April 9: Honoring My Dad’s Uncanny Insight on the Darkness of Mankind

My father died on April 9, 2005. For his sake, I’m glad he did not live to see Charlottesville, the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre of Jews, and all the hate in our midst. His obituary below captured his dark view of human nature—though he held out hope for everyone under 18 years of age. He believed kids could be taught not to hate.

In high school, I had repeated disagreements—even tense arguments— with my Dad on the topic of antisemitism. I had a sheltered upbringing, living on a nice little horse farm and attending school with really nice people. My Jewishness—almost unique at our mid-sized school— was accepted without notice at Dundee Community High School.

My Dad never really escaped Auschwitz or Bunzlau. In the 1970s, a distant news story of Jews being sent to camps in the USSR, or killed by militants in the Middle East, or being slaughtered at the Munich Olympics (the Israeli team) sent my Dad into a deep and prolonged tailspin. 

Often, I felt that he projected his intense pessimism on me— a happy, affluent, assimilated Jew who marked his teenage years with great optimism about the inevitability of human progress. 

I resented his abiding pessimism about humanity; he resented my unbounded faith in human nature. 

If I could have just one more minute to talk to my Dad, I would say: “You are right. Hate comes easily, even naturally, to people; compassion is hard. Jews are still targeted…. as are Muslims, and many other minorities around the globe. And you’re right, Dad, about the over/under line on the human heart: Under 18 years old, there is hope; over that age, no. I will talk to a class of 5^th graders this week. Their hearts are good. I won’t teach them much that is new. But my job is to motivate them to follow your footsteps in teaching people not to hate.”

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Chicago Trubune

ROBERT LEROY, 80
Holocaust survivor spent life working to end hatred

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.

Last year, Mr. LeRoy bought Grape View Farm, a century-old vineyard west of Hoffman Estates, saving it from developers.

"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."

Survivors also include sons Michael and Steven; a daughter, Cathy; a brother, Steven; and seven grandchildren.