Leon Greenman
Former boxer, barber, amateur opera singer, salesman, antiquarian book expert and five-foot-tall force of nature Leon Greenman died last week at the age of 97.
As has been written before … that he was alive at all is something of a miracle. A survivor of Auschwitz, having endured forced marches, beatings and scant rations, Leon retained enormous energy, an impressive lack of bitterness, and a crusading zeal to ensure that the genocide never be repeated.
Born in Whitechapel on 18 December 1910, Leon was one of six children, three brothers and two sisters, with his mother dying when he was just two. The family were Dutch Jews, and his father returned to Rotterdam to live with his parents when he remarried. It wasn’t a happy time - Leon was beaten both by his stepmother and his teachers, and by the 1920s he was back, in Forest Gate, working for a barber.
Singing and boxing were his loves, and he met his future wife, Esther van Dam at an amateur opera group in the early thirties. Leon and ‘Else’ were married at Stepney Green Synagogue in 1935, honeymooning in Rotterdam. It was the move to Holland that sparked the awful run of mistakes that saw Leon, wife Else and baby son Barney in Auschwitz. Leon was now in the antiquarian book trade, working for his father in law, and by the late thirties was shuttling between Rotterdam and London. In 1938 the reality of the coming war hit, as he emerged from a London bookshop to see people “digging trenches in the streets”.
Back in Rotterdam he got the family packed, but sitting at home, listening to Neville Chamberlain on the BBC talking of “peace in our time”, he relaxed. He asked the British Embassy who assured him that as Britons, the family would be evacuated.
To be on the safe side, Leon gave his and Else’s passports to a non-Jewish friend for safe keeping. In May 1940, Germany bombed Rotterdam. “The town burned for five days,” remembers Leon. He headed for his friends who denied knowledge of the passports, before admitting they had panicked and burnt them.
The Greenmans, with baby son Barney, had nowhere to go. The embassy staff had fled, and the limits the Germans put on Jews saw them totally isolated. Jews couldn’t go to the library, cinema, swimming baths, parks, cafes, use public transport or leave town. The only thing they could do was listen to the BBC for news of the war … until Jews were banned from listening to the radio. Every day at 5pm they would go upstairs to the flat of sympathetic Dutch friends to listen to the bulletin. Curfew fell at 8pm, and the couple would “listen to old gramophone records, over and over again. Very dull … we would go to bed early”.
Along with hundreds of others, the family were interned in Westerbork - a halfway house for Jews being shipped east to the death camps. Leon remembers “hundreds of sad faces”. Again and again he protested that he was a British subject, but to no effect. Four months later, the family was moved to Auschwitz. Greenman was one of 700 Dutch Jews in the party - he and another man were the sole survivors.
“The women were separated from the men: Else and Barney were marched about 20 yards away to a queue of women … I tried to watch Else. I could see her clearly against the blue lights. She could see me, too, for she threw me a kiss and held our child up for me to see. We had been promised we could meet at weekends after our work was done. We will have a lot to talk about, I thought to myself.” But Else and two and a half year old Barney had been murdered within two hours. Luckily Leon never knew - it was his hope that kept him going.
In the camp, he made himself useful, employing his old barbering skills. Subsisting on a meagre diet (”turnip with water, cabbage with water or spinach with water”), he later reckoned that his early training as a boxer, with his rugged physique, saw him through. He would live through 18 months in Monowitz camp as a builder, a 60-mile death march to Gleiwitz, and a freezing five-day journey in open cattle trucks to Buchenwald, his fellows dying around him. On 11 April 1945, he looked out of the barracks and saw no SS guards. They knew the Allies were arriving and had fled. When the Americans arrived, they found that despite gangrene and a thousands and semi-starvation, the only permanent physical damage the loss of a toe.
Leon was one of only two Dutch Jews to survive from the initial transport to Westerbork. And back in Rotterdam, bar his father and stepmother, he found nobody and nothing to keep him. They took a ship to Gravesend, where he was reunited with his brothers, Morry and and Charlie.
Leon became a market trader in London, sang professionally as Leon Maure, and most of all poured his energies into telling the story of his life … and of the lives brutally ended. “I started talking about this in 1946 and I’m still talking,” says Leon.
With so much good done, his passing shouldn’t be a cause for sadness. Rather, we should celebrate a life lived well … and ensure his message isn’t forgotten.
*The full recording of a talk Leon Greenman gave two years ago, documenting his story in detail, can be found on the web at http://www.irespect.net/Holocaust/. He has published two books: Leon Greenman, Auschwitz Survivor 98288: A Resource for Holocaust Education (ISBN 0-9511613-8-5) and An Englishman in Auschwitz (ISBN 0-85303-424-9).