Schindler’s List, Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster movie on how one Nazi businessman found his soul and saved more than one thousand Jews from the gas chambers, will be the background for a Madera Method project.
Valerie Shelton’s Historical Literacy class at Madera South High School, in collaboration with Scott Gandy’s eighth-grade Eastin-Arcola students, will use the recently found interviews with Leon Leyson, the youngest survivor of Schindler’s List, to unveil a deeply personal view of his rescue from the Nazi death camps.
Historian Bill Coate interviewed Leon Leyson in his Fullerton home. The interviews were later produced and aired by KMPH FOX26 Television. In them, Leyson offered a powerful first-person account of his life and the debt he owed to Oskar Schindler for saving him during the Holocaust.
Leyson’s story tells of his childhood in his birthplace, Narewka, Poland. When he was 10, his father moved the family to Krakow, Poland, and soon after that, the German Army invaded Poland, and life as he had known it began to crumble.
Leyson talks about being forced to move to the Krakow Ghetto and then to Plaszow, a labor camp and last stop before the journey to the death camp.
Fate, however, intervened, and industrialist Schindler moved to Krakow and bought a factory. He built his camp near his factory, and his employees, all Jews, including Leyson
and his family were moved to Schindler’s camp.
He talked about many of the close calls he had and how two of his brothers were murdered by the Nazis, but by 1945, the war had ended, and Leyson was still alive.
He came to America, where he married and became a teacher. Leyson’s full story of
how he lived to become the youngest survivor of “Schindler’s Jews” will be published by the Madera Method students in June 2025.