Leon Kliot memoir

Leon Kliot was born in 1929 in Vilna, Poland (now Vilnius, Lithuania). Before World War II, Kliot owned a hardware business, married, and had a child. Following the Soviet Union seizure of eastern Poland in 1939, the city became part of Lithuania. In 1941, the Germans forced Kliot and his family out of their home and into the ghetto. Leon was part of the resistance movement in the ghetto and snuck out to find food for his family. Ghetto conditions were poor, and his first wife and child both perished. In fall of 1943, Kliot was deported to the Vaivara concentration camp complex in Estonia. Leon was one of 75 men on his transport who immediately began planning an escape. Leon met his second wife, Vera, also from Vilna, in the camp. She joined Leon and 18 other prisoners when they escaped the camp one night in September 1944. Upon returning home the couple found that most of their family members had been murdered. They headed for the American sector of Germany, planning to immigrate to the United States. They stopped in Łódź, where Vera gave birth to the couple’s daughter, Rosalyn, in April 1945. The family continued on to Heidenheim, Germany, where Leon worked for two years for the United Nations Relief Organization. In 1947, the Kliot family sailed from Bremerhaven, Germany to Boston Harbor and settled in Skokie, Illinois.