Leopold Engleitner toiled in three Nazi concentration camps for refusing to renounce his faith as a Jehovah's Witness.
In the decades after the war, he tried to tell his tale but rarely found an audience. Now, at 100, he finally is reaching listeners, thanks to the efforts of an Austrian filmmaker who was taken with his story of endurance.
Engleitner has toured the United States since May 1, sharing his life story to encourage others to stick by their principles. His last stops were in Los Angeles this week, with screenings of a documentary about his life at the Music Hall theater on Wilshire Boulevard and sold-out presentations at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust.
The Austrian native's story is a lesson in faith -- especially for the many Jehovah's Witnesses who drove from as far as San Diego to see him -- and in history.
Jehovah's Witnesses "could have signed a document and walked out" of the camps, said Robert Buckley, a consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
Buckley has traveled throughout Europe to interview non-Jewish survivors of the Nazi period. That document was a declaration agreeing to cut ties with the church, thus allowing them to join the army in defense of the fatherland, he said.
Peter Black, senior historian at the Washington holocaust museum, said the Nazis targeted Jehovah's Witnesses mainly for three reasons: Refusing to swear an oath to any earthly authority, declining to serve in any army other than Jehovah's and proselytizing to encourage others to follow their ways.
About 3,200 Witnesses were sent to concentration camps, Black said. They were among the lesser-known victims: Gypsies (also known as Roma), homosexuals and political prisoners, including Communists, Socialists and Soviet prisoners of war. The mentally and physically disabled were murdered under a euthanasia program.
"It's about time that the world came to appreciate that there were other victims of that Nazi era other than the Jewish people," Buckley said.
Engleitner's slight, stooped frame did not diminish the light that sometimes entered his eyes as he recounted his experiences.
Audiences at the theater and museum soon found that the tiny man in the wheelchair they photographed with camera phones had quite a sense of humor -- despite stories of cruelty and of some prisoners so desperately hungry that, at one camp, they roasted potatoes in the crematorium.
