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A life of tragedy and survival

Spending the final years of World War II working 12-hour days on a lathe as a slave laborer in a munitions factory turned out to be a blessing for Leon Leyson. That factory was owned by Nazi industrialist Oskar Schindler, and that job saved his life.

Though the war is an all-too-familiar subject for many of the members of the Newport Harbor Exchange Club, about 50 men listened attentively as Leyson — the youngest survivor of Schindler’s list — shared his story at their weekly luncheon Thursday.

Leyson, 77, began his account in a small Polish town, Narewka, where he was born in 1929, the last of five children. By the time he was 12 years old and living in Krakow with his parents and siblings, every Jew in that tiny village was dead, including his eldest brother.

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“There were special [Nazi] troops whose only assignment was to find small towns where Jews lived and murder them,” said Leyson, who was brought to the United States in 1949 by his aunt and uncle after spending time in a displaced persons camp. “In just 20 years, a nation of science, culture, music and philosophy had turned into a nation of killers.”

The retired high school teacher remembered as the restrictions placed on the Jews during the Holocaust progressively took effect. At first, Jews were allowed to go to the park, but not sit on the benches, and then they weren’t allowed to go at all. Suddenly, Jews had to sit in the back of the bus and soon they couldn’t ride at all, he said.

“The Holocaust was not something that happened. It was something that people did,” he said. “They were systematically going to eliminate a whole group of people, not because of anything they did, but simply because of who they were.”

“The Nazis were the master race, and we were untermensch — not human — and they treated us that way.”

By the early 1940s, all the Jews in Krakow were placed in an overcrowded ghetto with high walls and few food sources.

Known for his craftsman skills, Leyson’s father was selected by Schindler as one of the first Jewish employees for his newly acquired kitchenware factory, which meant he could leave the ghetto and sneak food and coal back in for his family.

A good day living there was when the neighbor upstairs — whose family was more well-off — would ask Leyson to run her errands in exchange for a large hunk of bread and butter.

“It’s very difficult for me to explain what it means to be hungry,” Leyson said. “I get hungry today between breakfast and lunch, but it’s not that kind of hungry.”

One of Leyson’s brothers soon joined their father at the factory, and after many months, a 13-year-old Leyson and his mother did the same. By this time, his sister had been sent to live in another camp, and his other brother perished in the gas chambers, refusing to leave his girlfriend when Schindler approached him at a railway station, offering safety.

During the two years he worked in Schindler’s factory, Leyson remembers the man coming down to the factory floor just to visit with workers, and after familiarizing himself with “Little Leyson,” who had to stand on a box to reach the machine controls, he ordered that the boy receive extra food rations.

Leyson made every attempt to express the generosity and kindness of Schindler, who saved more than 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust by bribing Gestapo and employing them in his factories, but he struggled with the words.

Drawing on the protagonist of the Steven Spielberg film “Schindler’s List” as a reference, Leyson said the real person “was even a much better man in real life.”

Though Schindler came to Poland in search of money, he took many chances and risked his fortune to save the Jews, he said.

“And it wasn’t just the 1,200 of us he saved,” Leyson said, paraphrasing a passage from the Talmud. “He who saves one life saves the world entire.”

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