were
all in the factory together. Life in the factory was not easy –
the shifts were 12 hours long – but Leyson remembers Schindler
as a kind man, who stopped to talk on the factory floor.
"I was not exactly his equal, so we were not on a first-name
basis," Leyson told the Independent in a telephone interview
from his California home. "But he knew me well. He knew my
father, he knew my brother, who worked behind me on the same shift.
"He had a habit of coming down to the factory floor and [he
would] go through slowly, look at people and stop and talk to them,"
said Leyson. "He would stop and talk to me, ask me things.
They were not anything important. We did not have a lot in common.
Just chatting a little, mak[ing] human contact. He was a remarkable
person."
Leyson remains astounded by the risks his life-saver took, but also
touched by the small acts of kindness Schindler exhibited.
"The norm was the opposite of what he was doing – speaking
in a normal manner to a Jewish boy, asking him how he was doing,
how he's feeling tonight, then ordering a double ration of food
the following day for him, as he did for me. It was a most incredible
deed. It was plenty dangerous for him to do this."
Why Schindler, whose background did not suggest extraordinary humanitarianism,
would take life-risking chances on behalf of Jews when millions
of others did not is a question Leyson has often pondered.
"I've thought about it and I've heard people [who] have all
kinds of opinions about it," he said. "My personal opinion
is that he was a genuinely decent human being, who naturally came
to Poland because that was a good opportunity for him to make money.
But when he saw, as things developed, how his employees were going
to end up, namely dead, he just couldn't accept that ... he decided
to simply do something about not letting these people die –
an incredible deed in the face of the atmosphere of the time."
Leyson, both his parents and the sister and brother who were on
Schindler's list survived. Two other brothers were murdered by the
Nazis in separate incidents. Like many survivors, Leyson kept his
story to himself for decades. The aftermath of the war was not a
time for calm reflection.
"In 1945, we were liberated in the Russian zone," he said.
"After being traumatized by the Nazis for five years, we really
didn't have anything, we didn't know where to go. Since we came
from Kraków, we decided we would go back to Kraków.
We went back to Poland and were there for a year.
"That was a bad idea," Leyson began tentatively, "and
we left ... I don't want to go into details about just how bad it
was."
The family spent the ensuing three years in a United Nations displaced
persons camp in Germany, during which time a relief agency located
Leyson's aunt and uncle, who had migrated to the United States decades
earlier.
"They assumed," Leyson said, referring to his mother's
American siblings, "that everybody was dead – which, with
the exception of the five of us who were on Schindler's list, it
was true. None of my relatives, my extended family, nobody except
those of us who were on Schindler's list survived."
Those relations completed the paperwork and brought Leon and his
parents to Los Angeles in 1949. The other surviving brother and
sister made aliyah and now head large families in Israel.
But Leyson kept silent about his Holocaust experiences in the Kraków
ghetto, the Plaszów concentration camp and, finally, during
the last two years of the war, in Schindler's factory.
"In the first place," he says now, "I really didn't
think that people would be interested in hearing my story, or anybody
else's story about the Holocaust. I wasn't particularly interested
in telling people or trying to explain my past experience. My aim
when I came to this country [the United States] was to assimilate,
become an American citizen, speak English and start my new life.
My real life started when I came to this country."
He was drafted by the American army during the Korean War and, after
a long struggle to learn English and make a life for himself, Leyson
became a high school teacher and settled into life as a husband,
a father of two and, eventually, a grandfather. But when Spielberg's
film came out in 1993, Leyson's silence began to crack. Local newspapers,
seeking an angle on the film's remarkable tale, sought him out and
interviewed him about his experiences. Invitations came in for him
to share his story with university and high school students. He
began to open up and tell his history. Even so, and as he prepares
to address an audience in Vancouver next week, speaking of that
terrible time has not gotten any easier.
"It's not even easy now, on the phone," he told the
Independent. "It's very difficult. It's so far out. To
try to explain what it was really like is a difficult thing to do.
There's no comparison. You can't relate to any of those things."
As for the movie, Leyson has praise for Spielberg's interpretation.
"He did very well," Leyson said. "The scenes they
depicted in the movie were genuine and accurate. It was very close.
I was really amazed. I was kind of skeptical before I went to see
it. It was done on location in Kraków and I looked at the
structures, the buildings were exactly the same. It was absolutely
heart-stopping."
Leyson is to speak at the opening of Vancouver's Schindler Jews,
a new exhibit at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. Leyson
will speak Oct. 18, at 7:30 p.m., in the Norman Rothstein Theatre
at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver. For more information,
visit the VHEC website at www.vhec.org.
The exhibit continues until next May. A parallel travelling exhibit,
originating from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in
Washington, D.C., runs until Dec. 15.
Pat Johnson is editor of MVOX Multicultural Digest, www.mvox.ca.
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