Leo Weinrieb: My many lives

Leo Weinrieb (1917-2011) was born in what was then the Russian Empire, in present-day Poland (in a village between Sosnowiec and Katowice), in 1917. Following his birth, but before the formation of the Polish state in the wake of World War I, his parents decided it would be better to live in Germany, and immigrated there, where his father initially found work as a coal miner in western Germany. Later, his parents worked in a furniture store and in a grocery business, and when Leo completed his schooling, he worked in a department store (Karstadt). In 1937, with increasing persecution of Jews in Germany, his parents decided it would be best to emigrate, and they, Leo, and his siblings, escaped to the Netherlands, and then they immigrated to Brazil the following year. However, after a year spent in Rio de Janeiro, the family decided to return to the Netherlands, and were living there at the time of the German invasion in May 1940. Weinrieb, who had married in the meantime, was interned in the Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam, but eventually he and his wife were smuggled out by members of the resistance, and hid in a town in the Limburg region, where they were protected by Dutch farmers for the duration of the war. Following the war, Weinrieb was reunited with his parents, and in 1948, he, with his wife and children, immigrated to the United States, settling first in New York City, before relocating to Buffalo. Leo Weinrieb died on 1 July 2011.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Elizabeth Conant

Gift of Elizabeth Conant, 2016.