Stephen Shooster
Cornerstones Stephen Shooster, Author
I am humbled by the story of Leon Schagrin. He has a fantastic memory. How one man could have more painful stories then anyone I have ever met, except perhaps another survivor, makes me awestruck. I have pondered the depravity he has been through and shake my head in disbelief, the same feeling I have been warned about relating to Holocaust deniers. They will find the edges of our belief and try and peel back what happened to erase the memories of those that died. Writing this story and locking in the details with research will give you the cornerstones needed to build a foundation of knowledge. Leon is not cursed. In fact, a prayer was given to him when he was a child that he would have a long life. He is 92 now. No one predicted back then that his years would be marked by the worst crime ever committed in the name of a State. He has dedicated years to teaching about the Nazi Holocaust and the dangers of hate outliving all of the perpetrators. Survival alone is his greatest achievement. There are hundreds of Holocaust stories, but there should be over six million; that is how many died. Most of those stories were short, lives cut short by killing factories and militias given the task of shooting undefended women, children, and old people, in open graves with machine guns, first stripping them of their clothing and anything of value. Jews lived for over 700 years in the region of Galicia in Southern Poland, where Leon and his family lived. They were wiped out in only three years. Six hundred thousand Jewish neighbors and all the Jews in the neighboring towns were sent to Belzec in a single year. That is where his family lies. That is where his town of 12,000 Jews was
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