Over 11 years and 570 episodes, John Rabe and Team Off-Ramp scoured SoCal for the people, places, and ideas whose stories needed to be told, and the show became a love-letter to Los Angeles. Now, John is sharing selections from the Off-Ramp vault to help you explore this imperfect paradise.
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This week, Amazon chose Leon Leyson's memoir, "The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the Impossible Became Possible," one of its best books of 2013. The title refers to the fact that Leyson had to stand on a box to work the machinery in Schindler's factory.
Leyson lived in Fullerton and taught at Huntington Park High School for decades. He started telling his harrowing story later in life, over and over, to any group who asked him to speak, even though it dredged up horrible memories. He said he wanted the world to know that the Nazis didn't kill numbers; they killed real people. Leyson died in January at the age of 83.
In 2011, journalist Camille Hahn interviewed Leyson for Off-Ramp. He was her father-in-law. We've posted a condensed version of her piece.
By the way, Leon did not see the book in print. Camille tells us that Leon's wife Lis was able to tell him just before he died that an agent had taken on the memoir, and out on the day of his funeral, the family got the news that Simon&Schuster would be publishing it.