People

Leo Bach was born in 1927, the first son of a Jewish butcher living in a predominantly Christian neighborhood on the outskirts of Krakow, Poland. In Chapter 1 of his memoir he describes his family’s life in pre-war Krakow, their faith, their business and their usually friendly relations with their Christian neighbors. The building that Leo’s father built in Krakow that housed the family’s home and business. In 1943, the janitor of the building betrayed Leo’s brother to the Gestapo while he was hiding in their former home.

In Chapter 2, Leo describes the reaction of the family as the Germans invaded Poland and their world was transformed into one that was officially hostile to the Jewish people. Chapter 3 tells how the family attempted to maintain their lives in Nazi occupied Krakow from Sept 1939 to May 1941 under increasingly severe restrictions. To escape being confined to the Jewish Ghetto in Krakow, Leo’s father Jacob brought the family to a village, Mogila, where they rented a room from a poor Christian farm family (Chapter 4). During this time, young Leo helped maintain the family’s livelihood and their connection to cousins, uncles and grandparents by traveling through the woods and back roads to deliver goods and messages back to Krakow crossing areas restricted to the Jews. In August 1942, the orders came to deport Jews from the villages and those who were not employed as forced laborers in essential industries were sent to the death camps. Leo’s father helped him obtain a position at a German airfield where the food was inadequate but at least no atrocities had been committed against the Jews. In one of the most moving episodes of the memoir, we learn in Chapter 5 how the officials from the airfield tried to save their Jewish employees and their families from being sent to the death camps. On the first day, the officials sent wagons but had only enough room for the employees and the women and children had to remain behind. On the second day, the wagons returned to retrieve the family members, but the official from the airfield had no way to distinguish the family members of the employees from other Jews who clamored to be saved. Leo’s mother and sister, considering it uncivilized to fight for their place on the wagons, remained behind and were deported and murdered in Auschwitz.

After the war, Leo’s father, Jacob, erected a monument in Krakow to the family members including Leo’s mother, sister and brother who perished in the Holocaust. In his Preface Leo dedicates his memoir to their memory.

Chapter 6 tells of Leo’s life in the Krakow ghetto and work at the German airfield from August 1942 to July 1943. From July 1943 to April 1945, Leo was held is a series of Nazi forced labor and death camps. It is a miracle that a boy of 15-16 with no special skills survived this ordeal with his life and humanity intact. In the Plaszow forced labor camp (Chapter 7), the commandant Amon Goeth who took sadistic pleasure in using executions (including the execution of Leo’s brother, Karl) to terrorize the prisoners. The cruelty was less organized in the Storachowice labor camp (Chapter 8) where Leo spent the winter and spring of 1943-44, but the hard labor in the ore smelting works, the poor food, and the cold weather led to many deaths. In July 1944, Leo was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (Chapter 9). Here he was subject to the daily cruel and fickle selection of those who would be sent to the gas chambers and those who would be sent to perform labor. After surviving typhus, Leo developed a skin infection and feared that this obvious infirmity would lead him to be selected as unfit to work. Fortunately he found that bathing in a drainage ditch in the camp and drying in the open air cured the infection. Eventually, a German electrician took a liking to young Leo and declared that Leo was an electrician’s assistant thereby saving him for a time from the hardest labor and the prospect of selection. Leo, who knew nothing of electrical work, did his best to look efficient as he “assisted” the electrician. By the time Leo was taken to Buchanwald death camp in January 1945 (Chapter 10), conditions in the collapsing Third Reich had decayed to the point where the deprivation in the camps came from lack of supplies in addition to the organized cruelty of the SS. Here, for lack of space, Jews and non-Jews were housed together. When the inevitable day came in which the Jews were called forth to be sent to their execution, Leo removed his Jewish insignia and a non-Jewish Polish man gave him a triangle to wear indicating he was a (non-Jewish) Pole. When a Polish boy from his village told the SS card Leo was a Pole, the other Polish prisoners all affirmed that he was Polish and he was allowed to stay in the barracks. The senselessness of the collapsing death machine reached a climax in April 1945 (Chapter 11), when the prisoners from Buchanwald were taken on a 20 day train ride without food and water to prevent them from being liberated by the advancing Allied forces. After most of the prisoners in the boxcars had died of hunger and thirst, a crazed guard came through shooting those who remained alive. Leo, who lay near death, pretended he was dead and escaped being shot.

Here, Leo (left) and his cousins Dolek and Joseph Finer wait to cross the Czech border during their return from Poland back to the deprogramming camps in Germany in April 1946.

Shortly after arriving in the Dachau death camp, the remaining prisoners were liberated by Allied forces. In the Epilogue, Leo describes his time in the Allied forces’ deprogramming camps and his subsequent return to Poland to learn what had become of his family and their homes. When anti-Semitism arose again and led to massacres in postwar Poland, Leo and his family fled. Shortly thereafter Leo emigrated to the US, married Evelyn Wexler of Brooklyn, NY. The couple settled in Southern California where they raised two children, Gloria and Julian.

Leo (left) sails across the North Atlantic on a Liberty ship to emigrate to the United States.

Please feel free to download some more pictures from Leo's Memoir