I was sent down into Georgia, outside of Macon, Georgia, a place called Camp Wheeler. It was an
infantry training, basic training camp, and I was with a battalion of soldiers - 600 in all,
all black - we were there to get training as infantry soldiers.
[Interviewer] How was it for you?
[Leon] Well, it was a very difficult time for me to understand the order, the discipline that you
had to experience, and of course I learned maybe the hard way sometime, but I learned how I should
comport myself and as a soldier, and sometimes I had to acquiesce to things that I didn't want to,
some of the things that the military maintained. It was an institutional racism, and they helped to
maintain it with the segregation and the way we were treated at the camp, so I didn't like that
but I had to learn to carry myself in such a way that I could survive. I must be honest with you,
I didn't feel I had a reason to fight, at that time I felt that I was being used.
I was fighting to promote all those wonderful things that American"s supposed to enjoy but
I now knew that I was not permitted to enjoy what I was fighting for.
And so I was an angry young soldier at that time. I'm sorry, I was angry at my country and I
carried that even though I had to go through the war, I carried that feeling, that anger with me.
I didn't hate, no I didn't hate. My parents taught me better than that,
but I was really angry because I felt this was unjust to put me out there to fight and
to maybe die to preserve something that I was not permitted to enjoy. So yes, I was angry.
But on this day in April in 1945, I was going to have the shock of my life because I was going to
walk through the gates of a concentration camp called Buchenwald, and you've got to believe
me when I tell you I wasn't ready for that. I was totally unprepared for that kind of an experience.
The Nazis had placed them there because the Nazis were saying none of them were good enough,
therefore they were not fit to live, they could be terminated, murdered. Man,
I couldn't get a handle on this, this was beyond anything in my experience.
But I walked about the camp, I went to a place where the men would sleep, they called
it a barrack, and I opened the door. I stepped across the threshold, and I closed the door, but
I could go no further. You see, that odor, the stench that comes from death and human waste,
well it was overpowering, it was awesome. I stood there and I was holding my breath all the time,
I was holding my breath and I was gonna leave, I knew I couldn't stay. And so I turned, but
before I could step away, I looked down
and there on the bottom bunk near the door was a man, oh he was an emaciated person, he was skin
and bone. He was on a bit of filthy straw and rags and he was trying so desperately to look at me
with that skeletal face and those deep set eyes, but he was so weak. You see, the man had been
starved for so long and it was a struggle for him just to look at me, but finally he did.
He looked up at me and he he said nothing, nor did I. I came in with one feeling of anger
at my country, really angry about what was happening to me but now,
now I realize that all the pain and suffering is not relegated to just me
and those like me, that pain can touch everybody, so many different kinds of people,
and that's what I saw there, and that changed me. It made me know that
we have a connection, that what happens to you can happen to me, what I saw happening to those
people, I said Leon, that could be happening to you, and it's all because of bigotry and prejudice
and all of that hate that antisemitism was right there. It had been carried to the ultimate.
And I knew that was something we had to get rid of because, I had experienced that. You see,
I was told that I wasn't good enough, these same people in here were told by Nazi Germany
that they weren't good enough, and so they didn't, they couldn't be allowed to live. So
yeah, I became a different person. I knew we had to do something about that evil.