Teacher tells story of being saved during Holocaust
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By Mary Louise Speer | Monday, May 19, 2008 |
Leon Leyson, who was saved during World War ll by industrialist Oskar Shindler, tells his story at the i wireless Center in Moline Monday. (Jeff Cook/QUAD-CITY TIMES) Buy this Photo
Leon Leyson, a Holocaust survivor, took listeners on a gripping journey into the Nazi-dominated world portrayed by the movie “Schindler’s List” during a program Monday at the i wireless Center, Moline.
The “Saved by an Angel” program was presented by the Chabad Jewish Outreach Center. Leyson is a retired industrial arts teacher who shares his story of survival with school groups, universities and community organizations.
“This promises to be a very interesting, a very heart-rending and I’m sure in many cases a heart-wrenching evening,” emcee Charles Rubovits said at the beginning of the evening.
Leyson was born in 1929 in a small town of Narewka, Poland.
“Something like you would imagine from ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ without the movie stuff,” he said.
The family moved to the city of Krakow a year before the war began in 1939. After the Nazi invaders took control, they began placing restrictions on Jews .
The Nazis designated an area of Krakow as a Jewish ghetto and required the non-Jewish residents to move out. Jews, including Leyson and his family, were forced to live in the walled-off ghetto.
Leyson’s family was luckier than most, he said. His father, Moshe, was given a special permit that allowed him to leave the ghetto and work at Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory. Moshe smuggled bits of food in his pockets to feed his family. Leyson’s oldest brother, Hershel, fled the ghetto and was killed in a massacre at Narewka along with other members of their extended family in 1941.
“My memory of the ghetto — and I was there two years — is I was hungry all the time,” Leyson said. “And I was never not frightened and hungry.”
Most of the scenes in the 1993 movie are fairly authentic, he said.
“The movie focused more on individual people, and that’s probably what made it more successful than other movies,” he said. “I want to tell you the Nazis were not murdering numbers. They murdered individuals, someone’s father, someone’s brother.”
Leyson and his mother, Chana, were imprisoned in a concentration camp for a year after the ghetto was liquidated. Eventually, Schindler was able to add their names to his list of workers. But Leyson almost ended up staying behind in the death camp.
“Afew days before we were to be escorted out, I discovered my name was crossed off the list,” he said.
With courage — or out of desperation — he told a German guard that his name was on the list. The guard “grunted something and I jumped into the group and tried to make myself even smaller,” he said.
At Schindler’s factory, he worked 12 hour days, standing on a box so he could manage the machines. Schindler would stop sometimes and ask Leyson how things were going.
“I think he was a little amused that I was standing on a box,” Leyson said.
The businessman also made arrangements for Leyson to receive double food rations.
“Saving Jews was a dangerous thing — and he did that. He ended up spending most of his fortune to do what he did,” Leyson said. “Schindler was a hero, not a squeaky clean hero, but he had a good heart.”
After the war, Leyson and his parents spent three years in a displaced persons camp.
“My parents and I came to this country in 1949,” he said. “My real life began when I came to this country.”
The city desk can be contacted at (563) 383-2450 or newsroom@qctimes.com.
Comment on this story at qctimes.com.
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