The Horse Adjutant Introduction Leon Schagrin
B y telling you the story of my life, at my late age, it is my hope to leave behind a true and accurate testament for future generations. It is my hope that you let these writings serve as a warning against tyranny and hate. What I want you to take away is just how important it is to defend your freedom, at all costs.
Experience has taught me, If you lose your freedom, you are condemned.
I still feel that the shadow of evil following me and it will probably remain until the end of my life. However, I am compelled to share the lessons of The Nazi Holocaust, so it will not be repeated by future generations. Future generations must be on extreme alert surrounding the dangers of dictatorships and any type of Fascist thinking. I can’t stress this enough, by all means, protect your freedom and pursue a course that reduces and finally stamps out hate. Don’t forget, Germany was a Democracy before it slipped into a Fascist dictatorship. I vowed, to my father a long time ago, before he was forcefully taken from our home, with my family and our entire neighborhood, soon after to all be brutally murdered, that I would tell the story of my life to everyone who would listen. Not because I am important, but because if my story is lost to the ages, then what happened could be repeated. It is not easy to tell you my story. It is painful for me to recall such memories. Once you get past the pain and realize the miracle of my survival you may be ready to think about the bigger ideas, like what it means to be free, and why if you lose your freedom you lose everything. If things were different, my father and mother would have grown old together, and my brother and sisters would have had long lives. I hope things are different for you and all the future generations. Many years after the war I visited Belzec in Eastern Poland and confronted my great- est nightmare. It was incomprehensible to me that in a small field covered in volcanic rock rest my mother and father, my four sisters, and my baby brother, along with some 600,000 other souls from all of Upper Galicia (Southeast Poland). It is not just the number of people, which is appalling, but that they were all destroyed in a period of a single year. My own family was among the twelve to fifteen thousand who were killed in only three days by the deadly gas chambers. It was an extermination factory.
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