The Horse Adjutant town square. Leon moved unrestricted among the townspeople and the peasants from the farms who brought their pigs, chickens, and vegetables to sell. Gypsies arrived, hawking their handmade copperware, and mountain people, known as the Yuvanim (also known as Lemkos), sold their leatherwork. All the different people, Jews, and Gentiles, mixed in one weekly event. Leon looked for work he could do on market days. How ordinary it all seemed at the time now just a memory. The town of Grybow is in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, organized around a town square dominated by one of the most beautiful Roman Catholic churches in southern Poland. It’s mainly an agricultural town whose industrial opera- tions included a brewery and a lumber mill. It is a town of small shops, craftsmen, butchers, bakers, and tailors. Gypsies lived just outside the town on the roads in camps. The Yuvanim lived in the mountains since the 1500s. The name Yuvanim means ‘of Ivan,’ they were driven out of Russia into this remote place by Ivan the Terrible. The Yuvanium were also notorious for smuggling due to their knowledge of those remote hills. Grybow was a fine community, with a professional class of politicians, lawyers, teach- ers, doctors, businessmen, and clergy, together, referred to as the intelligentsia. They were also smart enough to resist the Nazis, making them dangerous. The first targets of the Nazis were the intelligentsia. They wanted the land without Jews or anyone that would contest it. Grybow is the gateway to the health spas and resorts of Krynica in the nearby moun- tains. Tourists from all over Europe would pass through Grybow on their way to these places. These places were so important that a railroad was built to access them. When Leon was growing up, he and his friends would earn a few coins by cleaning dust from the cars heading to the resorts. He saw women with furs and cigarette holders, and men in their big cars. It made a lasting impression on him. Within a month, that world no longer existed. The men of the intelligentsia were dragged out of their homes and summarily killed. Killing became common. Someone had to remove the bodies. A 13-year-old boy found himself doing this grisly task. It was Leon. Because he was strong and his family had horses and carts he was a natural choice. It was much more dangerous for a grown man, like his father, to be among the Nazis. Being a child made the task safer. Leon also just happened to look, German, making him more inconspicuous. One day Leon was ordered to bring his horse and cart to pick up the body of a prominent lawyer. That man laid on the street, his fine clothing seeping with blood. The incongruity of one of the leading citizens of the town, lying so well dressed in a
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