Leonas Visocekas

  • Place of Birth: Siedle (Poland)
  • Date of Deportation: 1943
  • Place of deportation: Alderney
  • Sites deported to: Norderney,

By Piers Secunda

Leonas Visocekas was born in Poland to Jewish parents. Due to his parents’ fear of Russian political pressure on Poland because of the persecution of Jews, the family lived under a non-Jewish sounding name (unrecorded); Visocekas was their real name. Leonas grew up this way. Growing in confidence as he grew older, he studied and became a professor of Jewish history and the Hebrew language.

In 1917, when Germany overran Poland, Leonas was arrested by the Germans for the first time and became a prisoner of the Germans near the town of Kerenski, just before the Russian Revolution started. When the First World War ended, he moved to the Jewish Quarter of Vilnius in Lithuania, where he continued to teach. Before WWII, 45% of the population of Vilnius was Jewish, with over 100 Synagogues in the city.

Before WWII started, Leonas and his wife and son moved to Paris, a choice which saved their lives, as two thirds of the Jewish population of Vilnius was gathered up and shot in the forests outside the city when the Germans arrived. Those who were not shot were transported to concentration and death camps.

In Paris, Leonas took a sales representative job working for Total (a French oil company), selling Total products to petrol stations. He was arrested by the Germans in a roundup of Jews in Paris in 1943 and transported to Alderney, where he was sent to Norderney concentration camp as a slave worker under the control of Organisation Todt.

During his year in Norderney camp, he witnessed great brutality meted out to the Jewish, Russian and Ukrainian prisoners. The Jews were separated from Ukrainian and Russians by a 3-metre partition of barbed wire. A fellow prisoner whom he befriended, Michael Barangos, made a catapult to send small lumps of bread over the barbed wire into the Russian side of the camp. On one occasion, Leonas saw a Russian pick up a potato in a field; a German soldier immediately shot the man through the head.

After a year in Norderney camp, after D-Day, he and a group of his fellow prisoners were transported to mainland France and were liberated in a camp in the vicinity of Boulogne. In September 1944 he was picked up on the roadside by American soldiers and driven by them in a jeep to central Paris. There he was and reunited with his wife and son.

After the war he found a job selling chemicals for manufacturing and agriculture.

 

Sources:

  • Raphael and Arieh, Leonas’ son and grandson respectively.

Map

  • Cemetery / Mass Grave
  • Concentration Camp
  • Forced Labour Camp
  • Prison
  • Worksite / Fortification