On Monday July 15, at 1:30 p.m., the eve of the Vél d’Hiv Roundup commemorations, Léon Lewkowicz, 94, survivor of the Shoah, will carry the Olympic flame to Paris.
Deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau at age 15, he survived the Death Marches. When he returned, Léon weighed 33 kilos. He then made this promise to himself: no one would terrorize him again. He would become the strongest man in France and thus became, at the age of 19, French weightlifting champion.
75 years later, still a sports fan and unconditional Olympic Games fan, Léon dreamed of carrying the Olympic flame.
The collective memory of the Shoah disappears like the ink of his deportation number fades, but he affirmed it and promised: “Survivor of the death marches, it is not the 200 meters of the Olympic relay which me will stop.”
Let us be many at his side!
LEON AND THE DOSE
Léon Lewkowicz was born in Lodz (Poland) in 1930. He was ten years old when he entered the city’s ghetto, he was fourteen at the Birkenau camp and fifteen when he arrived in France.
Léon is part of the group of 426 young people from Buchenwald welcomed by the children’s relief organization (OSE) in June 1945 in Écouis (Eure), with Elie Wiesel, Meir Lau (future chief rabbi of Israel), or Élie Buzyn who left us last year. He is alone in the world, alone with memories that prevent him from leaving hell.
No matter, he throws himself into life, tries to rebuild himself in the secure, socializing OSE houses where he learns to smile again: a few months in Ferrières-en-Brie with the Rothschilds where he meets André Glucksmann, some time of absolute idleness in Bellevue, a detour via Vésinet, then Champigny, the home of her heart, that of first loves. But above all, he met Maurice Brauch, the sports instructor who organized the interhouse competitions. Having also returned from the camps, he taught him how to use his muscles and do gymnastic figures. Very quickly, he knew how to do freeboard pull-ups on his fingers at Saint-Quay-Portrieux, the OSE summer camp, he knew how to carry a young girl in the air at arm’s length. The path of life opens to him.
Emancipated at 18, he made it his mother’s saying: “blessed are the hands that make themselves”.
Through hard work and perseverance, in 1955 he became the French weightlifting champion (but could not participate in the Olympic Games because he was not yet French) and specialized in jewelry with the title, in 1978, of Master craftsman crimper, Best Workman in France, then member of the National Jury of National Education.
He took his revenge on life, to be the strongest. His mother can be proud of him.
Katy Hazan, historian at the OSE
Léon Lewkowicz, Katy Hazan, Abi gezunt, As long as you have health! Memoirs of a Polish Jewish child, The Manuscript, 2022