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, Bretholz 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. Bretholz 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. On November 11, 1938, he arrived in
Antwerp, Belgium, where he stayed for a peaceful eighteen months, and went to a public trade school to become an electrician as an alternative to being sent to an internment camp. During that time, Bretholz 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, being an Austrian – and thus, because of the
Anschluss, German – citizen, Bretholz became an enemy to Belgium. 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, where he stayed 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. With his cousin Albert Hershkowitz he walked across the Swiss border in October 1942 under the name
Paul Meunier, only to be stopped by a Swiss mountain patrol and sent back to France. There 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. On November 5, 1942, Bretholz was deported on convoy 42 with 1000 others headed for Auschwitz. With his friend Manfred Silberwasser he escaped through the window and leaped off the train. and
See You Again Soon. Until his death in 2014, he lived in
Pikesville, Maryland, and was a regular speaker at a range of venues, including the annual Holocaust Remembrance Project, and a number of schools. == Fight for SNCF Reparations ==