“Every year my mother’s family would celebrate Passover in my grandparents’ apartment in the elegant house we owned in Krakow. My cousins, sister and I loved the part of the ceremony where we were allowed tiny sips of wine, and, of course, in the best Jewish tradition there was always enough food to give a child a bellyache.  But the part of the Seder I awaited with the greatest excitement was the story of The Exodus that my grandfather Joseph with his rabbinical beard recounted each year with the same thrilling fervor. The suffering of the Israelites at the hands of brutal Pharaoh. Moses leading our people out of captivity. The Egyptian chariots in hot pursuit! The Red Sea miraculously parting to let us through (and drowning our pursuers)! To six-year-old-me it all felt so alive and yet, comfortingly, so far in the past. The last time I heard my grandfather tell the Exodus story was in April of 1938. That September Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and my family that had sat around my grandparents’ Passover table just six months earlier – fifteen of us ranging in age from six to seventy – would begin our own hazardous Exodus – a flight from oppression to freedom that would take us from Nazi-occupied Poland to Lithuania, across the Soviet Union, to Japan, Canada and finally to the United States! The physical journey would take two-and-half years to complete (and for me, spiritually, would not end until I returned to Krakow, seventy years later!)” 

As a teacher, author and public speaker, Leon Prochnik has always believed in the transformative power of stories. Now, seven decades after it occurred, Leon tells the inspirational saga of his family’s escape from Nazi-occupied Poland – fifteen people raging in age from six to seventy plucked from a life of privilege and transformed overnight into penniless refugees fleeing for their existence.

“This is one of millions of Exodus stories that I believe will continue to occur as long as Man exists,” says Leon.  “While it is in no way an equal of the epic narrative recounted in the Bible, I feel it addresses the same timeless theme: escape from oppression to freedom when escape seems all but impossible.”

 “Until now,” says Leon, I’ve shared this story only with my family and friends. But with most of the survivors of the Holocaust having left us and the massive upheaval of World War II fading from memory, I feel it both an obligation and a privilege to communicate this inspiring story of survival – a story I was part of -- to as many people as I can.” 

For information on booking Leon for speaking engagements, please contact him at aripress@ca.rr.com