‘Too many people still believe these are hoaxes’
Canadian Holocaust survivor shares his story
MONTREAL — There are those who choose to forget their painful pasts. Not Roman Lesniak. He wants to remember. More importantly, he wants the world to remember, particularly the young.
Lesniak, 98, is said to be the last Canadian survivor from Schindler’s List. He remembers just about every shocking detail about surviving the Holocaust. Save for his nowdeceased older brother Stefan, also on Schindler’s List, he lost his immediate family during the Holocaust.
Lesniak also vividly remembers his various interactions with industrialist Oskar Schindler, both during and after the Second World War.
“Schindler was a most complex man,” Lesniak recalls. “He had been a Nazi and a spy. He had big drinking problems. He made fortunes at his factories, but he was left penniless, because he had spent everything in bribing the SS. Yet he and his wife, Emilie, were solely responsible for protecting and saving more than 1,100 Jews, and my brother and I were two of them. If it wasn’t for their noble actions, I believe no more than 10 per cent of the 1,100 would have survived. That explains why he was the only former Nazi to be honoured by being buried in Jerusalem’s Mount Zion cemetery, after his death in Germany.”
Lesniak was there for the funeral in 1974 and had made a pact with other List survivors to honour Schindler’s memory by returning every 10 years to his gravesite.
“And so we did, but at the last tribute in 2014, I was the only List survivor there. It brought such tears to my eyes.”
Lesniak had also been part of a group of List survivors to donate funds to Schindler to keep him going in his final, faltering years.
Lesniak has seen Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List” three times: “35 per cent accurate, 65 per cent Hollywood, but at least he got the message out.”
Still, being saved on Schindler’s List was but one of the chapters of Lesniak’s extraordinary survival ordeal.
He was 17 when the Nazis occupied his Polish birth city of Krakow in 1939.
“A year after the occupation began, 20,000 out of Krakow’s 60,000 Jews were sent to the ghetto. The remaining 40,000 were sent to the gas chambers. Stefan and I were selected to work in the ghetto. We remained in labour and concentration camps for the next six years, working 12 hours a day with little food. Those who grew sick or weak were taken away to the gas chambers.”
Lesniak still recalls each destination: “The Krakow ghetto, Bonarka labour camp, Rakowice, Plaszow concentration camp and GrossRosen concentration camp. After Bonarka, we were transferred back to the Krakow ghetto.”
It was at the Krakow ghetto where he first encountered Schindler, making pots and pans at his enamel factory there. A few years and several camps later, Lesniak and Stefan ended up at another Schindler labour camp, a munitions factory in Brunnlitz, in what was then Czechoslovakia.
“We remained there under threat of Nazi terror until finally being liberated on May 8, 1945, by the Russian army in Schindler’s factory. We were set free. At midnight that evening, Schindler addressed the List survivors: ‘I give you back your freedom and your names. You can go anywhere you want as free people. And me, the hunter is now the hunted.’ And he was.”
Lesniak may have been set free, but he was very much traumatized by the deaths of his parents and younger sister.
“My eight-year-old sister was taken to Auschwitz for crude experimentation. Then she was shot to death. My mother died in a Belzec extermination-camp crematorium. My father was executed in a ditch in Plaszow, after being shot and then burned to death.
“Luckily, Stefan and I were never separated.”
After being liberated, they headed back to Poland in the hope that some of their family had survived. Out of more than 100 family members in Poland, only two cousins from their mother’s side and one cousin from their father’s side were still alive.
In 1948, Lesniak and Stefan left for Israel and joined the Israeli army. In 1952, they went to England to hook up with an uncle and worked in construction. A year later, the brothers moved to Montreal and started their own construction company.
Lesniak married in 1954. He and his wife, Bernice, had two children, Grace and Irwin. Bernice died in 1994 and Grace in 2004, both succumbing to cancer.
Lesniak kept working fulltime until eight years ago. He continues to live on his own, drives, golfs regularly and even played tennis, biked and fished until recently.
“My goal now is to tell my story in the hope people will remember atrocities of the past, not just what I went through but all atrocities, regardless of the race or religion of those affected. Too many people still believe these are hoaxes. No one can ever tell me what happened during the Holocaust was a hoax. I was there.
“I know it’s sometimes considered a cliché, but I believe the Churchill line that those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. That is my greatest fear ... Never again!”
“My eight-year-old sister was taken to Auschwitz for crude experimentation. Then she was shot to death. My mother died in a Belzec extermination-camp crematorium. My father was executed in a ditch in Plaszow, after being shot and then burned to death.” Roman Lesniak Last Canadian survivor from Schindler’s List