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Via ▲☾I'm Not Who You Think☾▲
This is Leslie Kleinman, the Holocaust survivor whom gave us an extraordinary speech yesterday.
He told us of how his best friends turned against him due to inaccurate propaganda, how he got bullied at school for having side-locks, how, at the age of 13, he saw his Rabbi father get deported. He went onto explain how he was boarded onto a frieght train as human cargo, with on average 100 people occupying a single carriage. On arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau he told us how he got seperated from his mother and 7 siblings, only to later find out that they had all been led to the gas chambers. He explained how shortly after arriving at Auschwitz he queued up for 4 hours only to become tattooed and then known only as “8230”, and how he lost his only possession - a bible given to him by his father at his bar mitzvah, which was replaced by a set of striped pyjamas.
He went on to explain how he coped with the hardships of being a prisoner of war; how he saw his close friends get shot or brutalised for absolutely no reason at all, how he considered himself lucky to have only gotten 30 lashes for taking too long in the toilet, how he saw people of his own heritage burnt alive.
He explained how he was barely able to stay alive in the winter months when the temperature could reach -25°, how, even after he was liberated, he was sent on a death march, after which he lived in a forrest for 3 months before being found by a fellow Jew and taken to a convent to live.
It took Leslie 62 years before he was able to speak about his experiences, and even now he bears no grudges at all, he even went on to marry a German.
The single most important message that Leslie wanted us to take away from his story was ‘to treat everybody as an equal, in order to stop prejudice’.
This is the single most amazing and inspiring man that I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, I can’t describe in words how amazing I think this man is; after all that he has been through in life, he still has a twinkle in his eye, and is able to speak out about the importance of treating everybody as an equal, although he claimed that as a prisoner of war, a fly was considered of more importance than a Jew.



