Keeping a nearly 70-year-old promise

Cedarhurst resident Leo Zisman, 82, came to the U.S. from Poland in 1946, at age 15, having made a promise to a stranger during the Holocaust to tell the world what happened to the 6 million Jews who were slaughtered.

Sixty-six years later, Zisman is telling that story, in a documentary entitled, “The Lion of Judah.”

In the fall of 1944 and the spring of 1945, thousands of Jewish prisoners from several concentration camps, weakened by starvation and countless acts of violence, were forced to go on what was called a death march. They were ordered to walk to a new concentration camp, and along the way, those who could not keep up were shot to death.

At one point, Zisman, who had been walking for hours, was called over by a man who was lying on the ground. “The man raised his head and shouted, ‘You will survive the war. Tell them what they did to us,’” Zisman recalled. “Then he died in front of me. I don’t know how he knew I would survive, but he did.”

When Matt Mindell, a Woodmere resident and the executive director of the Manhattan-based Jewish Enrichment Center, heard about Zisman through a member of the JEC, he called him and was awed that Zisman had survived the concentration camps. “His spiritual bravery was enormous,” Mindell said. “He became someone who thrived.”

During a conversation in 2010 about a JEC trip to Poland to visit concentration camps planned for that August, Mindell invited Zisman, and filmed a documentary about the experience. “He inspired everything,” Mindell said. “I wanted to create the film from a personal story, and I felt like in order for the story to be told, it had to be told from a perspective people could relate to. Though this is a Jewish tragedy, it’s not just for Jews, it’s for everyone. Genocide hits home.”