Current Materials

Our current materials focus on Leo’s arrival in Baltimore, spanning from 1947 to 2009. For more than sixty years Leo has lived in Baltimore, MD, where he first stayed with his aunt Sophie, and where 100,000 Jews still live today. For fifty years he has been married to Flo, a Baltimore native. The area of Pikesville, where Leo lives, is in many ways a modern American “shtetl.” Everybody on his street is Jewish. His neighbors and best friends are, like Leo and Flo, couples consisting of survivors and old Baltimoreans.





Across the street from Leo live Freda and Charles Sussman, who share a similar fate with Leo and Flo in that Freda is a Holocaust survivor from Bamberg. Charles says that Leo is “the survivor” in Baltimore, and that he is speaking out for all of them. Freda and Charles nominated Leo for the Baltimore Jewish Hall of Fame.




Leo is not the only Wiener in the Baltimore community. One of his best friends Herbie Friedmann, who escaped Nazi Vienna via Kindertransport to England, and who is also married to Baltimore native Joyce, says that, “not one day goes by that I am not thinking of Vienna.” Herbie and Joyce, like Leo and Flo, have been back to Vienna many times — in part to receive honors and compensations from the Austrian government from the “Wiedergutmachungs”-initiatives of chancellor Franz Vranitzky to the “A Letter to the Stars”-initiative in 2008, in part to enjoy Vienna as tourists and eat the food that they have craved for more than sixty years.



Hymie Shapiro was born in a refugee camp in Linz in 1946 and is now the owner of Al Pacino Pizza: the Egyptian Kitchen, among other restaurants, in Baltimore. His parents escaped from the Polish Bransk via Linz first to New Jersey, where they bought a chicken farm. “What does a Jew do,” they asked having arrived in New York, “who has some money and wants to settle outside of New York City?” Well, they go to New Jersey, or to Baltimore. Hymie, too, feels somehow related to Austria and to his past: “I am drawn to border zones.” His aunt Blume Shapiro survived Auschwitz and is a prominent member of the Baltimore survivor community.




The second and third generation of survivors such as Livia Shapiro, Hymie’s daughter, as well as Leo and Flo’s children, continue in the footsteps of their parents and grandparents. Some of them have “arrived” in Baltimore, like Edie Norton, Leo’s younger daughter, who lives a comfortable life outside of Washington, DC, and whose children are Jewish but, more than that, American. Others have not quite “arrived,” or struggle with their Jewish identity, like Myron, Leo’s oldest son, an Irish folksong musician and student of Forensic. The yoga teacher Livia Shapiro, Hymie’s daughter, feels “trapped” in Jewish Baltimore. She now studies alternative medicine at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO. All of them carry the exodus of Wien—Baltimore in their hearts, to some degree.



On Shabbat or any other Jewish holidays one can see many orthodox Jews walking by Leo’s house to the various synagogues in his area. “It’s like being in Vienna in the 1920s,” says Leo. It is comfortable living here as a Jew. Leo feels safe and well in his community. But under the surface of this idyllic Jewish existence in today’s Pikesville, Leo hides an inner struggle to survive that has never dissipated. The photographer Lisa Shifren runs the Holocaust Survivor Social Club of Baltimore and has documented the Baltimore survivor culture since 2006 in her photo series “Grace Dignity Humility Compassion – Photographic Portraits — the Holocaust Survivors of Baltimore.” Her portraits are living expressions of this inner struggle to survive. “The survivors,” she says, “are like a family. They have each other.”



Leo’s battle will be documented by showing his continued efforts since 1962 to educate young students in Baltimore schools and colleges on the Holocaust, and the history of World War II. Current schools in debate for documentation are Pikesville High School, The John Carroll School, Northwestern High School, Perry Hall High School, The Krieger Schechter Day School, The Carroll County Community College, and The Park School of Baltimore. In addition to the Holocaust Commemoration Days, we will document school excursions to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., as well as the Arlington military cemetery.



Leo is not alone on the battlefield. With him are fighting Jason Hartling, principle of the all African American Baltimore City School, Northwestern High School, who says: “education is our weapon,” and many more teachers: among whom the young Jennifer Meltzer, who is teaching her first year Facing History and Ourselves class at Pikesville High School; or Tom Hockstra, who is teaching the Holocaust through “the eyes of Adolf Hitler”; or Louise Geczy, who has institutionalized the Holocaust education programs including Commemoration Day, and other Holocaust education activities for the Baltimore school community; and Jeanette Parmigiani, who runs the Holocaust education program for the Baltimore Jewish Council and, like Louise, is driven by a force greater than herself.