Leo Bretholz (1921–2014)
Auteur van Sprong in het duister zeven jaar op de vlucht voor de holocaust
Over de Auteur
Leo Bretholz was born in Vienna, Austria on March 6, 1921. He left Vienna at the age of 17 amid the growing menace of Nazi control. For the next seven years, he evaded Nazi concentration camps by living as a fugitive from 1938 to 1945. He assumed aliases, slept in ditches, and found sanctuary with toon meer relatives, in Jewish ghettos, and among orders of Roman Catholic nuns and priests. He jumped from a transport carrying him and a thousand other Jewish deportees to Auschwitz on November 5, 1942. The transport was a French train operated by the state-owned railway, the Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (S.N.C.F.). Toward the end of the war, he joined a Jewish resistance group known as La Sixième. He wrote about his experiences in a 1998 memoir entitled Leap Into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe. After the war he settled in Baltimore, Maryland. He found work in the textile business, then as a partner in a liquor store, then in the book selling business. Recently, when S.N.C.F. became involved in commuter rail contracts in Maryland, he became a witness at congressional hearings on the proposed Holocaust Rail Justice Act, which would allow Holocaust victims and their families to sue S.N.C.F. in the American courts. He died on March 8, 2014 at the age of 93. (Bowker Author Biography) toon minder
Werken van Leo Bretholz
Tagged
Algemene kennis
- Gangbare naam
- Bretholz, Leo
- Geboortedatum
- 1921-06-03
- Overlijdensdatum
- 2014-03-08
- Geslacht
- male
- Nationaliteit
- Austria
USA (naturalized) - Geboorteplaats
- Vienna, Austria
- Plaats van overlijden
- Pikesville, Maryland, USA
- Woonplaatsen
- Pikesville, Maryland, USA
Baltimore, Maryland, USA
Vichy, Allier, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France - Beroepen
- book dealer
memoirist
Holocaust survivor
public speaker - Organisaties
- La Sixième (Jewish resistance group)
- Korte biografie
- Leo Bretholz was born the eldest child in a family of Polish Jewish immigrants in Vienna, Austria. His father Max died when Leo was nine years old, and his mother Dora supported the family by working as a seamstress. After the Nazi Anschluss (annexation) of Austria in 1938, his relatives and neighbors were arrested, and his mother urged him to leave the country. His life on the run for the next seven years involved a series of daring escapes from death. He took a train to Trier, Germany, and swam across the Sauer River into Luxembourg. From there, he went to Antwerp, Belgium, where he began training to become an electrician. In 1940, when Germany invaded Belgium in World War II, he was deported to the St. Cyprien internment camp in France. He escaped by crawling under the fence. In 1942, he was arrested and sent to the Drancy camp. When he was being deported by cattle car to the death camp at Auschwitz, he and a friend managed to pry open the bars of a window and jump off the moving train. Upon crossing into the southern (Vichy) zone of France, he was arrested again and spent nine months in prison. In October 1943, he was being sent to the Atlantic coast for forced labor, when he again escaped from a train. In Toulouse, he joined the French Resistance, forging identification papers and scouting Germans. After the Allied invasion of D-Day in June 1944, he assisted refugees in France until the end of the war. His mother, sisters, and 55 other relatives all died in the Holocaust. In 1947, he emigrated to the USA and settled in the Baltimore, Maryland area. He married Florine Cohen, with whom he had three children. Leo worked for much of his career in sales, and later managed bookstores. In 1998, he published a memoir, Leap into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe, written with Michael Olesker. He spoke about his experiences during the war in schools, and was a witness at Congressional hearings on legislation that would have permitted Holocaust survivors to sue the French National Railway (SNCF) in American courts.
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