Leon Greenman was the only British-born Jew to be deported to Auschwitz and to come back. He was forty two when he was liberated from Buchenwald in April 1945. He spent the next sixty years working as a market trader in London, raising no family because the family he had had been murdered in Auschwitz, and giving testimony to anyone who would listen, which by the end of his life was a great many.
Greenman was born in Whitechapel in east London on 18 December 1910. The family moved to Rotterdam when he was a small child. He grew up Dutch, married Esther van Dam in Rotterdam in 1935, and had a son, Barney, born in March 1940. Greenman had retained his British citizenship, and at the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 he tried to register the family with the British consulate. The consulate had been evacuated. The family was trapped.
The Greenmans were deported from Westerbork on the same train, on 18 January 1943. They reached Auschwitz on the third day. Esther and three-year-old Barney were sent to the gas chambers on arrival. Leon was selected for slave labour because he was a fit twenty-eight-year-old man with a barber’s manual skill. He spent two years in Auschwitz III Monowitz on slave labour for IG Farben. He was on the death march out of Auschwitz in January 1945 and reached Buchenwald, where he was liberated on 11 April 1945 by American troops.
He returned to London in 1946. He never remarried. He worked at the East Lane market in Walworth selling clothes for forty years. From the late 1970s onwards, when the British National Party began to organise on the streets of east London where he lived, he started carrying his Auschwitz tattoo to public meetings. He stood up in the question sessions and showed it. He took on the deniers in his own neighbourhood. He spent the last twenty years of his life giving testimony in British schools, sometimes more than two hundred talks a year, on a programme run by the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Anne Frank Trust.
His memoir An Englishman in Auschwitz was published in 2001. The Jewish Museum in London opened a permanent Leon Greenman gallery in 2003. The Anne Frank Trust gave him their inaugural Award for Moral Courage in 2005. The Queen appointed him Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1998. He died in London on 7 March 2008 at the age of ninety seven.
Greenman’s case is unusual not because he was British by birth, although that mattered for the official record, but because he chose to use his last decades for direct confrontation with British antisemites. The men he met at the meetings of the British National Party in the 1980s and 1990s were the descendants in spirit of the men who had murdered his wife and his three-year-old son. He carried the tattoo into their meetings and made them look at it. The work he did is part of why postwar British antisemitism stayed fringe rather than mainstream. He is owed for that as well as for the survival.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards