Home
At age 16, Leon Kahn hid with his brother and watched the rapes and murders of women; the brutal murders of children.
In 1925, Leon Kahn was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Eisiskes, Poland (today in Lithuania) as Leon Kaganowicz. He left his shtetl (village) and fought with the partisans against the Nazis after his village was first occupied by the Russians.
First, the Nazis wouldn't allow his people to walk on the sidewalks; they could only walk in the gutters. Belongings were confiscated, yellow stars of David had to be worn. Most of his village's 5,000 people were eventually killed. The majority of the Jewish inhabitants were murdered by Lithuanian members of the Einsatzgruppen. Kahn and his brother fled to the nearby Radun ghetto where their family had managed to escape earlier. When the ghetto was liquidated in May 1942, Leon's family hid in an attic but was soon discovered. His father escaped, while his mother stayed behind with his grandmother. They were probably deported to Treblinka and murdered by gas.
At age sixteen, when Leon was forced into hiding with his brother Benjamin, they found a place to sleep in a tangle of bushes, close to a wall, in the oldest part of the cemetery, next to the gravel pit. They heard a rumble of field wagons approaching. Concealed in the bushes, they peered over the wall and watched an unbelievable parade as the women and children of Eisiskes were herded along the road by Lithuanian police, whipped and beaten to move them faster.
When the cavalcade arrived at the gravel pit, and the police barked orders, separating the women from the children, they saw an aunt, a cousin and a neighbour. They were much relieved not to see their mother, grandmother and sister. Kahn recalls:
"The women were taken in groups of a hundred or so down the path into the gravel pit. When they reached the point where the bushes that grew there would hide them from the sight of the others, the women were made to strip naked, and pile their clothing nearby. Then many of those who were young were separated from the others and dragged into the bushes to be raped and raped again by soldier after soldier and policeman after policeman. At last, they were dragged off to join the others, marched to the bottom of the gravel pit, lined up and coldly shot to death by the Lithuanian killers.
"I clung to the edge of the cemetery wall, as horror welled up within me. I wanted to hide, to run screaming from the cemetery, to make this hideous thing end. Didn’t they know what they were doing? These were human lives! These were people, not animals to be slaughtered!
"My mouth opened to scream, but I could not. I wanted to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close.
"'Don’t look, Leibkie! [Leon] Don’t look,' Benjamin sobbed, and pulled at me to make me leave the wall.
"I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t stop looking. I saw the Lithuanians shoot the breasts off some of the women, and shoot others in the genitals, saw them leave others with arms and legs mutilated to die in agony, and some to smother as the next load of bodies fell upon them. I saw my aunt die in a volley of gunfire. I saw my beautiful cousin raped and raped until death must have been the only thing she longed for.
"My fingers slipped from the wall and I fell beside my brother, retching and sobbing. He clung to me."
Leon Kahn then describes how the Lithuanians proceeded to slaughter the children that remained, all of them. Some were shot. Many others were dashed to pieces by smashing their heads on granite boulders, one by one.
To give their lives meaning, the boys fled to the forest and fought with the partisans against the Nazis. As a teenager, Leon Kaganowicz became an expert at blowing up trains. His brother was killed by Lithuanian collaborators; his father and sister were killed by members of the Polish Home Army. When the Soviet Army eventually liberated the area, Leon spent two months catching Germans and sending them to POW camps or else killing them on the spot.
Both Russian and American forces detained Kahn until they could verify that he was not an enemy alien. In September, he returned to Eisiskes but found no one from his family. Leon was enrolled in a KGB school in Vilnius but after three months he ran away. He managed to get over the border to Lodz, Poland and from there went to a Displaced Persons camp in Salzburg, Austria. He survived and immigrated in 1948 to Vancouver, managing to pose as a tailor. He poignantly recalled:
"In the fall of 1948, I arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia as a refugee. I spoke no English, but this didn't worry me because I already spoke Polish, Lithuanian and Yiddish, and could make myself understood in Russian and German. I knew I could learn one more language. I was told that the best place to learn English was the movie theatre, so night after night I sat listening and watching as the famous lips of Hollywood moved and formed words for me to copy. It's surprising how well this system worked.
"One evening, after the last show was over, I came out the back door of the Capitol Theatre onto Seymour Street. The street was quite deserted, except for two drunks coming noisily along the sidewalk toward me. For a moment I watched them approach; then I crossed the sidewalk and stood in the gutter, hoping they wouldn't notice me. But they did.
"Still arguing drunkenly, they paused to look at me, obviously surprised at what I had done. Then off they went again down the street, shouting and shoving one another. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry! Neither of them had made a move to strike me. They hadn't called me names. They hadn't even understood why I was standing in the gutter!
"Where I had come from, no drunk ever forgot--even when he forgot his own name--that Jews were there to be beaten, abused and thrown in the gutter."
Leon Kahn eventually worked successfully in real estate, and died on June 8, 2003.
As told to Marjorie Morris, with editing by Betty Keller, Kahn's posthumous memoir No Time To Mourn: The True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter (Ronsdale, 2004) was originally self-published in 1979 under his private imprint of Laurelton Press when he was a middle-aged businessman in Vancouver. It was dedicated to his 24 relatives (including his mother, father, sister, brother and grandmother) who were killed by the Nazis and all listed at the outset.
"I remember Kahn telling me that when he was in that DP camp in Salzburg," recalls his editor Betty Keller, "he worked the Black Market and amassed a small fortune, but when he was accepted for Canada, he gave it all away because he was told the streets here were paved with gold. He arrived with just a few buckets in his pocket and was a little disappointed to find that Vancouver’s streets were just the ordinary kind. When I met him, he had a huge office in the building that is kitty-cornered to Christ Church Cathedral at Georgia and Burrard."
In old age, Kahn recounted some of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor for the documentary film, Unlikely Heroes: Stories of Jewish Resistance (2004), produced by Moriah Films, the media wing of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. Its founder and former dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier, was a rabbi emeritus of Vancouver's Schara Tzedeck Synagogue for fifteen years.
Kahn was a founding member of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and a founding funder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, as cited in a revealing, biographical summary from the Jewish Independent:
"In 1952, Leon Kahn travelled to New York to meet some relatives for the first time and, while there, attended a dance for Jewish newcomers, where he met Evelyn Landsman, a Bronx girl with Eishishkes roots. They married, Evelyn moved to Vancouver with Leon, and they had four children, Mark, Charlene, Hodie and Saul. (Charlene, who was born with severe developmental disabilities, passed away in 1966.) After they married, Leon Kahn scoped out an unlikely business niche for a Jew — Christmas trees — but his entrepreneurial spirit made a go of it and the business flourished. It was on a Christmas tree lot in 1957 that Kahn met a man who would change his life forever.
"Henry Block was a partner in the emerging local real estate giant Block Brothers. Spotting a talent for sales, Block asked Kahn to come work for him. Beginning as an entry-level commercial real estate agent, Kahn finally met his match. He wasn't very good at it. Block refused to acknowledge defeat, however, and pushed Kahn over to the construction wing of the company, offering the advice that, to cover up Kahn's initial ignorance of the construction industry, he should walk around confidently opening and shutting a tape measure.
"Block Brothers became Western Canada's largest real estate firm and Kahn would become president of its construction division before parting amicably to start his own firm. Among Kahn's most notable projects were the Vancouver Show Mart Building and the Seattle Trade Centre. Leon Kahn's son, Saul, told the Bulletin that being his family's sole survivor of the Holocaust gave Leon a special purpose and perspective in life. ‘He always felt that he survived the war because he was meant to give of himself to the community,’ said Saul Kahn. Infused by a deep sense of obligation mixed with an overwhelming guilt at surviving while the rest of his family did not, Leon Kahn's outlook was unique, said his son. He avoided the trappings of wealth that many of his station exhibited and devoted himself to community service and providing for his own family."
Kahn's beneficiaries included Jewish and secular causes devoted to Holocaust education, medical research, health care, as well as the Jewish Family Service Agency, the B.C. Lung Foundation, the B.C. Cancer Foundation and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.
BOOKS:
No Time To Mourn: The True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter (Laurelton Press 1978; Ronsdale 2004)
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
Second longer entry for Out of Hiding: The Holocaust Literature of British Columbia (2021).
KAHN, Leon
“It is the duty of the survivor to speak of his experience and share it with his friends and contemporaries. Leon Kahn’s story is poignant and its message eloquent.”—Elie Wiesel
Leon Kahn’s life story reads more like Jerzy Kosinski’s harrowing 1965 novel The Painted Bird than an autobiography. Of all the various memoirs in book format from British Columbia-based survivors, few come anywhere near to being as consistently riveting and alarming.
As a boy growing up in the village of “shtetl” of Eisiskes, near the Lithuanian/Polish border, Liebke Kaganowicz—later known as Leon Kahn in Vancouver—was a straight-A student who gorged himself on Tarzan comic books when the reality of the German occupation became too horrible to accept. “I was sure that if I believed hard enough and willed it to be happen with every ounce of concentration I could muster, I could transport myself to Tarzan’s jungle paradise.” Possibly this devotion to fantastical feats and death-defying actions in a fantasy world explains, as much as anything else, why Kahn survived his serial escapades from 1939 to 1948.
Eisiskes was in Poland in 1939 when Russian Communists successfully took control. In June of 1941, the Nazis invaded, abetted by Lithuanians who welcomed the Germans as allies. Soon the Polish Jews could not walk on the sidewalks; they could only walk in the gutters. Yellow stars of David had to be worn, belongings were confiscated and ultimately most of the 5,000 people in the village were murdered by Lithuanian collaborators of the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary mobile killing units).
*
Born in 1925 into an Orthodox Jewish family, Liebke (Leon) Kaganowicz (Kahn) took refuge with his family in the nearby Radun ghetto until it was liquidated in May of 1942. Most of Leon’s family hid in an attic but were soon discovered. His father escaped, while his mother stayed behind with his grandmother. Later, his mother would disappear, probably deported to Treblinka and murdered by gas.
At age sixteen, when Leon was forced into hiding with his brother Benjamin, they found a place to sleep in a tangle of bushes, close to a wall, in the oldest part of the cemetery, next to the gravel pit. They heard a rumble of field wagons approaching. Concealed in the bushes, they peered over the wall and watched an unbelievable parade as the women and children of Eisiskes were herded along the road by Lithuanian police, whipped and beaten to move them faster.
When the cavalcade arrived at the gravel pit, and the police barked orders, separating the women from the children, they saw an aunt, a cousin and a neighbour. They were much relieved not to see their mother, grandmother and sister. Kahn recalls:
The women were taken in groups of a hundred or so down the path into the gravel pit. When they reached the point where the bushes that grew there would hide them from the sight of the others, the women were made to strip naked, and pile their clothing nearby. Then many of those who were young were separated from the others and dragged into the bushes to be raped and raped again by soldier after soldier and policeman after policeman. At last, they were dragged off to join the others, marched to the bottom of the gravel pit, lined up and coldly shot to death by the Lithuanian killers.
I clung to the edge of the cemetery wall, as horror welled up within me. I wanted to hide, to run screaming from the cemetery, to make this hideous thing end. Didn’t they know what they were doing? These were human lives! These were people, not animals to be slaughtered!
My mouth opened to scream, but I could not. I wanted to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close.
“Don’t look, Leibkie! [Leon] Don’t look,” Benjamin sobbed, and pulled at me to make me leave the wall.
I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t stop looking. I saw the Lithuanians shoot the breasts off some of the women, and shoot others in the genitals, saw them leave others with arms and legs mutilated to die in agony, and some to smother as the next load of bodies fell upon them. I saw my aunt die in a volley of gunfire. I saw my beautiful cousin raped and raped until death must have been the only thing she longed for.
My fingers slipped from the wall and I fell beside my brother, retching and sobbing. He clung to me.
Leon Kahn then describes how the Lithuanians proceeded to slaughter the children that remained, all of them. Some were shot. Many others were dashed to pieces by smashing their heads on granite boulders, one by one.
Horrors persisted. These included forced labour in the ghetto of Radun, collecting and burying corpses, sorting the clothing of murder victims he knew, cleaning up after massacres. Chopping wood and cleaning toilets for the Germans. “In my heart, I was still convinced that the only refuge for us was the forest. Throughout the nightmares of Eisiskes and Radun, I had longed to flee to its safety, feeling that there at least I could find some means of defence. Even if I lived as the animals lived, I could die there with the dignity of a man. Part of this feeling that the forest was the right place to go came from my boyhood idolization of Tarzan, of course.”
It is an odd experience for a reader to told be by a good man how and why he was obliged to commit two murders, killing two German guards silently with a knife, in order to flee terror of imminent deportment to a concentration. He vomits after each murder but proceeds to led his weakening father and brother and little sister on a nightmarish journey through the winter forests and snow-laden fields, through a bizarre litany of traumas.
To give their lives meaning, the boys eventually fought with the partisans against the Nazis. As a teenager, Liebke Kaganowicz became an expert at blowing up trains. His brother was killed by Lithuanian collaborators; his father and sister were killed by members of the Polish Home Army. When the Soviet Army eventually liberated the area, Liebke/Leon spent two months catching Germans and sending them to POW camps or else killing them on the spot.
Both Russian and American forces detained Kaganowicz until they could verify that he was not an enemy alien. In September, he returned to Eisiskes but found no one from his family. He was enrolled in a KGB school in Vilnius but after three months he ran away and managed to get over the border to Lodz, Poland. From there he went to a Displaced Persons camp in Salzburg, Austria. In the fall of 1948, he was among 1,800 refugee immigrants who sailed on the American troopship S.S. Stewart to Halifax. He could not comprehend how it could possibly take five nights and six days to reach his destination by train. Managing to pose as a tailor, he immigrated to Vancouver and started a new life as Leon Kahn. There his memoir ends.
He later recalled: “I spoke no English, but this didn’t worry me because I already spoke Polish, Lithuanian and Yiddish, and could make myself understood in Russian and German. I knew I could learn one more language. I was told that the best place to learn English was the movie theatre, so night after night I sat listening and watching as the famous lips of Hollywood moved and formed words for me to copy. It’s surprising how well this system worked.
“One evening, after the last show was over, I came out the back door of the Capitol Theatre onto Seymour Street. The street was quite deserted, except for two drunks coming noisily along the sidewalk toward me. For a moment I watched them approach; then I crossed the sidewalk and stood in the gutter, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. But they did.
“Still arguing drunkenly, they paused to look at me, obviously surprised at what I had done. Then off they went again down the street, shouting and shoving one another. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry! Neither of them had made a move to strike me. They hadn’t called me names. They hadn’t even understood why I was standing in the gutter! Where I had come from, no drunk ever forgot—even when he forgot his own name—that Jews were there to be beaten, abused and thrown in the gutter!”
Leon Kahn eventually worked successfully in real estate. Originally self-published in 1979 under his imprint of Laurelton Press, Kahn’s posthumous memoir No Time To Mourn: The True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter (Ronsdale, 2004), as told to Marjorie Morris, was edited by Betty Keller. It was dedicated to his 24 relatives (including his mother, father, sister, brother and grandmother) who were killed by the Nazis. All are listed at the outset.
“I remember Kahn telling me that when he was in that DP camp in Salzburg,” Keller recalls, “he worked the Black Market and amassed a small fortune, but when he was accepted for Canada, he gave it all away because he was told the streets here were paved with gold. He arrived with just a few dollars in his pocket and was a little disappointed to find that Vancouver’s streets were just the ordinary kind. When I met him, he had a huge office in the building that is kitty-cornered to Christ Church Cathedral at Georgia and Burrard.”
The Jewish Independent once provided a synopsis as to how he rose from poverty:
“In 1952, Leon Kahn travelled to New York to meet some relatives for the first time and, while there, attended a dance for Jewish newcomers, where he met Evelyn Landsman, a Bronx girl with Eishishkes roots. They married, Evelyn moved to Vancouver with Leon, and they had four children, Mark, Charlene, Hodie and Saul. (Charlene, who was born with severe developmental disabilities, passed away in 1966.) After they married, Leon Kahn scoped out an unlikely business niche for a Jew—Christmas trees—but his entrepreneurial spirit made a go of it and the business flourished. It was on a Christmas tree lot in 1957 that Kahn met a man who would change his life forever.
“Henry Block was a partner in the emerging local real estate giant Block Brothers. Spotting a talent for sales, Block asked Kahn to come work for him. Beginning as an entry-level commercial real estate agent, Kahn finally met his match. He wasn’t very good at it. Block refused to acknowledge defeat, however, and pushed Kahn over to the construction wing of the company, offering the advice that, to cover up Kahn’s initial ignorance of the construction industry, he should walk around confidently opening and shutting a tape measure.
“Block Brothers became Western Canada’s largest real estate firm and Kahn would become president of its construction division before parting amicably to start his own firm. Among Kahn’s most notable projects were the Vancouver Show Mart Building and the Seattle Trade Centre. Leon Kahn’s son, Saul, told the Bulletin that being his family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust gave Leon a special purpose and perspective in life. ‘He always felt that he survived the war because he was meant to give of himself to the community,’ Saul Kahn explained.
“Infused by a deep sense of obligation mixed with an overwhelming guilt at surviving while the rest of his family did not, Leon Kahn’s outlook was unique, said his son. He avoided the trappings of wealth that many of his station exhibited and devoted himself to community service and providing for his own family.”
In old age, Kahn recounted some of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor for the documentary film, Unlikely Heroes: Stories of Jewish Resistance (2004), produced by Moriah Films, the media wing of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
Leon Kahn died on June 8, 2003. His beneficiaries included Jewish and secular causes devoted to Holocaust education, medical research, health care, as well as the Jewish Family Service Agency, the B.C. Lung Foundation, the B.C. Cancer Foundation and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.
Leon Kahn was forever haunted by the question, “Why me? Why did I survive when so many others died?” Long torn by guilt and anguish, he took some solace from what Golda Meir once told a group of survivors. “You can get used to anything if you have to. Even to feeling perpetually guilty. It is a small price to pay for being alive.”
In a moving Epilogue, Kahn described the many ways the Holocaust could haunt him—such as stopping his car at a railway crossing, waiting for a freight train to pass, unable not to think of his mother and grandmother inside a cattle car to Treblinka.
“I remember lying in the tall rye grass near the forest in the summer of 1943,” he writes, “waiting for the night to come. A skylark soared up into the heavens, dived down, and soared up again, and I prayed to be transformed into a bird like that. How marvellous to have wings and fly straight into the heavens leaving all my miseries and terrors behind! I lay there willing myself into that bird’s form, just as I had tried to will myself far from Eisiskes long before. But the bird flew away and night came again.”
In 1925, Leon Kahn was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Eisiskes, Poland (today in Lithuania) as Leon Kaganowicz. He left his shtetl (village) and fought with the partisans against the Nazis after his village was first occupied by the Russians.
First, the Nazis wouldn't allow his people to walk on the sidewalks; they could only walk in the gutters. Belongings were confiscated, yellow stars of David had to be worn. Most of his village's 5,000 people were eventually killed. The majority of the Jewish inhabitants were murdered by Lithuanian members of the Einsatzgruppen. Kahn and his brother fled to the nearby Radun ghetto where their family had managed to escape earlier. When the ghetto was liquidated in May 1942, Leon's family hid in an attic but was soon discovered. His father escaped, while his mother stayed behind with his grandmother. They were probably deported to Treblinka and murdered by gas.
At age sixteen, when Leon was forced into hiding with his brother Benjamin, they found a place to sleep in a tangle of bushes, close to a wall, in the oldest part of the cemetery, next to the gravel pit. They heard a rumble of field wagons approaching. Concealed in the bushes, they peered over the wall and watched an unbelievable parade as the women and children of Eisiskes were herded along the road by Lithuanian police, whipped and beaten to move them faster.
When the cavalcade arrived at the gravel pit, and the police barked orders, separating the women from the children, they saw an aunt, a cousin and a neighbour. They were much relieved not to see their mother, grandmother and sister. Kahn recalls:
"The women were taken in groups of a hundred or so down the path into the gravel pit. When they reached the point where the bushes that grew there would hide them from the sight of the others, the women were made to strip naked, and pile their clothing nearby. Then many of those who were young were separated from the others and dragged into the bushes to be raped and raped again by soldier after soldier and policeman after policeman. At last, they were dragged off to join the others, marched to the bottom of the gravel pit, lined up and coldly shot to death by the Lithuanian killers.
"I clung to the edge of the cemetery wall, as horror welled up within me. I wanted to hide, to run screaming from the cemetery, to make this hideous thing end. Didn’t they know what they were doing? These were human lives! These were people, not animals to be slaughtered!
"My mouth opened to scream, but I could not. I wanted to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close.
"'Don’t look, Leibkie! [Leon] Don’t look,' Benjamin sobbed, and pulled at me to make me leave the wall.
"I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t stop looking. I saw the Lithuanians shoot the breasts off some of the women, and shoot others in the genitals, saw them leave others with arms and legs mutilated to die in agony, and some to smother as the next load of bodies fell upon them. I saw my aunt die in a volley of gunfire. I saw my beautiful cousin raped and raped until death must have been the only thing she longed for.
"My fingers slipped from the wall and I fell beside my brother, retching and sobbing. He clung to me."
Leon Kahn then describes how the Lithuanians proceeded to slaughter the children that remained, all of them. Some were shot. Many others were dashed to pieces by smashing their heads on granite boulders, one by one.
To give their lives meaning, the boys fled to the forest and fought with the partisans against the Nazis. As a teenager, Leon Kaganowicz became an expert at blowing up trains. His brother was killed by Lithuanian collaborators; his father and sister were killed by members of the Polish Home Army. When the Soviet Army eventually liberated the area, Leon spent two months catching Germans and sending them to POW camps or else killing them on the spot.
Both Russian and American forces detained Kahn until they could verify that he was not an enemy alien. In September, he returned to Eisiskes but found no one from his family. Leon was enrolled in a KGB school in Vilnius but after three months he ran away. He managed to get over the border to Lodz, Poland and from there went to a Displaced Persons camp in Salzburg, Austria. He survived and immigrated in 1948 to Vancouver, managing to pose as a tailor. He poignantly recalled:
"In the fall of 1948, I arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia as a refugee. I spoke no English, but this didn't worry me because I already spoke Polish, Lithuanian and Yiddish, and could make myself understood in Russian and German. I knew I could learn one more language. I was told that the best place to learn English was the movie theatre, so night after night I sat listening and watching as the famous lips of Hollywood moved and formed words for me to copy. It's surprising how well this system worked.
"One evening, after the last show was over, I came out the back door of the Capitol Theatre onto Seymour Street. The street was quite deserted, except for two drunks coming noisily along the sidewalk toward me. For a moment I watched them approach; then I crossed the sidewalk and stood in the gutter, hoping they wouldn't notice me. But they did.
"Still arguing drunkenly, they paused to look at me, obviously surprised at what I had done. Then off they went again down the street, shouting and shoving one another. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry! Neither of them had made a move to strike me. They hadn't called me names. They hadn't even understood why I was standing in the gutter!
"Where I had come from, no drunk ever forgot--even when he forgot his own name--that Jews were there to be beaten, abused and thrown in the gutter."
Leon Kahn eventually worked successfully in real estate, and died on June 8, 2003.
As told to Marjorie Morris, with editing by Betty Keller, Kahn's posthumous memoir No Time To Mourn: The True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter (Ronsdale, 2004) was originally self-published in 1979 under his private imprint of Laurelton Press when he was a middle-aged businessman in Vancouver. It was dedicated to his 24 relatives (including his mother, father, sister, brother and grandmother) who were killed by the Nazis and all listed at the outset.
"I remember Kahn telling me that when he was in that DP camp in Salzburg," recalls his editor Betty Keller, "he worked the Black Market and amassed a small fortune, but when he was accepted for Canada, he gave it all away because he was told the streets here were paved with gold. He arrived with just a few buckets in his pocket and was a little disappointed to find that Vancouver’s streets were just the ordinary kind. When I met him, he had a huge office in the building that is kitty-cornered to Christ Church Cathedral at Georgia and Burrard."
In old age, Kahn recounted some of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor for the documentary film, Unlikely Heroes: Stories of Jewish Resistance (2004), produced by Moriah Films, the media wing of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. Its founder and former dean, Rabbi Marvin Hier, was a rabbi emeritus of Vancouver's Schara Tzedeck Synagogue for fifteen years.
Kahn was a founding member of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and a founding funder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, as cited in a revealing, biographical summary from the Jewish Independent:
"In 1952, Leon Kahn travelled to New York to meet some relatives for the first time and, while there, attended a dance for Jewish newcomers, where he met Evelyn Landsman, a Bronx girl with Eishishkes roots. They married, Evelyn moved to Vancouver with Leon, and they had four children, Mark, Charlene, Hodie and Saul. (Charlene, who was born with severe developmental disabilities, passed away in 1966.) After they married, Leon Kahn scoped out an unlikely business niche for a Jew — Christmas trees — but his entrepreneurial spirit made a go of it and the business flourished. It was on a Christmas tree lot in 1957 that Kahn met a man who would change his life forever.
"Henry Block was a partner in the emerging local real estate giant Block Brothers. Spotting a talent for sales, Block asked Kahn to come work for him. Beginning as an entry-level commercial real estate agent, Kahn finally met his match. He wasn't very good at it. Block refused to acknowledge defeat, however, and pushed Kahn over to the construction wing of the company, offering the advice that, to cover up Kahn's initial ignorance of the construction industry, he should walk around confidently opening and shutting a tape measure.
"Block Brothers became Western Canada's largest real estate firm and Kahn would become president of its construction division before parting amicably to start his own firm. Among Kahn's most notable projects were the Vancouver Show Mart Building and the Seattle Trade Centre. Leon Kahn's son, Saul, told the Bulletin that being his family's sole survivor of the Holocaust gave Leon a special purpose and perspective in life. ‘He always felt that he survived the war because he was meant to give of himself to the community,’ said Saul Kahn. Infused by a deep sense of obligation mixed with an overwhelming guilt at surviving while the rest of his family did not, Leon Kahn's outlook was unique, said his son. He avoided the trappings of wealth that many of his station exhibited and devoted himself to community service and providing for his own family."
Kahn's beneficiaries included Jewish and secular causes devoted to Holocaust education, medical research, health care, as well as the Jewish Family Service Agency, the B.C. Lung Foundation, the B.C. Cancer Foundation and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.
BOOKS:
No Time To Mourn: The True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter (Laurelton Press 1978; Ronsdale 2004)
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit
Second longer entry for Out of Hiding: The Holocaust Literature of British Columbia (2021).
KAHN, Leon
“It is the duty of the survivor to speak of his experience and share it with his friends and contemporaries. Leon Kahn’s story is poignant and its message eloquent.”—Elie Wiesel
Leon Kahn’s life story reads more like Jerzy Kosinski’s harrowing 1965 novel The Painted Bird than an autobiography. Of all the various memoirs in book format from British Columbia-based survivors, few come anywhere near to being as consistently riveting and alarming.
As a boy growing up in the village of “shtetl” of Eisiskes, near the Lithuanian/Polish border, Liebke Kaganowicz—later known as Leon Kahn in Vancouver—was a straight-A student who gorged himself on Tarzan comic books when the reality of the German occupation became too horrible to accept. “I was sure that if I believed hard enough and willed it to be happen with every ounce of concentration I could muster, I could transport myself to Tarzan’s jungle paradise.” Possibly this devotion to fantastical feats and death-defying actions in a fantasy world explains, as much as anything else, why Kahn survived his serial escapades from 1939 to 1948.
Eisiskes was in Poland in 1939 when Russian Communists successfully took control. In June of 1941, the Nazis invaded, abetted by Lithuanians who welcomed the Germans as allies. Soon the Polish Jews could not walk on the sidewalks; they could only walk in the gutters. Yellow stars of David had to be worn, belongings were confiscated and ultimately most of the 5,000 people in the village were murdered by Lithuanian collaborators of the Einsatzgruppen (paramilitary mobile killing units).
*
Born in 1925 into an Orthodox Jewish family, Liebke (Leon) Kaganowicz (Kahn) took refuge with his family in the nearby Radun ghetto until it was liquidated in May of 1942. Most of Leon’s family hid in an attic but were soon discovered. His father escaped, while his mother stayed behind with his grandmother. Later, his mother would disappear, probably deported to Treblinka and murdered by gas.
At age sixteen, when Leon was forced into hiding with his brother Benjamin, they found a place to sleep in a tangle of bushes, close to a wall, in the oldest part of the cemetery, next to the gravel pit. They heard a rumble of field wagons approaching. Concealed in the bushes, they peered over the wall and watched an unbelievable parade as the women and children of Eisiskes were herded along the road by Lithuanian police, whipped and beaten to move them faster.
When the cavalcade arrived at the gravel pit, and the police barked orders, separating the women from the children, they saw an aunt, a cousin and a neighbour. They were much relieved not to see their mother, grandmother and sister. Kahn recalls:
The women were taken in groups of a hundred or so down the path into the gravel pit. When they reached the point where the bushes that grew there would hide them from the sight of the others, the women were made to strip naked, and pile their clothing nearby. Then many of those who were young were separated from the others and dragged into the bushes to be raped and raped again by soldier after soldier and policeman after policeman. At last, they were dragged off to join the others, marched to the bottom of the gravel pit, lined up and coldly shot to death by the Lithuanian killers.
I clung to the edge of the cemetery wall, as horror welled up within me. I wanted to hide, to run screaming from the cemetery, to make this hideous thing end. Didn’t they know what they were doing? These were human lives! These were people, not animals to be slaughtered!
My mouth opened to scream, but I could not. I wanted to close my eyes, but they wouldn’t close.
“Don’t look, Leibkie! [Leon] Don’t look,” Benjamin sobbed, and pulled at me to make me leave the wall.
I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t stop looking. I saw the Lithuanians shoot the breasts off some of the women, and shoot others in the genitals, saw them leave others with arms and legs mutilated to die in agony, and some to smother as the next load of bodies fell upon them. I saw my aunt die in a volley of gunfire. I saw my beautiful cousin raped and raped until death must have been the only thing she longed for.
My fingers slipped from the wall and I fell beside my brother, retching and sobbing. He clung to me.
Leon Kahn then describes how the Lithuanians proceeded to slaughter the children that remained, all of them. Some were shot. Many others were dashed to pieces by smashing their heads on granite boulders, one by one.
Horrors persisted. These included forced labour in the ghetto of Radun, collecting and burying corpses, sorting the clothing of murder victims he knew, cleaning up after massacres. Chopping wood and cleaning toilets for the Germans. “In my heart, I was still convinced that the only refuge for us was the forest. Throughout the nightmares of Eisiskes and Radun, I had longed to flee to its safety, feeling that there at least I could find some means of defence. Even if I lived as the animals lived, I could die there with the dignity of a man. Part of this feeling that the forest was the right place to go came from my boyhood idolization of Tarzan, of course.”
It is an odd experience for a reader to told be by a good man how and why he was obliged to commit two murders, killing two German guards silently with a knife, in order to flee terror of imminent deportment to a concentration. He vomits after each murder but proceeds to led his weakening father and brother and little sister on a nightmarish journey through the winter forests and snow-laden fields, through a bizarre litany of traumas.
To give their lives meaning, the boys eventually fought with the partisans against the Nazis. As a teenager, Liebke Kaganowicz became an expert at blowing up trains. His brother was killed by Lithuanian collaborators; his father and sister were killed by members of the Polish Home Army. When the Soviet Army eventually liberated the area, Liebke/Leon spent two months catching Germans and sending them to POW camps or else killing them on the spot.
Both Russian and American forces detained Kaganowicz until they could verify that he was not an enemy alien. In September, he returned to Eisiskes but found no one from his family. He was enrolled in a KGB school in Vilnius but after three months he ran away and managed to get over the border to Lodz, Poland. From there he went to a Displaced Persons camp in Salzburg, Austria. In the fall of 1948, he was among 1,800 refugee immigrants who sailed on the American troopship S.S. Stewart to Halifax. He could not comprehend how it could possibly take five nights and six days to reach his destination by train. Managing to pose as a tailor, he immigrated to Vancouver and started a new life as Leon Kahn. There his memoir ends.
He later recalled: “I spoke no English, but this didn’t worry me because I already spoke Polish, Lithuanian and Yiddish, and could make myself understood in Russian and German. I knew I could learn one more language. I was told that the best place to learn English was the movie theatre, so night after night I sat listening and watching as the famous lips of Hollywood moved and formed words for me to copy. It’s surprising how well this system worked.
“One evening, after the last show was over, I came out the back door of the Capitol Theatre onto Seymour Street. The street was quite deserted, except for two drunks coming noisily along the sidewalk toward me. For a moment I watched them approach; then I crossed the sidewalk and stood in the gutter, hoping they wouldn’t notice me. But they did.
“Still arguing drunkenly, they paused to look at me, obviously surprised at what I had done. Then off they went again down the street, shouting and shoving one another. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry! Neither of them had made a move to strike me. They hadn’t called me names. They hadn’t even understood why I was standing in the gutter! Where I had come from, no drunk ever forgot—even when he forgot his own name—that Jews were there to be beaten, abused and thrown in the gutter!”
Leon Kahn eventually worked successfully in real estate. Originally self-published in 1979 under his imprint of Laurelton Press, Kahn’s posthumous memoir No Time To Mourn: The True Story of a Jewish Partisan Fighter (Ronsdale, 2004), as told to Marjorie Morris, was edited by Betty Keller. It was dedicated to his 24 relatives (including his mother, father, sister, brother and grandmother) who were killed by the Nazis. All are listed at the outset.
“I remember Kahn telling me that when he was in that DP camp in Salzburg,” Keller recalls, “he worked the Black Market and amassed a small fortune, but when he was accepted for Canada, he gave it all away because he was told the streets here were paved with gold. He arrived with just a few dollars in his pocket and was a little disappointed to find that Vancouver’s streets were just the ordinary kind. When I met him, he had a huge office in the building that is kitty-cornered to Christ Church Cathedral at Georgia and Burrard.”
The Jewish Independent once provided a synopsis as to how he rose from poverty:
“In 1952, Leon Kahn travelled to New York to meet some relatives for the first time and, while there, attended a dance for Jewish newcomers, where he met Evelyn Landsman, a Bronx girl with Eishishkes roots. They married, Evelyn moved to Vancouver with Leon, and they had four children, Mark, Charlene, Hodie and Saul. (Charlene, who was born with severe developmental disabilities, passed away in 1966.) After they married, Leon Kahn scoped out an unlikely business niche for a Jew—Christmas trees—but his entrepreneurial spirit made a go of it and the business flourished. It was on a Christmas tree lot in 1957 that Kahn met a man who would change his life forever.
“Henry Block was a partner in the emerging local real estate giant Block Brothers. Spotting a talent for sales, Block asked Kahn to come work for him. Beginning as an entry-level commercial real estate agent, Kahn finally met his match. He wasn’t very good at it. Block refused to acknowledge defeat, however, and pushed Kahn over to the construction wing of the company, offering the advice that, to cover up Kahn’s initial ignorance of the construction industry, he should walk around confidently opening and shutting a tape measure.
“Block Brothers became Western Canada’s largest real estate firm and Kahn would become president of its construction division before parting amicably to start his own firm. Among Kahn’s most notable projects were the Vancouver Show Mart Building and the Seattle Trade Centre. Leon Kahn’s son, Saul, told the Bulletin that being his family’s sole survivor of the Holocaust gave Leon a special purpose and perspective in life. ‘He always felt that he survived the war because he was meant to give of himself to the community,’ Saul Kahn explained.
“Infused by a deep sense of obligation mixed with an overwhelming guilt at surviving while the rest of his family did not, Leon Kahn’s outlook was unique, said his son. He avoided the trappings of wealth that many of his station exhibited and devoted himself to community service and providing for his own family.”
In old age, Kahn recounted some of his experiences as a Holocaust survivor for the documentary film, Unlikely Heroes: Stories of Jewish Resistance (2004), produced by Moriah Films, the media wing of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
Leon Kahn died on June 8, 2003. His beneficiaries included Jewish and secular causes devoted to Holocaust education, medical research, health care, as well as the Jewish Family Service Agency, the B.C. Lung Foundation, the B.C. Cancer Foundation and the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver.
Leon Kahn was forever haunted by the question, “Why me? Why did I survive when so many others died?” Long torn by guilt and anguish, he took some solace from what Golda Meir once told a group of survivors. “You can get used to anything if you have to. Even to feeling perpetually guilty. It is a small price to pay for being alive.”
In a moving Epilogue, Kahn described the many ways the Holocaust could haunt him—such as stopping his car at a railway crossing, waiting for a freight train to pass, unable not to think of his mother and grandmother inside a cattle car to Treblinka.
“I remember lying in the tall rye grass near the forest in the summer of 1943,” he writes, “waiting for the night to come. A skylark soared up into the heavens, dived down, and soared up again, and I prayed to be transformed into a bird like that. How marvellous to have wings and fly straight into the heavens leaving all my miseries and terrors behind! I lay there willing myself into that bird’s form, just as I had tried to will myself far from Eisiskes long before. But the bird flew away and night came again.”
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Joan Givner
