Schindler survivor to share memories

Schindler survivor to share memories

05:13 PM PDT on Wednesday, April 18, 2007

By LAURIE LUCAS
The Press-Enterprise

Nearly three decades after World War II ended, Oskar Schindler remembered the youngest Jew he'd saved.

"I know who you are," the German industrialist said at a 1972 reunion of Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles. "You are 'Little Leyson.' "

At 77, Leon Leyson owes his life to the man who hired him and 1,100 other Polish Jews to work in Schindler's Krakow factory and spared them from Nazi death camps.

Leyson, a retired high school teacher who lives in Fullerton, will share memories of pain and salvation at 7:30 p.m. today at Chabad Jewish Community Center in Riverside.

After the 1993 debut of Steven Spielberg's award-winning movie, "Schindler's List," Leyson decided to break almost 50 years of silence about his survival.

The story still brings tears to Leyson's eyes. Schindler plucked a skinny kid named Leib Lejzon (Americanized to Leon Leyson) from the Krakow Jewish ghetto to work at his enamel factory. Leyson used to stand on an overturned box to reach the machine's handles.

"He had flaws, like we all had," Leyson says in a phone interview. "But he was a most unusual, extraordinary man, who put his life in jeopardy to live against Nazi rules."

Leyson says Schindler was fond of him and once brought him a hunk of bread, which the boy hid and shared with his family. But the businessman's most critical act was putting Little Leyson on the final list that granted him life.

After three years in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, Leyson, whose family had lost everything, fled to America.