The Boy on the Wooden Box (15 page)

My brother and sister also married and had families of their own in Israel. David has three boys and a girl and still lives in Kibbutz Gan Shmuel, famous for its orchards and its exports of fruit concentrates and tropical fish. Pesza changed her name to Aviva after she immigrated to Israel. She has three children and six grandchildren and a baby great-granddaughter. She lives in Kiryat Haim, a beautiful town on the Mediterranean, north of Haifa.

It was much harder for my parents than for me to find their way in a new country. They had survived the unimaginable,
as had three of their children, but the war ripped a hole in their hearts that would never heal. There was not a day they didn’t think of Hershel and Tsalig and all the family they had lost. Physically, the years of suffering had taken a toll. One time when we were in Płaszów a guard struck my mother on the side of her head with a wood plank. The blow permanently shattered her eardrum. She said that for the rest of her life she could hear her two murdered sons calling to her in that ear.

My father continued to take English classes, so determined was he to master the language. He moved from a custodial job to one in a factory as a machinist. Soon his skill as an expert craftsman became apparent, and that helped him to regain some of the pride and self-respect he had enjoyed in the years before the war. He rarely spoke about what we had gone through during World War II. He continued to be the center of my mother’s world. When he died in 1971, it was fortunate that she had two grandchildren living close to her to help her through her grief. She died five years after my father.

Schindler struggled after the war. His brand of wartime wheeling and dealing was not appropriate for a businessman in peacetime. He had a series of unsuccessful business ventures and went bankrupt more than once. Near the end of his life he lived on contributions he received from Jewish organizations. To many of his fellow Germans, Schindler had been a traitor to his country, a “Jew lover.” In 1974, Schindler died in humble circumstances in Hildesheim in what was then West Germany.

Up until his death Schindler kept in touch with some of his former workers. Our gratitude meant a great deal to him. He thought of us, the
Schindlerjuden
, the Schindler Jews, as the children he never had. He asked to be buried in Jerusalem. “My children are here,” he once said. He is interred on Mount Zion, the only member of the Nazi Party buried there. If you visit his grave, you will see it covered with small stones and pebbles, tokens of remembrance left by those who knew him and those who didn’t, but who remember the lives he saved and the courage he showed.

Now and again, I met other
Schindlerjuden
in the United States. I reconnected with Mike Tanner, who had worked on a machine near mine in Schindler’s factory in Kraków. Leopold Page, who was quite a bit older than I, was devoted to Schindler and made it his life’s goal to educate the world about who Schindler was and what he had done. I met Mr. Page when he came to talk with my parents about his project to help Schindler. He and his wife, Mila, were at the airport the day Schindler came to Los Angeles in 1965.

It was serendipitous when writer Thomas Keneally walked into the luggage store that the Pages owned in Beverly Hills and became fascinated by the story Mr. Page told him. Page celebrated the publication of Keneally’s book
Schindler’s Ark
(
Schindler’s List
in the United States) in 1982 and contributed valuable insight to the 1993 Steven Spielberg film,
Schindler’s List
. Leopold Page died in 2001.

Page’s wife, Mila, who was also on the “list,” is still living and is a dear friend. She is the last surviving founding member of The “1939” Club, an organization of Holocaust survivors, mostly from Poland, and their descendants.

My own life changed with the release of Spielberg’s movie
Schindler’s List
. Until the film I had remained mostly silent about my past. When there was such enormous interest in the movie, I began rethinking my reluctance to talk about my experiences. Shortly after the movie’s release, Dennis McLellan, a reporter for the
Los Angeles Times
, found me through Spielberg’s company. He telephoned our house and left a message with his phone number, requesting an interview. I ignored the call for a couple of days until Lis encouraged me to give him the courtesy of a yes or a no. By that time I had made up my mind. I would give him a definite no. I just wasn’t ready to do an interview about my Holocaust experiences. Mr. McLellan was a persistent reporter. Too clever and too persistent for me, because by the end of our phone conversation, I had agreed he could come to our house just for a “chat.”

One evening he came over after work. As we talked, I quickly was charmed by his sincere interest and concern. When he politely asked if he could use his tape recorder, I saw no reason to object. By then he had my complete confidence.
After we talked for several hours, he asked if he could take my picture. I agreed, expecting him to pull out a camera. Instead, he opened our front door and called out, “Okay, you can come in.” A photographer, who had arrived with Mr. McLellan hours earlier, stepped inside and snapped several photos of me. The following Sunday, January 23, 1994, my story and my photo ran on the front page of the Orange County edition of the
Los Angeles Times
.

After the article appeared, my students and fellow teachers mobbed me at school. One young man who had not done particularly well in my class came running up to me on campus. He grabbed my hand, shook it, and said, “Mr. Leyson, I’m so glad you made it.” I’ve never forgotten the total genuineness of his response. Friends, students, and teachers asked me why I had never told them about what I had experienced during the war. I didn’t have a good answer. Maybe I hadn’t really been ready to speak about my experiences until so many years later, or maybe people hadn’t really been ready to listen, or maybe both.
The outpouring of interest from the community touched me deeply. I began to accept invitations to share my story at churches, synagogues, schools, and political, military, civic, and philanthropic organizations, locally and across the United States and Canada.

In 1995, I met Dr. Marilyn Harran, a professor and the founding director of the Rodgers Center for Holocaust Education at Chapman University in Orange, California. With her encouragement, I began to speak at Chapman and other venues. Chapman has become a second home to me. I will always cherish the memory of the graduation ceremony in 2011, when the university presented me with an honorary doctorate of humane letters. With my wife, my children, my grandchildren, and many friends there, it was one of the proudest days of my life. A little boy who had been told he wasn’t good enough to go to school was now “Dr. Leyson.” I could only imagine the pride my parents would have felt.

They never would have believed that a wonderful television newsman in Los Angeles named Fritz Coleman, who interviewed me at a Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony,
would decide to talk with me some more, and then create a half-hour news special. My story,
A Child on Schindler’s List
, was broadcast on KNBC in December 2008. I was thrilled when Fritz and his colleague, Kimber Liponi, won a local Emmy for their work.

I speak often now. My talks are unrehearsed. I never use notes, so each talk is different. I say what I am moved to say. When I speak, I follow the same story you’ve been reading. It’s never easy to recount what I lived through, no matter how many years or how much distance I put between myself and the boy I once was. Each time I speak, I feel again the pain of watching my parents suffer, the cold and hunger of all those nights in Płaszów, and the loss of my two brothers. That moment when Tsalig was torn away from us haunts me every day.

As I’ve grown older and become a parent myself, my admiration for my own parents and all they did to attempt to protect us has grown even greater as has my admiration for Oskar Schindler. Over the years, from books and documentaries, and especially from my
fellow Schindler’s “list” survivors, I have learned much more about what Schindler did and how much he hazarded to protect our lives. His accountant, Itzhak Stern, thought that Schindler committed to saving Jews after he witnessed the mass killings during the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. He was already sympathetic to the plight of his Jewish workers; but from that time on, he increased his efforts to save as many Jews as he could. With money from black market dealings, he bought a piece of land adjacent to his Emalia factory, built the barracks, and persuaded Commandant Goeth with smooth talk and substantial amounts of money that having his workers nearby would increase productivity. His real goal was to rescue his workers from Płaszów and the sadistic Goeth.

Schindler courageously took risks despite the possible dire consequences. He constantly attracted suspicion for his corruption and for his unorthodox treatment of Jews. During the years of unprecedented inhumanity, Schindler saw value in the very people the Nazis labeled
as less than human and sought to eradicate. For the most part, he wooed those in authority and those who were surely his enemies by showering them with generous bribes and gifts that were simply too tempting for most high-ranking Nazis, camp commandants, SS officers, and local police to refuse. And he certainly knew how to throw a party.

In 1943, Oskar Schindler was arrested and briefly jailed for his black market activities. That same year the Nazis threatened to close his factory if he didn’t switch from producing enamelware to making armaments. Schindler was forced to agree, but ironically, that change was what saved our lives near the end of the war when Schindler argued that his “expert” workers had to be moved to Brünnlitz. An argument that he had “essential” enamelware workers wouldn’t have meant anything to the decision makers, but the argument that we were essential to Germany’s munitions production did.

When other German factory owners took their profits and fled Kraków, intent on saving their lives and fortunes,
Schindler increased his efforts to save his Jews. Had he not done so, most of us would have died in Auschwitz or other camps. Even though we were close to starving at the end of the time in Brünnlitz, we managed to survive because Schindler chose to spend his fortune on buying us food.

He did everything in his power to protect us. Thanks to him, it turns out that I didn’t die from the last bullet of the war after all.

As a Jewish kid during those times, I fought to live every day. I didn’t have a choice. As an influential Nazi, Schindler did have a choice. Countless times he could have abandoned us, taken his fortune, and fled. He could have decided that his life depended on working us to death, but he didn’t. Instead, he put his own life in danger every time he protected us for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. I am not a philosopher, but I believe that Oskar Schindler defines heroism. He proves that one person can stand up to evil and make a difference.

I am living proof of that.

I recall a television interview I once saw with scholar
and writer Joseph Campbell. I’ve never forgotten his definition of a hero. Campbell said that a hero is an ordinary human being who does “the best of things in the worst of times.” Oskar Schindler personifies that definition.

For years after the war I searched for my brother Tsalig in crowds. I would see a young man who resembled him, and for a split second I would feel a surge of hope.
He has come back,
I thought.
He escaped
. If anyone could do it, my superhero brother could. Each time hope turned into bitter disappointment. Tsalig had not escaped. He did not magically reappear, not in the ghetto, not anywhere. Years later I learned that no one had survived from the transport that took Tsalig and Miriam to Belżec.

My wife, Lis, and I still live in Fullerton, California, where we settled on our sixth anniversary in 1971. Our daughter, Constance (Stacy) Miriam, and her husband, David, live in Virginia and have three sons, Nicholas, Tyler, and Brian. Tyler has the middle name Jacob to honor the memory of my grandfathers. Our son, Daniel, and his wife, Camille, live in Los Angeles and have one daughter, Mia,
and twin sons, Benjamin and Silas. Daniel has the middle name Tsalig. So does his son Benjamin. Both Tsalig’s name and something of his spirit live on in them. I am certain of it.

Leon Leyson

September 15, 2012

Afterword

Leon Leyson died on January 12, 2013. For more than three years, Leon suffered from T-cell lymphoma. He was stalwart throughout the ordeal. He never lost his kind ways nor his sense of humor. He knew Peter Steinberg had agreed to handle his manuscript, but he did not live to know that Atheneum would publish his book. The driving force that kept Leon telling his story year after year, even though he relived heartbreaking grief each time he spoke, was to honor the memory of his family and of the millions of other victims of the Holocaust. I know he is at peace with the knowledge that in this book, the story of his loved ones, of his hero Oskar Schindler, and of the times of unspeakable evil and stunning courage will live on for generations.

Is seems to me that for those of you who never knew Leon personally, the best way to help you understand the man whose story you just read is to share with you the tributes given by his daughter, Stacy Miriam, and his son, Daniel Tsalig, at the memorial service arranged by Dr. Marilyn Harran at Chapman University on February 17, 2013.

Their words that follow are slightly condensed from the original.

—Elisabeth B. Leyson

From Stacy:

Many people—friends and strangers—have been kind enough to share their wonderful memories of my dad with me—memories of Leon the friend, the uncle, the cousin, the neighbor, the colleague, the teacher. As I heard these and sifted through my own memories, I recognized a common theme, and I realized that if I had to choose one adjective to describe my dad, it would be “generous.”

Obviously, he was generous with his story, sharing it with groups around the country. Did he worry how big the group was? No. Did he worry about the group’s religious beliefs? No. Did he make any group feel less important to him than another? No. Did he ever ask for or accept money? No!