Jack Kagan’s groundbreaking research after the war and his tenacity and drive to erect one of the first memorials to Jewish victims in Soviet-dominated territory is a lasting legacy. Jack Kagan, who as a young boy had escaped a labour camp by tunnelling his way out with other prisoners and joined the Jewish partisans deep in the woods of Eastern Europe. It was not easy for him, but he felt he owed it to his father whose last words to him had been ‘to try and stay alive’. When lecturing, Solly always stood behind a chair, using it as a barrier and a grip to hold on to as he bore witness. He spoke about the terrible dilemma of having to leave his sister behind, in order to survive. Solly Irving a young boy when war broke out. Some of the people interviewed have passed away and their stories live on in our galleries and through the thousands of people they have inspired through their lectures: Other survivor stories are highlighted in the Holocaust Gallery through testimony films. To date, it might be the earliest known English spoken testimony. The BBC interviewed him in 1945 and the Jewish Museum has the record of this particular interview that was never broadcast. Leon kept his promise and started speaking about his experiences immediately and continued to speak out until his death in 2008. His wife Else and son Barney had been murdered straight after waving goodbye on that bitterly cold January day in 1943. Leon endured the infamous death march in January 1945 and ended up in Buchenwald where he was liberated.
Selections, hard labour, hunger, weakness, illnesses and fear. This was the beginning of 18 months of camp life. He had been forcibly separated from his wife Else and their two year old son Barney. When he made his promise, Leon was lying in his bunk after arriving in Auschwitz Birkenau from Westerbork Camp. In Leon’s case, they were the only things he managed to retrieve and were a painful reminder of love, happiness, family, loss and trauma.
Holocaust remembrance day 2021 events archive#
Leon’s archive and personal artefacts are a visual testimony of lives altered and destroyed by the events of the Holocaust – everyday items that in our throwaway society would unlikely to have been kept. The Jewish Museum London’s permanent Holocaust gallery has been telling the story of Leon Greenman story since 1996. “I promised to tell the outside world of the evils of the Nazis so no further generation could repeat the mistake.”
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