Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz dead at 93

Leo Bretholz, who made a daring escape from the Nazis by jumping off a moving train en route to Auschwitz and decades later led a campaign for reparations from the French railway that carried thousands of others to their deaths during the Holocaust, died Saturday at his home in Pikesville, Md. He was 93.

His daughter Denise Harris confirmed his death but said she did not know the cause.

Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Bretholz became a leader among activists who have called for reparations from governments and companies in Europe that aided the Nazi regime during its execution of the Final Solution.

The often-controversial issue of reparations has figured prominently in recent considerations of a planned light-rail system in Maryland.

The Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Francais (SNCF), the French railway system that historians say carried 76,000 people to Nazi camps, is the majority owner of Keolis, one of the companies invited to bid on the multibillion-dollar project.

Bretholz was scheduled to testify Monday before the Maryland General Assembly's House Ways and Means Committee on a bill that would prevent Keolis from winning the contract if the SNCF does not pay reparations to victims.

A longtime Maryland resident, Bretholz had frequently recounted in speeches before lawmakers, schoolchildren and others his story of persecution and survival.

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Leo Bretholz was born March 6, 1921, to Polish immigrants in the Austrian capital.

At his mother's insistence, Bretholz fled Austria after it was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. He recounted traveling by rail to Trier, a city in western Germany, and then swimming across the Sauer River to Luxembourg. There, he said, he was met by refugee workers who smuggled him into Belgium.

After the German invasion of that country in 1940, Bretholz was deported to France. He entered Switzerland in 1942 but was returned to France and ultimately to the Drancy transit camp northeast of Paris.

From there, he and thousands of others were sent east, bound for the death camp at Auschwitz, in what is now Poland.

Years later, in testimony before the U.S. House Foreign Relations Committee, he recalled the conditions on the train.

"For the entire journey, SNCF provided what was one piece of triangle cheese, one stale piece of bread and no water," he said. "There was hardly room to stand or sit or squat in the cattle car. There was one bucket for us to relieve ourselves. Within that cattle car, people were sitting and standing and praying and weeping, fighting."

In a recorded interview preserved by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Bretholz recalled his escape through a window on Nov. 6, 1942. He and a friend removed articles of clothing, soaked the clothing in human waste from the bucket and repeatedly wrung out the moisture to increase the fabric's strength. The two men then used the clothes to force open the bars.

"We kept twisting the wet sweaters tighter and tighter, like a tourniquet," he told the House committee. "The human waste dripped down our arms. We kept going for hours, until finally there was just enough room for us to squeeze through. It was night. I went first, and Manfred helped me climb out the tiny window. . . . He followed me, and we held on tight so as not to slip and fall beneath the train, and waited for it to take a curve and slow down. Then we jumped to our freedom." After escaping the train through a cattle car window, Bretholz recalled that he lay in a ravine and then moved into a village, where he received aid from a priest.

He said that the underground resistance provided him with false identification documents. He worked with the resistance, falsifying documents and scouting Germans, and later assisted refugees in France after the 1944 D-Day invasion.

Of 1,000 people on his train to Auschwitz, Bretholz said, only five survived the war. Many of his relatives also perished.

His wife of 57 years, the former Florine Cohen, died in 2009. Survivors include three children, Myron Bretholz of Phoenix, Md., Denise Harris of Ellicott City, Md., and Edie Norton of Herndon, Va.; a half-sister; and four grandchildren.