Lion of The Holocaust

By Tim Bullard

There's a signpost up ahead, next stop. Meet one Ernest Lion, a German Jew.

"Do you know what that is?" Lion asks, pulling up his sleeve, revealing a blue tattoo of numbers. When asked about his life experiences, he replied, "Read my book." He doesn't talk about his past.

You have it made, and you don't know it - you are pampered, aggravated by botched fast food orders and slow traffic. Lion's story makes one feel lowly, ashamed to complain about the travails of life. Think you have it bad?

Lion donated his manuscript "The Fountain at the Crossroad" to Coastal Carolina University where two copies are listed in the 800s. One has been checked out only eight times since April 2001, which is a shame because his story of courage, stamina and triumph over tribulation is spell-binding.

A CCU English professor, Randall Wells, and Suzanne Thompson, a CCU lecturer, assisted him with the 101-page book and its unsettling introduction of his dream of a dwarf. "We don't control our lives. We think we do. It's only a deception,"  says the dwarf, disappearing in a foggy shadow.

Lion was born Dec. 15, 1915 in Brambauer to Leo Lion, born Sept. 9, 1877 and wounded in the shoulder in World War I, and opera-trained soprano Berta Lion, 42. His parents operated A. Steinweg & Co., a dry goods store.
1933 - "Jews are our misfortune. Don't buy from a Jew!" read placards Nazis put in front of Jewish businesses, he wrote.

"That disturbed my father," Lion wrote. His dad asked a soldier to leave; the Nazi replied with "ugly remarks," asking him what he was going to do about it.

"If you are not gone within 15 minutes, I'll take a bat and beat the living crap out of you!" his father replied. "How could you do that?" he wrote his mother responded. "These are dangerous people!"

November 1938 - Lion is hungry as the synagogue burns during looting. "You must come with us," two men in dark suits told him before his arrest and rail ransit to Weimar. "JEDEM DASSEINE" or "To each what he deserves" read the gate's large sign. Welcome to Buchenwald concentration camp.

Supper, a bowl of something. Lights out at 9 p.m. 5 a.m., beaten out of bed with truncheons and screams of anti-Semitic slogans, herded naked to the a latrine, working in a stone quarry.

Released in December 1938, he saw his parents.

Lion met Liesel Mosbach, whose father had a nervous breakdown and was sent to a hospital where gas engines were added to sheds in reverse for asphyxiation, the bodies burned, Lion wrote.
Lion loved to act and was part of a musical revue, "The Magazine."

"To make sure it contained no anti-government comments, the Gestapo sat in the first row every night," he wrote.

His mother used an Indian mental ritual to die, his father told him. Lion married Liesel Dec. 18, 1939 at 25.

"Rumors began to spread. Jews in large cities were assembled and taken away. Nobody knew any details," he wrote.

His father, 66, 14-year-old sister-in-law Gretel and mother-in-law were arrested in August 1942, taken to Zamosc and shot in ditches.

Page 25 is haunting tragedy: Feb. 26, 1943, he and Liesel have to go to a school with a suitcase. At a restaurant they sleep on a bare floor, stripped of their wedding rings and watches before U.S. fighters bomb Dortmund. They board a train.

"The children cried, thirsty and disoriented," Lion wrote.

"Keep cool and calm, don't make waves, don't be surprised about anything. You are now in Hell!" a prisoner tells him at the camp among SS and fang-flashing dogs

"Someone shouted, 'Women to the left, men to the right! You will be reunited after checking in!' All the women were led away. My wife looked at me for one last time before she disappeared. It was dark now, and I saw her walk away like a shadow," Lion wrote.

From then on Lion's fortitude is his guardian the moment his tattoo artist tells him "You'll be dead within three months." "If I should live through this, and I should meet you somewhere after this is over, I'll wrap my arm with that big number you just created around your neck!"

Block 10, Auschwitz. Thin soup, whale meat.

"My goal from now on: Survival!" he wrote.

In the camp were Catholic priests who had preached against Hitler. "That had cost them their freedom because Gestapo agents even attended church services," Lion wrote. Lion said he did not know the Rev. Maximillan Kolby.
Lion's father's sister Rosette survived the Theresienstadt camp (re: Miscellany butterfly online archive article), but other paternal siblings weren't so lucky - sister Helene committed suicide before camp deportation; brother Arthur died in Theresienstadt.

Lion lost weight, his ribs protruding, he wrote, refusing to eat grass like others who did so and died.
1944 - Lion meets Karl Kipp, a former opera tenor who wore a pink triangle, the sign for homosexuals in camps. They created a revue.

Lion took advantage of job assignments, fighting Stockholm Syndrome.

One day a U.S. bomber dropped a bomb on the camp, killing a few inmates, Lion wrote.
February 1945 - Lion cheats death and a coma. Near starvation, a prisoner puts a raw potato in his mouth, its juices reviving him.

"On the side of one barrack I saw naked bodies of those who had died from starvation, stacked like cords of wood, criss-cross, so that the pile would not collapse," he wrote.

Lion steps on a nail, and his left foot becomes infected. The prison's hospital doctor turns out to be his wife's cousin, Dr. Erich Mosbach, who helps him.

Marched to Fussen, he tries to drink water from a city fountain at a crossroad, but a guard's rifle butt pushes him back as his face touches the "clear, cool water." Lion strays from his group, helped by a farmhouse family.

"The next doorbell I rang was that of a Catholic priest, who still wore his white collar and black frock. When he saw my prison garb and looked over my condition, he waved me away as a signal not to come near him," Lion wrote of "his disgusted looks." "And I still hear the loud slamming of his door. A priest. A man of God."

Soon he gets double pneumonia at 85 pounds with lice. An American soldier finds him, shouting, "Jesus Christ, somebody come here and help me with this man!"

At a hospital, he wrote, "A nun, clad in black, a tight wimple covering her head, handed me a bowl of hot cereal and a glass of skim milk, totally without gesture and comment." He falls asleep in the Catholic Hospital in Fussen. A young "Sister Elisabeth" tells him the war is over and later leaves the sisterhood.

A G.I. gives him a pack of Old Golds, and Lion smokes three packs a day until the first Sunday in January 1964.
Lion takes a job in a military club kitchen, meeting special agents of the 317th Infantry Counter Intelligence Corps and gains favor by spying, getting references and taking a ship to America after sponsorship from his Aunt Hanna in Washington, D.C.

He left but not without another visit to the fountain.

"The water spouted freely from the fountain at the crossrowad, but I was not thirsty anymore," he wrote.
USS Flasher, Feb. 27, 1947: Lion brought his 200-year-old violin. His first purchase was a hot dog, a Coca-Cola and a TIME for $1 with change returned. His passport Jan. 27, 1947 listed his tattoo number, 104979.

Lion went to work for Giant Food at $30 a week. Lion's asides on the Daughters of the American Revolution at a D.C. Isaac Stern concert are unforgettable while his self evaluation and constant yearning for healing cause empathy from the reader. After World War II ends, the horror is over, but his road to citizenship remains engaging and revealing.

On Oct. 9, 1953 his second wife becomes Inge, a German native.

"We swore we would never touch European soil again," he wrote. The German government gave him $5,400 for loss of personal liberty and property, and I.G. Farben Co. gave him $1,800 for his slave work at Buna-Monowitz in Auschwitz.

The couple isited Frankfurt eventually, and they toured France, but his wife died after an intestinal disease. Lion became a founding member of the Kennedy Center, and he joined the Lions Club.

"I greatly admired the U.S. veterans who fought in the second war and always silently thanked them for their bravery without which I would not be here," Lion wrote. Lion moved to Horry County after a visit in 1979, and he joined the Myrtle Beach Lions Club.

His Christmas visit to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Carroll Campbell is interesting.

After signing up for a CCU creative writing course, his teacher, Thompson, encouraged him to cut down on the history and write about his personal Holocaust experience, and the result is the paralyzing account he shared on paper.

When a representative of Steven Spielberg's "Shoah" visited him for seven hours, Lion writes the woman's questions were "systematically read from a printed form."

"Several times she asked me to turn off the tape recorder. The entire meeting began to annoy men, not only because of her unreasonable attitude, but also because of all the details I was forced to reveal to a total stranger during that very long period of seven hours.

"I remained polite. After all she was a guest in my house."

That was the end of that. He wrote her and asked her not to return.

The book's end is quite moving with his friend Elisabeth Lohr convincing him to return to Buchenwald, now a museum. Lion introduced himself, and a woman in the Archives Department assisted him in finding lists of names, including his and those of his relatives.

"We visited the room where operations had been performed on live inmates who were placed on a bed constructed of tiles showing openings for the blood to flow into receptacles beneath."

He saw the ovens. He saw SS buildings with information about the criminals and their times of death.

"It's not always easy being me," Lion wrote. "I don't let on, but sometimes I get depressed because I have now lived the longest time of my life and have only a few years left to live. It is not that I mind dying...writing this was not easy."

"It has been an overpowering experience - at times causing fright and great anger," he wrote. "Often I had to interrupt the effort for days until the sleepless nights had passed, and I could find new strength again untl the blurred vision had cleared and resassured me that I had nothing to fear as the American I have become."

The last sentence is as uplifting as the book proves to be either one of the best books ever written or for some, the best.

"These events had been locked away for decades. I have re-examined them and conclude that my life, after all, has been worth living."