Survivor Gives First-Hand Account of Life on Schindler’s List

Ioana Patringenaru | April 14, 2008

By the time World War II ended, Leon Leyson had lost two brothers, survived the Krakow Ghetto in Poland and narrowly escaped death countless times. He was just 15.

Leon Leyson

Leyson is the youngest survivor on the now-famous Schindler’s List, drafted by industrialist Oskar Schindler, who went on to save about 1200 Jews from death in Nazi concentration camps. Now a resident of Orange County and the father of a UCSD alumna, Leyson gave a talk Friday on campus, sponsored by UCSD’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

Most Americans are probably familiar with Stephen Spielberg’s retelling of Schindler’s war-time heroism in his 1993 movie, “Schindler’s List.” Leyson credits the film for giving a different view of the Holocaust and putting an emphasis on individual victims. 

“The Nazis weren’t killing numbers,” he said. “They were killing individual people—somebody’s brother, somebody’s sister.”

Friday, a standing-room only audience at Hojel Hall got a first-hand account of these tumultuous times, when the line separating life and death was tenuously thin. Leyson said Schindler saved his life, and the life of several of his family members, repeatedly.

“If you take him in the context of the time, you have to declare him a true hero,” Leyson said of Schindler. “Because the norm was to murder Jews, not to save them.”

Lives saved

First, after the Nazis invaded Poland, Schindler hired Leyson’s father as a craftsman in his factory. When all Jewish people in Krakow were rounded up and forced to live in a ghetto, the job allowed Leyson’s father to leave the ghetto and bring scraps of food home for his family.

“My memory of the ghetto is that I was hungry all the time and I was always afraid,” Leyson told the audience.

UCSD-TV will broadcast Leon Leyson’s talk, starting in May.
Click here for showtimes.

By the end of the war, all of Leyson’s surviving family members were on Schindler’s list. Schindler had decided to dismantle his factory and move it to Czechoslovakia. That meant he would have to lose some workers. Half of those who lost their jobs didn’t survive, Leyson said. Someone drafted a list of those who would remain employed. Leyson’s mother was on it. But Leyson, his father and his brother were not. As they were rounded up to be sent away, Leyson was able to attract Schindler’s attention as he came to see his workers off.

The businessman immediately took Leyson’s father and the two brothers under his wing and made sure they would get to stay. Then, he found Leyson’s mother and told her she would soon be reunited with the rest of the family. “That’s the kind of man he was,” Leyson said of Schindler.

“At this point, he saved our lives,” he added.

When a transport of women working for Schindler, including Leyson’s mother and sister, was mistakenly routed to Auschwitz, the businessman bribed Nazi officers to make sure the women would safely return to his factory. Leyson said his mother had been headed for the gas chamber at the camp when she found out she was saved. Schindler saved a similar transport of men, including Leyson and his father, when it was routed to another death camp.

Lives lost

Leyson spoke at UC San Diego on April 11.

Schindler also tried to save the life of Leyson’s second-oldest brother, who had been rounded up on a transport headed to a concentration camp. Schindler had gone to find his accountant on that transport and was able to save him. He also offered to get Leyson’s brother off, but the boy refused. He was with his girlfriend, whom Schindler couldn’t help. The two lost their life sometime after that train reached its destination, Leyson said.

He had already lost his oldest brother, who had fled Krakow for the Leysons’ hometown. The youth died when German soldiers rounded up all the town’s Jewish men and murdered them, Leyson said. Jewish women and children were later killed too. Almost everyone he was related to died then, he also said.

Life in Schindler’s factory was no summer camp, Leyson added. He worked 12-hour shifts. He wasn’t tall enough to reach all the controls of the machine he was assigned to. So, he stood on a box. But Schindler would often come to the factory floor in the wee hours of the morning and talk to his workers, including Leyson. He would order two food rations for the little boy and leave half a pack of cigarettes for his father. 

Coming to America

After the war, Leyson and his family returned to Soviet-occupied Poland. They found few prospects for the future there. They eventually fled their homeland and spent three years in a displaced persons camp, from 1946 to 1949. They were finally able to reunite with some of Leyson’s aunts and uncles, who lived in the United States. Leyson went on to serve in the U.S. military during the Korean War. He then taught in the Los Angeles Unified School District for 39 years.

After the lecture, UCSD sophomore Julia Ha said Leyson’s talk really impressed her. Her family came to the United States after the Vietnam War and she always had been fascinated by diasporas and conflicts, she said. “It just gave you a real human perspective,” she added.