Leo’s Story
Wien-Baltimore is the story of Leo Bretholz, born in 1921 into a Jewish family of Polish descent in Vienna’s 20th district, the “Mazzo-island” (together with the 2nd district), who has resided in Baltimore’s Pikesville district since 1947 as one of an estimated total of 2.500 survivors of 50.000 Austrian Jews killed during the Holocaust.
Leo’s life in Vienna, where 200,000 Jews were living at the beginning of the 20th century, changed dramatically after Hitler's annexation of Austria on March 12, 1938. On that day, as Leo recounts, “everything changed. Even the tramways were now driving on the other side of the road.” Leo’s life and the lives of 200,000 fellow Jews were irrevocably altered: from the “benign anti-Semitism” with which Leo had grown up (having been spat on by a fellow student, his mother suggested merely to wash himself off and move on), Austria had turned into the absolute enemy for Jews. On October 25, 1938, Leo's mother Dora sent Leo away to Antwerp. Leo never saw his mother and two sisters again.
But Leo escaped and survived. Between 1938 and 1945 he hid in attics, lived, outran police, escaped from prisons and, joined the Compagnons De France under the false name of Max Henri Lefevre, and on November 6, 1942 he did the unimaginable: he jumped from train no. 42 from the French prison camp Drancy to Auschwitz, where he would have been killed the very same day of his arrival together with all but five of the 1000 deportees on that train. 
Not many trains, as Leo points out, would have given him the opportunity for such an audacious escape. As it turned out, the French deportation trains had their bars inside, and not outside the windows as most of the Polish ones did. This allowed him and his friend Manfred to remove the bars, although with an unimaginable effort. After eight hours, and almost at the German border, the bars came loose, and they jumped into darkness. Allez-y, et que dieu vous garde, (go, and may God keep you) were the encouraging last words of a woman who was riding toward her own death. 
Leo’s escape would not have been possible without the help of many people, among whom was French nun Jeanne d’Arc, a nurse who saved his life in Limoges where he was hospitalized with a life-threatening hernia. Leo had to face one more obstacle: “passing” as a Christian in the hospital in Vichy-France. The miraculous Joan of Arc calmed him: “you have nothing to fear, as long as I am in this ward.”
Leo’s story from Hitler’s annexation of Austria to his arrival in Baltimore in 1947 has been narrated together with Baltimore journalist Michael Olesker in the captivating and moving memoir Leap into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe (1999), currently in its 10th edition with Random House 
link to the Randomhouse website:
http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385497053