Leo Bretholz
| Leo Bretholz | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
March 6, 1921 Vienna, Austria |
| Died | March 8, 2014 (aged 93) Pikesville, Maryland |
| Spouse(s) | Florine Cohen (m. 1952–2009; her death) |
| Children | Three |
Leo Bretholz (March 6, 1921 – March 8, 2014) was a Holocaust survivor who, in 1942, escaped from a train heading for Auschwitz. He has also written a book on his experiences, titled Leap into Darkness.
He escaped seven times during the Holocaust.
Leo Bretholz was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 6, 1921. His father, Max Bretholz, was a Polish immigrant who worked as a tailor and died in 1930. His Mother, Dora (Fischmann) Bretholz, also Polish, was born in 1891 and worked as a seamstress. He had two younger sisters, Henny and Edith (Ditta).
After the Anschluss in March 1938, many of his relatives were arrested. At his mother’s insistence, he fled on a train to Trier, Germany, where he was met by a smuggler. He swam across the Sauer River into Luxembourg, where he spent five nights in a Franciscan monastery. He was arrested two days later in a coffee shop and chose to be taken to the Belgian border over arrest or being sent back to Germany. He arrived in Antwerp, Belgium, on November 11, 1938. He stayed in Antwerp for a peaceful eighteen months where he went to a public trade school to become an electrician as an alternative to being sent to an internment camp. He learned to speak Dutch. On May 9, 1940, he entered a hospital in Antwerp to have surgery on a hernia, but Antwerp was bombed the next morning before he could be operated on. Upon being discharged from the hospital, he was arrested as an enemy alien. Now that the war had reached Antwerp, he was an enemy to Belgium because he was an Austrian (now German) citizen. He was sent to St. Cyprien, an internment camp near the Spanish border. His friend Leon Osterreicher came to visit him and instructed him to escape by climbing under the camp’s fence. While living with distant relatives nearby, he was sent to an assigned residence in Cauterets, France, near the Pyrenees Mountains. He stayed at this residence for eight to ten months until on August 26, 1941, when the deportation began from this town. Upon a warning from the mayor of Luchon, he hid with his uncle overnight in the Pyrenees, returning the next day to find half of the ghetto’s population deported. He walked across the Swiss border with his cousin Albert Hershkowitz in October 1942, under the name Paul Meunier, only to be stopped by a Swiss Mountain Patrol and sent back to France. He was sent to the Rivesaltes internment camp where he remained for two weeks before being sent to Drancy, a large-scale deportation camp in the suburbs of Paris.
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