Holocaust survivor spent life working to end hatred
By Glenn Jeffers
By Glenn Jeffers
Tribune staff reporter
Published April 12, 2005
The 1945 quarter Robert LeRoy wore around his neck meant more than 25
cents. It reminded him of humble beginnings.It reminded him of the day he stepped off a steamer in 1949, one of the few members of his family to survive the Holocaust. That quarter was all the money Mr. LeRoy had.
It was a first step toward building a new life, first with his Elgin-based construction company, then through charitable deeds and talks to children about the dangers of hatred.
Mr. LeRoy, 80, died Saturday, April 9, from complications from pneumonia and congestive heart failure in his Elgin home. But before that, he took a hard life and 25 cents and made a wonderful, generous life for his family, said his wife, Carol.
"He believed that he had survived for a reason, and that reason was his children and his grandchildren and to give back to the community," she said.
It was 1944 when the Nazis rounded up Mr. LeRoy, then a 19-year-old named Otto Lefkovits, and his family in his hometown of Nyirmada, Hungary.
They were taken to Auschwitz, where Mr. LeRoy and three of his siblings were separated from the rest of his family.
Mr. LeRoy was shipped to Bunzlau, where he built aircraft decoys to fool Allied bombardiers. His mother, father and a brother, Mr. LeRoy recalled, were led into a showering area.
"No one knew it was a gas chamber," Mr. LeRoy said in a Tribune interview in February.
The man once known as No. 46288 spent more than a year suffering through repeated beatings and starvation before the Germans abandoned the camp and Russian tanks broke through the walls in 1945.
Mr. LeRoy would come to mark that day— Feb. 11— as the end of his imprisonment. But it also spawned a 60-year journey to understand why he had survived and 26 members of his family had not.
"You ask yourself, `Why am I singled out?'" Mr. LeRoy had said. "`Why did they do this to us? Why did they give us a horrible fate?' No one could answer."
Mr. LeRoy immigrated to the United States. He spent two years in the Army before he was discharged in 1953. He then moved west.
After marrying the former Carol Schultz, Mr. LeRoy and his bride moved to Elgin, where they started a construction and remodeling business. He said he owed those skills to a very unlikely instructor.
"Hitler," he said. "I learned to push a wheelbarrow."
But images from Bunzlau haunted Mr. LeRoy, sometimes in his dreams, other times when he was awake. He would cry sometimes when he walked into a shower, his wife said.
He'd combat those memories by surrounding himself with family, Carol LeRoy said.
"I don't think there was a day he didn't think about it and miss his family," she said.
But when LeRoy heard about a Northwestern University professor who claimed in the 1970s that the Holocaust never occurred, he began a crusade to educate people on the horrors of the Holocaust. His target: children.
Mr. LeRoy believed children could be taught not to hate. And for the next 30-plus years, he taught that message to children in grade school and high school.
Even after he retired from construction in 1989, Mr. LeRoy continued the talks.
They helped answer those questions that plagued him. He survived to help others, be it with lessons or with the ambulance his family bought and sent to Israel back in 2001.
"I have no doubt he made a very strong impact," his wife said. "Not just here, but in Israel, in Hungary, in Champaign, in anyone who ever heard him speak."
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