LW: About the possibility for German soldiers to say "no" to participating in the murder and execution of people.
And I said that wasn't that dangerous.
In the worst case, one was sent to the front.
But as far as I know, no one was put up against a wall when he said he didn't want to hang or shoot someone.
So participating was not absolutely necessary back then. One could..
But on the whole they were in agreement with it.
IV: There were enough people who volunteered.
LW: Since if someone was already that far that they didn't see or view the person across from them as worthy...as a full-fledged human, then it is not hard for them to kill this person.
One has to have reached this mental level that they see this living being, who looks like a human, as a non-human.
IV: I would to come back to...I asked about how it felt, after the liberation.
And you said the first feeling was not revenge.
Did you suddenly have this feeling like: Now I made it. I survived.
Or an idea of how things should continue from there in this total chaos.
Do you remember this mental state?
LV: When I look back today, I know that I had a huge desire to live, felt joy that I was alive and could see the sun shining, it was springtime.
But no reflection, no deliberation.
My brain was not restored to health yet or had not yet awoken so that I...
I think I fell back into a state, like a small child that cannot form thoughts about the past or the future, who lives in the present.
And right after the liberation I lived in the present, I am.
Without any thoughts, as I said, I didn't speak to anyone, I didn't have many thoughts.
An example: I cannot remember thinking about my mother, my sisters, what happened to them.
And immediately following the liberation, I didn't have any memories of asking myself where they are, what happened to them. I just was.
The feeling of simply being, biologically.
And probably a growing joy to experience life, purely physically.
And as for high-level thought processes, brain activity there, I don't know how it was for others, but I can only describe it so, that I had not reached that point yet.
That requres a longer period of recuperation, physically, to bring the psyche back to life.
IV: Most people say that life before the liberation, everyday was overshadowed by fear.
Also the fear of not living, fear of not making it, fear of punishment, violence.
Was the liberation also a way of letting go or that something that fell away or...
LW: I can't recall that I felt fear.
I was so dulled, so robbed of energy, so helpless and weak that I didn't have the strength to feel fear.
We saw it daily, death was so close, very close, as with the example in Flossenbürg where I woke up next to the corpse.
But I have hardly any memories of that upsetting me, of any feeling of emotion.
We were indifferent, we were... I was indifferent, I don't want to speak for others.
And basically in capable of expressing any feeling. Including fear or dread.
When they said: "go over there...to the gallows," I would have barely reacted, I think.
That shows how far a person come, through chronic, permanent, years of hunger, where the body is so weak and through the effect of shock from what i had experienced.
this transition from a terrible time in the ghetto with hunger, hard work but at least I was with a mother and sister, in one room with nine other people, who were perhaps a fifth of the dining room, but we were together,to go from that to total anonymity, to being a nobody in the camp.
This shock stayed with me the entire time and that is why I am sometimes amazed at how much others can remember.
Especially those who were only a few years older. They retained the ability to perceive, to partake. I insulated myself.
And that is why I regret that I cannot explain drastic things...but I can only report honestly and sincerely about what I really uncontrovertibly remember.
And I spoke to Mr Imre Kertész when he received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm.
Two years younger than me and brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau in '44.
His description of arriving in Birkenau, totally different from mine, although he went through the same procedure.
He came from an almost normal life, since the Jews in Hungary, the real persecution didn't start until '44, they had a difficult time before then but not harder, not worse than the general population.
He arrived having maintained his full physical and mental strength, it was perhaps a shock for him too.
But he still had the ability to have contact, went right to the older ones, they took him in.
He was healthy, physically normal, not like me who had been in the ghetto and starved for almost four and a half, five years.
So his ability to take things in, to perceive and the capacity to keep this and the special skill as a writer to recount it, that is something else altogether.
But that was the major difference.
That also shows how differently people reacted, depending on their physical condition that had an effect on the psyche.
IV: Good, then I suggest that we take a short break to drink something.
LW: We had similar stories after the war.
Afterwards I said to him "You know what? I could be that I didn't apply my hemisphere, my brain, to thinking.
That was an ability then...it was so empty that I could fill it right up with knowledge, learning, research."
I had, and that's another point, six years of grammar school, until '39, I started studying medicine in '46 in Göttingen.
IV: I did wonder how that was possible.
LW: I did it.
So I said to him, probably that child was just so empty from all that slag.
And able to absorb like a sponge that... he had something similar.
He also had only three years of grammar school, went to America, then he became a geologist (???)
and switched to medicine, began studying medicine, became a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst. {speaks about Jack Terry}
WIthout secondary school, Gymnasium, without anything.
So I say, maybe that was the key that we didn't apply it, that we were unused and more receptive than other brains.
IV: And you hadn't stored very much, also from these terrible things.
LW: there was lots of space, lots of space.
IV: Whereas with other people...
LW: It was all used up.
IV: Yes, or it was always working, this "always thinking about it."
LW: Yes..
IV: on the terror or...would you like to stand up for a moment?
LW: I got a small cramp.
IV: Careful, just a moment.
I would say, now, chronologically, childhood and youth in Lodz, if you would talk a bit about that...
LW: I was born in the city of Lodz, registered on January 1, 1926.
That means I am now in the middle of my 84th year.
The first of January is the date, but I have my doubts whether that corresponds with reality.
I can imagine that I was born a few days earlier but in order to make me a year younger, I wasn't registered until January.
That is how many people thought back then.
A girl that is a year younger, if she is born in December, better a year later.
And for boys, because of military service, so that they are a little more mature and not so young.
In any case born in a family with four older siblings, I was the fifth child.
My father was a textile worker, came from a small town in the triangle between Warsaw, Lublin, Radom, south, southeast of Warsaw that is where my father's family came from.
My mother's family came from the region around Kalisz, the oldest city in Poland, that Plinius had already described, on the way from...Mediterranean to the North.
My father worked in the factory, suffered an accident and lost his left arm.
I used to play with the prothesis, I found it under the bed, played, but never asked about my father.
He died when I was one and a half years old, in June 1927.
And the poor widow with five children, and she becomes self-employed.
My mother's brother, as I later learned, wanted to talk her into marrying again.
But she wanted to raise her children independently, took off her wig -- as an orthodox Jew, their hair is cut off when they marry and they get a wig -- got rid of it and opened a small laundry.
We moved out of the apartment where I had been born, on the edge of the poor neighborhood in Lodz.
It was called Balutau, still today, the streets was Salzgasse, the Sasolna, corner of Nordstrasse.
Because the ghetto. the poor neighborhood was int he north of the city of Lodz.
We moved close to the city center, there were two rooms. That was all.
Entrance to the street, window display on the left, a small counter, casing and shelves for taking in the laundry.
To the left of the window was a large table, for ironing the laundry and arranging it.
Behind it, behind the shelves was another table, also for ironing and arranging the laundry and that is where my sisters slept, my four sisters.
Then came the next room, like the letter T, perpendicular.
To the right a walled in caldron, to boil the wash with a fire below, left was a kitchen cabinet.
Behind it two beds, my mother and I with one of my sisters there alone, with ledges added to the ceiling for hanging the wash to dry.
That was my mother's worksite, the business and the living space for us children.
No space to do tasks, homework or studying.
So.. childhood was spent more life in the courtyard, with the boys.
And since I was an enthusiastic reader since I was five, books were the only refuge and escape from these rather poor and limiting, economomically limiting existence.
Went to school when I was seven, I was already able to read alone and loved going to school.
I loved learning, I was very hungry for knowledge, also found it rather easy to grasp new things.
But also a little careless, didn't work that hard.
which often...many talented people do not work that hard.
When it comes together, then it is...they become geniuses.
I didn't become a genius, but what I did have was enough.
There were definitely some funny situations that I was asked to read the homework, but I hadn't done any.
I read an essay from an empty page.
That was embarrassing when the teacher said " Leon, you did that so well. Now hand over the page so it can be entered into the class chronicle."
And then I stood there with red cheeks and the empty page.
As punishment, ...but Mrs. Linde, that was the name of our teacher.
It was a Jewish school...only Jewish children and only boys, wasn't mixed with girls.
The first school was on Narutowiczstrasse, at the corner of Kilinskistrasse,
Kilinski was a freedom hero, he fought in uprisings.
And Narutowicz was the first president after the independence of Poland in 1918 and of Jewish origins.
Was shot by a fascist, if one may say that, by a rightwing supporter.
Then we moved to the Kilinskistrasse across from the train station.
Factory station they call it today, across from the station which is now in the middle of Lodz today, continues to operate.
The area where I grew up as very poor, it was...
I wanted to have a dog, but we never had a dog legally, instead a stray dog picked up, homeless.
And then he always came, those are the worst memories of my childhood, when the dogcatcher came with the sling and grabbed it and threw it behind bars in the vehicle.
I cried terribly, I found it heartwrenching, my poor animal, took the dog away.
But I often sicked the dog on the building owner a short, fat Jew, he arrived and I knew my mother didn't have any money.
Always the 120 Złoty for the monthly rent, then I sicked the dog on him. And got slapped a few times.
I had a close friendship with the house caretaker, a Pole, Schitowski.
We shared a passion for novels in chapter segments, every week a new chapter.
And I read, I gave it to him and he gave it to me, we exchanged them.
He was a terrible drinker, alcoholic, he broke his wife's arm on his knee in front of me.
He had gotten angry.
That is why I remember that when my mother complained about me, she called him to punish me.
But since we were close, he always treated me very very mildly and didn't hit so hard with the belt.
He also came to the roof when the war broke out, where I was there a kite with my two or three friends.
Idiots, didn't know...
And the airplanes arrived, over our heads, towards Warsaw.
He grabbed us and really hit us.
That was better than if the defense people came ... and put you up against the wall and accused you of giving signals to the German planes.
School was normal. That was an oasis for me. That was normal.
I was among equals.
I liked going to school under normal conditions.
After the sixth grade, in June 1939, I took a few tests and qualified for the humanistic line.
And even got a free card, like a fellowship or exemption from fees, so that I could attend high school on September 1, 1939.
It was called Józef-Piłsudski-Gymnasium, after the former marshal of Poland, died in 1926.
Or, no, he died in 1935. He came to power with a state coup in 1926, in Poland, Marshal Piłsudski.
IV: You basically were on your way to going to Gymnasium?
LW: Yes, but something got in the way.
From my childhood I can also mention...
We were a group of boys, always running around the rooftops, territory battles with the other gangs.
I was like a leader, I was well-read. So Indians (???)
Read all the books. Played like boys play, with cowboys and indians, sheriff and bandits.
That was our daily life.
And I was like the leader, because I knew the books by heart, could recount them all.
There was hardly any religion at home.
There was no father to teach it. That had weakened.
Mother was so busy, intensely, to keep us alive, to make a living of sorts.
So it wasn't so urgent.
I have some photos of the Cheder, when we were in the other apartment.
I was around four years old.
I had gone to the Jewish children's school, that started with three or four years.
I stuck it out for a year and then when we moved I told my mother: "I don't want to continue."
We were twenty, thirty boys sitting together, and a man with a beard stood there and mumbled something to himself.
We were supposed to repeat it, I don't know what it was about.
I don't get that. It is so dumb.
And then I refused to go to the Jewish school, to continue. I found it too stupid.
That is why I don't know anything about this praying and didn't learn about this holy ???
Because my mother never insisted.
My oldest sister, six years older, she now lives in Quentin, Pennsylvania, in America, 89 years old.
She was six years older than me and she had to go to...at 14, after turning 14, after grammar school, had to go to work in the electricity factory.
And she was left, the left workers movement and she supported me.
And the episode with her that I remember so vividly, I was always careful to leave the house with her.
I went to school, she to work, we took the same route.
We passed the butcher, she got me a roll with ham for 50 cents.
And I still remember this juicy ham, wonderful taste.
But don't tell mother.
Because although we weren't religous, not practicing, but holidays, like Passover at Easter or Chanukah at Christmas, mother did that.
Sabbath too, on Friday, lit the candles, the movements, the light and the prayer.
I experienced all that and kept it, as a tradition but not out of deep belief in the Jewish faith with the Old Testament.
I read all that much later, also worked through and read the Koran and the New Testament.
To learn what is actually in there.
I have to say, nothing positive, Lots of talk, little content, For my part...
When you clear it away, a terrible stampede of words, which, when you analyse them, sentence for sentence, there is not much in there.
But that is something different.
Summer vacation, the last years before the war, my mother sent me to her sister, in a little town, städtl.
Wartha, that is in Warthega an der Warthe, on the RIver Wartha.
A little town, my aunt lived there, ten children.
And her husband, his income was, he had two horses, ...a..like a carriage, like in the wild west, ran errands for the business people at the market, made purchases.
Harnessed the horses, drove to Lodz, 62 kilometers, 70 kilometers, no, less, from Wartha it was 50 kilometers.
And he was there in five or six hours, arrived towards morning, loaded up.
And in the early afternoon he was back -- slept a few hours -- and then started over again.
I took the trip a few times, he slept, the horses went their way, they knew the way there and back.
IV: So it was a transport business?
LW: Yes, a small one.
He got the carriage for that, and with the horses it was so...
There were five girls, five boys.
Two - the oldest daughter, Mina, she is 94 now, lives in Netanya in Israel.
The only living cousin left, on my mother's side
Then there was Gabriel, who was short, maybe 1.50 meters, he now has four sons, who are 2 meters tall.
He was a horse boy and took me along, with the horses to drink at the River Wartha.
And one of my memories is as we were riding, without saddles of course, and Polish boys threw stones that scared the horses.
They went into a gallop and we held onto their manes so keep from falling and then I...
That was the first of a few clearly ant-Jewish incidents that boys intentionally wanted to cause us, as Jewish boys, harm.
Except in Lodz, too, I was a huge movie fan.
But I didn't have any money for the admission ticket.
And I rarely dared to sit in the cinema on the edge of the room where more Poles were, I stayed mostly in the Jewish quarter, because I was recognized there immediately "Jew, Jew" and hit with stones to make me leave.
Those were the few expressions of antisemitism that I experienced personally.
And I figured out how to get into the cinema without money. I noticed that two adults were able to bring a child along, without a ticket.
So I looked at the people, I learned that if I stood in line with normal adults that they shooed me away
"Get out of here, what are you doing here"
But a young couple in love, they barely even noticed that I was standing next to them, and they hardly saw me.
I got in and once I was in there were two kinds of movies.
Film previews, intermission, people leave, people enter, and the same film again.
Then there were non-stop cinemas.
One went in, in the middle, watched it and waited for it to start over again, and then left.
I could sit in a non-stop cinema for five, six hours, again and again.
And in the cinemas that had intermissions, I hid in the restrooms.
When it was dark I came out again.
And mother always asked where were you for so many hours and your homework and those kinds of things...
But I became a fanatic movie guy, still today. I have 3500 films at home that I recorded from television.
And everying in the archive, all the Bonds, all the HItchcocks, but also a few hundred about the Holocaust. Documentaries.
Those were the bright spots in the summer, the recreation, because eight of the ten children were in the house.
And only two rooms.
The first room for the parents, one entered through a small corridor, the little house was about thirty meters from the market square.
But across from a Benedictine cloister. The Benedictines. Very rich, this cloister. Klosterstrasse no. 6
Two windows to the street, facing a bed, a closet to the right, and the entrance to the second room, a narrow kitchen, with a clay floor.
That was all and then the small courtyard, the stable for the horses, with huge rats.
And there was a small ladder, up to the attic, with only straw, no mattresses, that is where we children slept, like sardines in a can.
But there...I have to say that I never complained, never looked or thought, those are the rich people, they have so much and we have nothing.
One just accepts the now as it is and one doesn't philosophize about one's existence as a child.
That is just the way it was.The end.
It was bad in the winter, not having any real shoes or what was bad was when I got a new pair of trousers for Passover, at Easter.
And I got ten pennies from my mother, and I went around the corner, to a Cyclodrom, that is what it was called.
Where you could rent a bike and ride around.
My pants got caught in the chain and tore and were smeared with oil.
I was scared to go home. And late in the evening, but then my mother saw it and said that is just a small thing.
I should not be sad because of that and not come home with everyone looking...
And there an example of the mental state of a child at that time.
I knew it was a huge expense for my mother to buy me a pair of pants.
IV: Excuse me, I have to interrupt. You have a spider or something in your hair. So.
LW: Attraction (laughs)
IV: (coughs) Good, that was a poor --
LW: Then.. that was that before the war
CM: OKay.
LW: I think we have -