Leo Bretholz
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| Leo Bretholz | |
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| Born | March 6, 1921 Vienna , Austria |
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Leo Bretholz (born March 6, 1921) is a holocaust survivor who escaped from a train headed for Auschwitz. He has also written a book on his experiences, titled Leap into Darkness.
[edit] Life
Leo Bretholz was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 6, 1921. His father, Max Bretholz, was a Polish immigrant. He worked as a tailor until his death to a bleeding ulcer in 1930; LB was nine years old. Most of his family lived in the area and many, including his father, were actors in the Yiddish theater. His Mother, Dora (Fischmann) Bretholz, also Polish, was born in 1891 and worked as a seamstress. He had two younger sisters, Henny and Edith (Ditta). His father was agnostic and socialist but the family celebrated traditional Jewish holidays. LB went to public school where he was one of six Jews. At home he spoke Yiddish and at school he spoke German. He learned conversational Hebrew in Hebrew school due to his father’s desire for him to move to Palestine at a later date. He speaks French, German, Yiddish, Dutch, Hebrew, Flemish, and English.
The Anschluss occurred in March 1938 and many of LB’s relatives were arrested. At his mother’s insistence, he fled on a train to Trier, Germany, where he would be met by a smuggler. He swam across the Sauer River into Luxembourg, where he spent five nights in a Franciscan monastery. He was arrested two days later in a coffee shop and chose to be taken to the Belgian border over arrest or being sent back to Germany. He arrived in Antwerp, Belgium, on November 11, 1938. He stayed in Antwerp for a peaceful eighteen months where he went to a public trade school to become an electrician as an alternative to being sent to an internment camp. He learned to speak Flemish. On May 9, 1940, he entered a hospital in Antwerp to have surgery on a hernia, but Antwerp was bombed the next morning before he could be operated on. Upon being discharged from the hospital, he was arrested as an enemy alien. Now that the war had reached Antwerp, he was an enemy to Belgium because he was an Austrian (now German) citizen. He was sent to St. Cyprien, an internment camp near the Spanish border. His friend Leon Osterreicher came to visit him and instructed him to escape by climbing under the camp’s fence. While living with distant relatives nearby, he was sent to an assigned residence in Cauterets, France, near the Pyrenees Mountains. He was in this residence for eight to ten months until on August 26th, 1941, the deportation began from this town. Upon a warning from the mayor of Luchon, Leo and his uncle hid overnight in the Pyrenees, returning the next day to find half of the ghetto’s population deported. He walked across the Swiss border with his cousin Albert Hershkowitz in October 1942, under the name Paul Meunier, only to be stopped by a Swiss Mountain Patrol and sent back to France. He was sent to the Rivesaltes internment camp where he remained for two weeks before being sent to Drancy, a large-scale deportation camp in the suburbs of Paris.
On November 5, 1942, LB was deported on convoy 42 with 1000 others headed for Auschwitz. With his friend Manfred Silberwasser he escaped through the window and leaped off the train. Staying with two priests on subsequent nights, he and Manfred were given train tickets to Paris with a new set of false identification papers, this time under the name Marcel Dumont. Upon crossing into the Southern region (Vichy France), LB was arrested again for abandoning his assigned residence. He spent nine months in prison, one month of which was in solitary confinement for having escaped for two days. He was released in September 1943. He was then sent to Septfonds forced labor camp for one month.
In October 1943 he was taken with thirteen other men to the Toulouse train station en route to the Atlantic coast to build fortification. At this layover he spent hours to bend the bars then climbed out of the train window and escaped into the city of Toulouse. In Toulouse his friend Manfred sent a third set of false papers, this time under the name Max Henri Lefevre. LB joined the Jewish Resistance Group Compagnons De France, known as “La Sixieme” so he could travel freely throughout France. He was assigned to Limoges, a city in south-central France. On May 8, 1944, his hernia ruptured and he collapsed on a Limoges park bench and was sent by a passerby to a hospital, where he had surgery. The next morning, May 9, 1944, he awoke in the hospital bed with a righteous gentile nurse, nun Jean D’arc Sardin. He spent seventeen days in the hospital then returned for his dressings to be changed. He rejoined the underground movement and remained in Limoges until departing on a ship for New York on January 19, 1947.
He moved in with his aunt and uncle in Baltimore, Maryland on January 29th and immediately sought work as a handyman. One month after his arrival, his uncle died, which was traumatic. He worked in textiles, traveling around the Mid-Atlantic. He moved into his own apartment with his friend Freddie. He met his wife Flo in November of 1951 at Freddie’s wedding. They married in July 1952. LB had his first child, Myron, in 1955 and later had two daughters, named Denise and Edie (in that order.) He received death notifications of his two sisters and mother in 1962. They had been deported to Auschwitz in April 1942, after which he had not heard from them. It was at this point he began to speak publicly about his experiences during the war.
In 1968 he went into the retail book business because of the strain of traveling and heavy lifting of his textile job. He lived in Holland with his family for two years. He is a public figure and has written a book, Leap Into Darkness, and appeared in the documentary film Survivors Among Us. He currently lives in Pikesville with his wife and speaks regularly in a range of venues.
