The Horse Adjutant plaining how his escape almost got the rest of us killed. The two old friends let the war go and for that moment toasted their good fortune, L’chaim (To Life). Meanwhile, at the age of 55, I was too young not to work. I started to look for something but knew it was going to be tough. My life switched from years of race discrimination to something new for me: age discrimination. It seemed I would never get a break. I tried a few times, but I just could not get a decent sales job. They didn’t want to hire anyone over 50. I reluctantly took a job as a security officer, for about 2 years, until I got a recommendation from the Holocaust Survivors of South Florida Group. Moshe Katz was one of the founders. He recommended that I run the local office. I was elected as the office coordinator. We had 1,500 members. This became my home for the next 20 years.
Leon Schagrin United States Citizenship Seal
Reflecting on my life, I have come to the realization that money is not everything. There are far more important goals for me. I made it my mission to educate everyone I could on the horrors of war, the insidiousness of anti-Semitism, and the tragedy of The Holocaust. With the help of the Central Agency of Jewish Education, The Broward County Florida Board of Education, and the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Hollywood, Florida, we agreed upon a curriculum of Holocaust Studies that was approved by the State Department of Education. It directed that ‘all Florida schools would have a ‘Holocaust’ curriculum during History class.” There was a lot of resistance from different politicians who did not want to include this in the curriculum of the late 1980s. Because of this delay, I personally started to give lectures in the high schools and other institutions of Broward County. We held a ‘Student’s Awareness Day,’ where approximately 500 students would take part in ex- ercises. We would break them into groups of 10-12 students and pair each one with a survivor. This event continued many years until there were too few volunteers. I also began to write petitions and letters on behalf of the survivors related to com- pensation by the German government. In 1988. I was part of the group that succeeded
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