Leon Leyson of Fullerton Will Never Forget the Nazis or Their Brutality. But His Strongest Memory Is of the Humanity of Oskar Schindler, Who Put Him on a . . . : Survivors’ List

The memories, Leon Leyson says, have not diminished with time.

Memories--of German troops invading Poland in 1939 and his family being herded into the Jewish ghetto in Krakow when he was 9. . . . Of hiding in a cramped attic crawl space to avoid being killed or sent to a death camp by SS commandos who periodically swept through the Jewish quarter. . . . Of living in a concentration camp run by a sadistic SS commandant who would shoot Jews for sport. . . . Of wondering whether he’d have enough bread to eat for the day or whether he’d even live until tomorrow. . . . And of a German industrialist--a war-profiteering Nazi Party member--who saved Leyson’s life and the lives of 1,100 other Jews who worked for him:

The memories of a Schindlerjude, a Schindler Jew.

“He was very good to me,” Leyson says of Oskar Schindler, the true-life hero of “Schindler’s List,” Steven Spielberg’s critically acclaimed movie adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s fact-based novel.

Leyson was 13 when he joined his other family members working at Schindler’s enamel works factory. Schindler frequently ordered that Leyson be given extra soup, and he called the skinny boy who had to stand on a box to operate a lathe “Little Leyson.”

Leyson’s father--a tool-and-die maker--was one of the first Jews to go to work at Schindler’s factory, which produced mess kits and pots and pans for the German army. Ultimately, Leyson, his mother, a brother and a sister would all work for Schindler--one of the few families to do so.

Two of Leyson’s older brothers, however, did not survive the war. One, who was taken from the Jewish ghetto, died in an extermination camp. The other was murdered by the Nazis, along with 500 other Jews living in the Leysons’ hometown on the northeastern border of Poland.

Leyson, 63, who teaches industrial arts at Huntington Park High School, hasn’t talked much about that time of his life. “Periodically,” he says, “some things come out in conversations with people.” But for the most part he has kept his memories to himself.

Elisabeth, his Ohio-born wife of 28 years, has often urged him to talk about his experiences. “I think it’s a miraculous story that many people would find inspirational and really amazing,” she says.

Leyson’s children--Daniel, 24; and Stacy, 25--are familiar with their father’s background. But Leyson says his sister, Aviva, who now lives in Israel, once started to tell her story for an oral history project and couldn’t finish. “I can identify with that,” he says.

So it was with “some real reservations” that Leyson recently agreed to talk about his wartime memories and about “Schindler’s List,” the movie that tells the story of the man who made a fortune in the war by using unpaid Jewish labor and then spent that fortune to save their lives.

Leyson sat on the edge of a white sofa in the living room of his two-story house in Fullerton, thousands of miles and a lifetime away from the Jewish ghetto and concentration camp where he spent five years of his youth.

His arms resting on his knees and his hands tightly clasped, the soft-spoken Leyson said he saw “Schindler’s List” at an invitational screening for other Schindler Jews in West Los Angeles.

He didn’t know what to expect of the movie, which was shot on location in Poland, but he found it “startlingly effective and quite authentic. I was amazed to see these places looking very much like I remember.”

At times, he said, watching the film “was like having an out-of-body experience because those little kids who were running around and hiding and trying to get away from the Sondercommando (the brutal SS commando troops), that was me. That was my friends.”

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His family, Leyson said, had moved from their hometown near the Russian border to Krakow a year before the Germans arrived in his country. His father, Moric, worked in a glass factory across from the Jewish-owned factory Schindler would eventually take over.

Even before the Germans invaded Poland, Leyson said, they had heard that the Germans were mistreating Jews inside Germany, “so we had some inkling of it, but nothing of the sort that it ended up to be. We had no idea.”

The only experience his parents had had with the Germans was during World War I. “To them, yes, the Germans forced people to work, and they would release them after they finished their work. So it looked like in the beginning that it was the same thing. But it was nothing like it.”

Within six months, Poland’s Jews were forced to move into a newly closed-off area of Krakow. Leyson’s parents piled as many belongings as they could into suitcases and onto sheets, which they tied up at the corners and made into bundles.

“We just loaded everything up on a wagon,” he recalled. “Whatever we couldn’t move we just left there.”

Their home had been in an apartment building not far from the Jewish ghetto. One of his father’s co-workers at the glass factory had been living in the ghetto area and, not being a Jew, had to move out. So the two families traded apartments.

The Leysons lived for two years in the ghetto, an area of only 16 square blocks surrounded by a newly erected brick wall whose rounded-off top reminded Leyson of grave markers. “I don’t think that was an accident,” he said.

In some cases, two or three families lived in a single room. The Leysons divided up their sole bedroom with blankets and shared it with an older Jewish couple, German refugees who would later be hauled off to a death camp.

Food was scarce. Meat--chicken mostly--was a luxury. Some food was bought on the black market or smuggled in by Jews who were allowed to work on the outside. Although Jews working in Schindler’s factory were not paid, Leyson said, “there was a benefit: You got a loaf of bread once in a while, and you’d get a bowl of soup at lunch time.”

In the beginning, killings in the ghetto were sporadic. “Here and there a soldier would decide he wanted to kill somebody,” said Leyson. You could never tell when that might happen, “so you always walked around with that funny feeling in the back of your head, that you don’t know who was pointing a gun at you.”

“To give you an idea, the whole time that this was taking place--from the time of the ghetto to the time of liberation--there were only two thoughts in mind: to have something to eat and keep yourself from getting killed.”

It didn’t take long before the killings became more organized. SS commandos would surround the ghetto and then move through, carting off families to a railroad station where they would be sent to extermination camps. Anyone who resisted or was found hiding or was infirm was shot.

“There were several actions like these where they kept removing people from the ghetto and shrinking it,” said Leyson. “At one point, you had to have a special card, and if you didn’t have that you were taken away. My father had a card, and so we were not taken away. But my older brother was supposed to have his own card. He didn’t have it.”

In the movie, Schindler is shown going to the train station to rescue his Jewish accountant from a death camp-bound train. Also on that train was Leyson’s older brother, Betsalil, whom Schindler also tried to save.

The Leysons later learned, however, that Betsalil’s girlfriend was with him and he wouldn’t get off without her. He died in the concentration camp.

One time when the SS commandos surrounded the ghetto, Leyson said, it was obvious what was going to happen. His father and brother David were already working for Schindler, and Schindler advised his workers not to go back home after work.

“He kept them in the factory,” said Leyson, who, along with his mother, was inside the ghetto. This time, he said, no ID card could prevent them from being removed. “It was just if you got caught you were gone,” he said.

So he and a few other boys climbed up into the attic crawl space in a one-story structure attached to their apartment building.

Leyson’s mother, Anna, and another boy’s mother said they were not going to hide, that they’d take their chances. But at the last minute, as the sound of gunshots and the commandos shouting for people to come out of their homes echoed through the streets, Leyson’s mother climbed into the cramped hideaway--setting down the teapot full of water she had intended to hand up to the boys.

The entire time the SS were operating in the courtyard, Leyson said, his mother’s teapot was sitting there. And as they frighteningly peeked down at the courtyard through cracks in the wooden building, they saw the other mother, trying to look inconspicuous by sweeping the ground, taken away by the commandos.

“I can recount dozens of times where if I had stepped . . . to my left, I would have been gone, or if I happened to step to my right,” said Leyson. “It wasn’t anything like being smart or clever or anything like that.”

Just luck, he said.

One time he and a friend took an old woman to a hospital inside the ghetto on a stretcher and they were a few minutes late for the curfew. As they walked by one of the gates, a guard spotted them and took his rifle off his shoulder.

Leyson’s friend, who was a few steps ahead of him, ran past the soldier and into the house where they lived. The guard fired at him and missed, then turned and fired a shot at Leyson, who ran in the opposite direction and ducked into the recessed entry of an apartment house.

“Luckily, someone let me in,” he said. “It could have happened that the people were scared enough not to open the door, but they did, and I spent the night there.”

But, he said, “that’s just one small incident, and it wasn’t long before things got really, really awful.”

In 1943, the ghetto was liquidated, soldiers dragging families from their apartments and again shooting anyone who resisted.

Jews who worked in factories, however, were assigned to Plaszow, a forced-labor camp on the outskirts of Krakow. Each group of factory workers marched out together, but before Leyson’s group was out of the ghetto, a guard pulled him out of line, saying, “Jew, you come later.”

“I wasn’t smart enough to know something bad is going to happen, but I knew enough that I didn’t want to ‘come later,’ ” said Leyson. Not wanting to be grouped with children or old people who were certain to be killed, he sneaked back in line with another group.

At Plaszow, which was built on a Jewish graveyard, Leyson and other Jews were forced to dig up the graves, smashing the grave markers into pieces to use for a road in the camp.

The camp was run by a psychopathic commandant named Amon Goeth, who is depicted in the movie sitting on the balcony of his hilltop villa and shooting at Jews below with his rifle. Leyson says the movie was an accurate portrayal of the brutal Goeth.

“He was the most sadistic, unpredictable person that you can ever meet,” said Leyson, adding that Jewish workers passing through the gate in the evening would ask among themselves what the “score” was that day.

Leyson had several encounters with Goeth.

At one point, Leyson was working the night shift in the camp brush factory when Goeth and his henchmen came through. For some unknown reason, Goeth pulled out his gun and shot a man.

They then took everyone outside and began separating the workers into two groups. Leyson, who was now about 13, was told to go to the side with the young and the old.

“It didn’t look good to me,” he said. Again, as the guards were walking back and forth, he was able to sneak back to the other side and “sort of blend in with the others.”

Another time he was among a group working on the road when Goeth came through and didn’t like the way things were going. He then lined everybody up and had the guards pull people out of line and give them 25 lashes. “I was the lucky recipient of 25,” said Leyson.

Then, Goeth lost interest and left.

The reason?

“The story has it that sort of toward evening time, Schindler came by to visit and word was sent to Goeth that Schindler was there, and so the whole thing stopped and he went back over to visit with Schindler.”

Leyson said that he knew Schindler quite well and that one of his disappointments with Spielberg’s movie is that more of Schindler’s “basic human decency “ wasn’t portrayed on screen.

Schindler is accurately portrayed as a womanizer and a war profiteer who used bribes and his considerable charisma to reap massive profits through his Nazi connections, but the man Leyson knew frequently displayed a sense of decency, of humanity.

The fact that Schindler, at the request of Leyson’s father, brought Leyson’s mother, brother and sister over to work in Schindler’s factory--keeping an entire family together--is one example, he said.

Leyson recalls working night shifts with his brother and father and seeing the flamboyant Schindler come through the factory after a night of partying with his Nazi friends.

“You didn’t have to look to know that Schindler was there,” he said. “He was all perfumed up and smoking these cigarettes. And he’d come through and he’d do things, not grandstanding or anything. He’d just quietly come up to my father, put his arm around his shoulder and say, ‘Don’t worry; everything is going to be OK.’ ”

Other times, Leyson said, Schindler would leave a lighted cigarette or a half-filled pack next to his father’s workstation and casually walk away.

Those are the kinds of things you don’t see in the movie, Leyson said. “He was a womanizer--everybody knows that--and he liked a good party, but you have to judge the man by what he did. He did great things, actually.”

Leyson has no doubt that Schindler was motivated to draw up his now-famous list for humanitarian rather than profit-making reasons: to move 1,100 Jewish workers en masse to a new factory in relatively safe Czechoslovakia.

Leyson never knew why, but he, his father and brother were mistakenly left off the list.

They were lined up and getting ready to be shipped out to an extermination camp when Schindler came by with several people. Wanting to get his attention, Leyson started moving toward the front of the line.

A guard hit him with his rifle butt, and Leyson dropped the Thermos he had been holding. Schindler heard the noise, turned and saw Leyson.

“I yelled out, ‘We’re not on the list, my father, brother and I,’ ” Leyson recalled. “He immediately ordered that we be put on the list.”

But more significant than that, Leyson said, Schindler “went back to where the others were kept who were on the list and told my mother not to worry.”

In one of the most harrowing sequences in the movie, the trainload of women from Schindler’s factory are mistakenly routed to Auschwitz, where they are herded into the showers, not knowing whether gas or water would come out. Leyson’s mother and sister were on that train.

Schindler, who refused an offer to replace them with 300 other workers, used his money and influence to get them back.

“Once he was into this business of transporting us from Poland to Czechoslovakia, and especially his accomplishment of getting the women from Auschwitz to Czechoslovakia, you knew that he was not doing it to make a profit. He was simply doing the right thing,” Leyson said.

Once in Czechoslovakia, the 1,100 Jews spent the next eight months working in Schindler’s new factory and living in an adjoining concentration camp, a time Leyson remembers being the hungriest he had ever been.

Then the war ended.

Schindler, accompanied by several older Jews, left in the middle of the night to avoid being captured by the Russian army. Before he left, however, his workers gave him a gift: a ring made of gold from one of his worker’s teeth and inscribed with the Talmudic verse: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”

The Leysons and the other Schindler Jews were repatriated to Poland. “But soon after we got there we realized that Poland was not the place for us. We were not greeted warmly, to say the least. There were a lot of people rioting against the returning Jews.”

A year after returning home, he said, “we had to go hide again.”

They smuggled themselves across the border back into Czechoslovakia. From there they traveled to Austria and then to Germany, where they wound up in a displaced-persons camp. And there they remained until 1949.

That’s when Leyson’s aunt, who had lived in the United States since the early 1900s and had thought they had perished with the rest of the Jews in Poland, learned through a search organization where they were and arranged for them to come to Los Angeles.

Schindler’s life, too, changed dramatically.

Penniless after the war, he and his wife immigrated to Argentina, where he turned to farming. After 10 unsuccessful years, he left his wife and returned to Germany, where he was taken care of by his former workers, the Schindler Jews.

Leyson would meet Schindler again, on a visit Schindler made to the United States a few years before he died in 1974.

He was among a group of Jews who met Schindler at the airport.

“I started to tell him who I was,” recalled Leyson. But he didn’t need to.

Schindler grinned at the middle-aged man standing in front of him and said, “I know who you are, you’re little Leyson.”