by Leon Leyson
Many years later I went back to Narewka. A gentile Pole I met there spoke of how one young Jew had tried to run, but, as he said, “one of ours”—in other words, a non-Jew—spotted him and reported him to the SS, who shot him immediately. As I think about my impetuous brother, I can imagine him being that young man who made a run for the forest, doing everything he possibly could to try to survive.
As the weeks passed, life did not improve. There were constant reports of recurring hostility toward Jews. Jobs were scarce and so was food. The future for us in Kraków looked bleak.
Early in 1946, David and Pesza devised a plan to go back to Czechoslovakia to see if they could settle there. I went with them across the border. After a few days, however, my mother sent word through a friend that she needed at least one of her children to be with her. As the youngest, still only sixteen, I was the obvious choice. I said good-bye to David, and Pesza took me back to Kraków. She then returned to Czechoslovakia and David. It hurt to say good-bye to my brother and sister. Amazingly, we had managed to stay together during the last years of the war. Now they were adults and eager to begin anew. My parents never would have tried to dissuade them.
A few months later my parents enlisted the help of a Zionist organization—one of the groups whose goal was to establish a Jewish national state. We hoped that they could smuggle us out of Poland. We did not consider going to British-controlled Palestine as the life there would be too arduous for my parents. After several weeks of anxiously waiting, our window of opportunity came. We paid a guard a small bribe and slipped across the border. We traveled by train through Czechoslovakia, arriving finally in Salzburg, Austria. There a United Nations relief organization assigned us to a displaced persons camp in Wetzlar, Germany, in the American occupation zone. On the one hand, it seemed strange to be in Germany, of all places; on the other, it felt good to be opening a new chapter in our lives.
Homeless, stateless, in yet another camp, we could have felt defeated, but Wetzlar was very different from the camps during the war. We had three meals a day, reliable medical care, and the protection of the US military. Pretty good. Most importantly, we could come and go as we pleased. I took every opportunity to go into town and strike up a conversation with anyone willing to talk with me. I befriended other teenagers in the camp, including a pretty Hungarian girl my age. I learned to speak fluent Hungarian just so I could talk with her. In fact, some Hungarians were so convinced that I was Hungarian that they spoke Polish when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying. Little did they know that Polish was my native language.
To my mother’s delight, I put on weight, began to fill out my skeletal frame, and grew several inches. My hair came back dark and thick. I had new clothes, made by tailors in the camp who ripped apart military uniforms at the seams and refashioned them into civilian clothes. Someone even gave me a hat, a brown fedora. It became my trademark. I wore it everywhere, emulating in my own way my father’s prewar flair for style.
Occasionally my new friends and I would argue about who had had it worse during the war. Some had been in labor camps, some in concentration camps, some even in the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Others had been in hiding in many different circumstances. We couldn’t resist the urge to swap stories and exchange information, even though such conversations sometimes led to jealousy and anger. In a strange way we seemed to be vying for the worst experience. We all had been through our private hells, and we were still processing what we had experienced. None of us knew what to do with the enormous burden of our memories. Sometimes the pain of our grief would break through the surface and threaten the fragile friendships we were nurturing.
I never felt like the camp was home, but I began to get used to the life there as we waited to see which country might allow us to immigrate. There were lots of people like us, looking for a place that would take them in.
The Germans had ended my schooling shortly after I turned ten. My parents were concerned about my lack of education and what that might mean for my future. My father began looking for someone to tutor me, to help me make up at least part of what I had lost. In the nearby town he found a former German engineer who was now unemployed and had five children to feed. Three times a week for two years, I went to Dr. Neu’s house to be tutored in mathematics and drafting. We began with basic arithmetic and worked our way up to the complexities of trigonometry.
Over time I came to look forward to my lessons with Dr. Neu. After my experiences with Oskar Schindler, I felt I could tell the difference between those Germans who had been true Nazis and those who had retained some humanity, even if they had joined the Nazi Party. I found that the true believers would look down at their shoes or wind their watches when someone mentioned the war. When someone spoke of what the Jews had gone through, their stock response was “We didn’t know.” Dr. Neu wasn’t like that. He asked me about my experiences and genuinely listened to what I told him. I was reminded of how Oskar Schindler had asked me questions and had waited for my answers. Dr. Neu didn’t try to whitewash what had happened. One time, when I was telling him a story, his wife overheard us. “We didn’t know,” she muttered. He gave her a piercing look and said, “Don’t say that.” After the awkward moment passed, he urged me to continue with my story.
Through Jewish organizations, my parents connected with our few relatives in the United States. My mother’s sister, Shaina, and brother Morris, who had left Narewka in the early 1900s, now lived in Los Angeles. (Uncle Karl had died shortly after arriving in the United States.) Based on the reports they heard, they had come to believe that all their family in Poland had been murdered. They were ecstatic to learn the three of us were in a displaced persons camp. Our American relatives wrote letters and sent packages to us, packages filled with food donated by other friends from Narewka now living in the United States. Since we didn’t have any money to pay Dr. Neu for my tutoring, we gave him items from our CARE packages; coffee and cigarettes, and food items from the DP camp my family would not eat, like canned ham.
In 1948, Pesza and David joined a Zionist group and left Czechoslovakia for the new state of Israel that had been founded that very year. When we received word of their plans, I wanted to go with them, but by this time my parents had decided we would go to the United States as soon as my aunt and uncle could make the arrangements. My parents reasoned that in America we could find jobs and help support my sister and brother, whose lives would not be easy in a country struggling to establish itself. Although I was now almost nineteen and longed to join my brother and sister, after all my parents had been through I couldn’t refuse their plea for me to stay with them.
At last, in May 1949, after nearly three years in the displaced persons camp, we received word that our immigration request had been approved. Almost beyond belief, we really were going to the United States of America! We took the train to Bremerhaven, Germany, and then traveled on a former troopship for nine days across the Atlantic Ocean to Boston, Massachusetts. I spent all the time I could on deck, watching the ocean stretching in all directions. Something about its majesty, its vastness, brought me a peace I had not known before.
We slept in hammocks below deck and battled sea-sickness, although I wasn’t as badly affected as some. We refugee passengers represented many nations and spoke many languages. I was awed by how many of the languages I didn’t know. What we didn’t speak was English, so we had identification tags on our jackets to make sure we ended up in the right place.
Uncle Morris’s son, Dave Golner, who lived in Connecticut, found us as we were being processed by immigration after our ship docked at Boston Harbor. During the immigration procedures, our last name changed to Leyson. I had already abandoned Leib for the much cooler, I thought, name Leon. Dave knew only a little Yiddish and no Polish, so he did more pointing than speaking as he directed us from the port to the train station. He gave us spending money for the five-day trip to Los Angeles, California.
It felt good to ride the
train this time, to sit in a passenger car, in a plush seat, not crammed in a cattle car. Probably some people would think our trip was an ordeal. We slept in our seats. There wasn’t a shower for us to use. But for me, every minute of the trip was wonderful. I spent hours sitting by the window, watching the world pass by as we went from the East Coast to Chicago, then across the Midwest and through the Southwest.
Our lack of English made for some confusing moments along the way. For example, whenever we went to the dining car, all we could do was point to what someone else was eating or to a few incomprehensible words on the menu. Often we ended up with some very strange combinations. I also had no idea how the prices on the menu corresponded to the money in my pocket, so I would hand the waiter a large bill and wait to receive change. I gradually accumulated a larger and larger stack of coins. Back in my seat in the pasenger car, I would study them and try to figure out what was worth what. Of course, I could read the numbers on the coins, but that was not the same as understanding the values.
One afternoon a woman a few seats away observed me looking at the change I had just acquired from paying for lunch. She left her seat and came over to sit next to me. She smiled and took a coin out of my hand. “This is a nickel,” she said. She picked out another coin. “This is a dime,” she continued, “and this one’s a penny.” We went over the denominations a few times—one cent, five cents, ten cents, twenty-five cents. After I learned how to say the names and values, the woman smiled again and returned to her seat. She probably forgot the incident in a few days, but I never have. I still remember her kindness nearly sixty-five years later. She gave me my first English lesson.
On the train I watched as the scenery went from lush greens to dramatic reds to dry desert browns. We crossed the Continental Divide and the Mojave Desert. I thought about this new country that would now be my home. The future lay before me in a way that only a brief time before I would have thought impossible. I wasn’t scared at all, even though I didn’t know the language nor have a clue what I would do. I was just excited. For the first time in many years, I could daydream about the future. I knew I would learn English. I would get a job. Someday I would marry and have a family. I might even live to be an old man. Anything could happen.
As the train pulled into Union Station in Los Angeles, my mother, father, and I gathered our belongings and readied to leave. I picked up my fedora and started to put it on, but then I reconsidered. I tossed the hat back on the luggage rack and turned to leave. That hat was part of my previous life, the life I intended to leave behind. With quarters, nickels, and dimes jostling in my pocket, I stepped off the train and into the California sunshine.
I was nineteen years old, and my real life was just beginning.
IN THE UNITED STATES, I rarely spoke about my experiences during the war. It was too hard to explain to people. There didn’t even seem to be a vocabulary to communicate what I had gone through. For Americans, a word like “camp” evoked happy summer memories that were nothing like what I had experienced in Płaszów and Gross-Rosen. I remember once shortly after we were settled in Los Angeles, I tried to describe to a neighbor what it was like to be starving in the ghetto. When I said we never had enough to eat, he responded, “We had rationing here, too.” He had no clue of the difference between what he had experienced in having only small quantities of butter and meat during the war and what I had experienced scrounging through garbage searching for a potato peel. There really wasn’t any way to talk about my experiences without seeming to belittle his, so I decided not to talk about Poland and the war. Like the hat I had left behind on the train, I tried to leave those years behind me as I began a new life. Of course, unlike leaving a hat, one cannot walk away from memories, and those memories stayed with me every day.
My parents and I focused on getting settled and finding work. We stayed with my aunt Shaina, now known as Jenny, for a few weeks before moving into a one-bedroom apartment in the building where my uncle Morris, my mother’s brother, lived. My parents took the bedroom, and I set up a cot for myself in the kitchen—a definite upgrade from the crowded bunks of the concentration camps. I felt very grateful.
The three of us enrolled in English for Foreign Born classes three nights a week at Manual Arts High School. Soon my father took a job as a janitor at an elementary school. It was not the same as being the respected craftsman he had been before the war, but he did the best he could and continued to feel optimistic. At fifty-plus years, with limited English skills, he had few options. I worked on an assembly line at a factory that made shopping carts. In the beginning it was good to have repetitive tasks that didn’t require speaking much English, but I knew I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this kind of work.
My mother had an especially difficult time learning English. Eventually she acquired enough vocabulary to be able to shop and to talk with the neighbors. She and my father joined the Narewka Benevolent Club, which had been founded by Jews who had immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. Periodically the club would get together to sing, dance, reminisce, and raise money to help various charities. How fortunate my parents felt to be on the giving end.
My mother devoted herself to caring for my father and making a home for us. Separated from the world in which she had grown up, she seemed to me to be lonely and adrift. Of course, she could never stop thinking about the sons she had lost, especially Tsalig, because she had stood by helpless as he had been taken away.
I learn languages easily, so it didn’t take me long to feel comfortable conversing in English. With the help of Uncle Morris, I was hired as a machinist at US Electrical Motors and enrolled in classes at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College. I was learning from books what my father had learned by doing, but we worked together to master challenges of converting metric measurements to the equivalents in inches, feet, and yards. For a year and a half, I went to classes in the morning and worked in the afternoons and evenings until midnight. After getting off my shift, I would sleep in the back of the bus on my ride home. The bus driver was a kind man who would wake me just before my stop. Early the next morning I would start the routine all over again. It was hard, but I didn’t think about it that way. Hard had been the grueling work in Płaszów. My schedule was tiring, but the work was worthwhile and interesting. Though I was draft age as the Korean War began, I was exempt from service as long as I was enrolled as a student.
In 1951, I finished my trade school courses, and like clockwork, even though I wasn’t a US citizen, my US Army draft notice arrived in the mail. I went first to Fort Ord in Monterey, California, for basic training and then to Aberdeen, Maryland. For many young men accustomed to a civilian life with freedom and personal privacy, military life was tough and there was a lot of grumbling. I listened to their gripes and just smiled. I had a cot to myself, decent clothes, more than enough food, and I was being paid! What was there to complain about? When the drill sergeants yelled at us for not doing a better job spit-polishing our shoes, I said to myself, “Well, I won’t be shot for that.” I made friends with guys from places I had never heard of: Kentucky, Louisiana, North and South Dakota, and other states. When they asked me where I was from, I just told them LA. By now my English was good enough to get away with such a cocky response.
Near the end of my training, I was transferred to a base outside Atlanta, Georgia. One weekend we received passes to go into the city. After boarding the shuttle to town, I went to my favorite spot in the back to catch some shut-eye. I was startled when the driver stopped the bus and walked back to me. “You can’t sit there,” he said. “The back seats are for Negroes. You have to move to the front of the bus.” His words hit me like a hard slap. Suddenly I flashed back to Kraków, when the Nazis ordered us Jews to the back of the bus (before they forbade us from traveling on public transportation altogether). The context was very different, but nonetheless it almost made my head explode. Why would something like this exist in America? I had mistakenly believed that such discrimi
nation was unique to Jews suffering under Nazi oppression. Now I discovered that there was inequality and prejudice in this country that I had already come to love.
Before my overseas assignment was made, I was tested in several European languages. The United States still had many military facilities in Europe; when I earned ratings of fluent in German, Polish, and Russian, I expected to be stationed in Germany or Poland. Instead, I was given an assignment in the opposite direction . . . Okinawa, Japan. I spent sixteen months on Okinawa, where I served with a unit of army engineers. I supervised twenty-one Okinawans in a machine shop and rose in rank from private first class to corporal. To me that was a big deal. I treasured those two stripes on the sleeve of my US Army uniform.
When I was discharged and returned to Los Angeles, I made up my mind to continue my education. The GI Bill made that possible. I met with a counselor at Los Angeles City College, who asked me for my high school diploma. I explained that I didn’t have one, that my formal education had ended just after I turned ten. He looked baffled, so I volunteered enough details to explain my past. The counselor reviewed my army experience and something clicked. He suggested that I consider becoming an industrial arts teacher. “If you maintain a C average, you can stay in school and get your degree,” he asserted. I couldn’t believe it. “That’s all I have to do?” I asked. He assured me it was.
I ended up with much better than a C average. I graduated from LACC and transferred to Cal State Los Angeles, where I completed my bachelor’s degree and earned a teaching credential. In time I earned a master’s degree in education from Pepperdine University.