By Bob Strauss, Staff Writer
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzjUg_95Vbk <<< Movie Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaPdrKAwPzs <<< Beautiful song written for him. (Tear-jerker)
http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2005325 <<< very short version of story
An unusual Holocaust documentary has brought near-capacity afternoon crowds to the Laemmle Town Center 5 for almost a week.
They've come not only to see "Ladder in the Lions' Den," but to meet its subject, 107-year-old Austrian survivor Leopold Engleitner.
Sitting quietly in his wheelchair outside the theater, the frail but remarkably resilient Engleitner met adoring fans from all over Southern California after Monday's screening of the 40-minute-film. It recounts the Jehovah's Witness' refusal to join Hitler's army during World War II and subsequent imprisonment in three Nazi concentration camps.
"It's really something that everybody should know about but very few people do," said Dave Butler, a Jehovah's Witness who drove down from Bakersfield to see the movie and meet the man. "Leopold doesn't speak English, I'd love to talk to him, but I think he's awesome. He's expending his limited strength and resources to come out and meet people and do this tour; it's amazing. It's very generous of him."
Born in 1905 with a bent spine and raised in a lakeside village not far from where Hitler grew up, Engleitner was appalled by the slaughter of World War I and joined the pacifist Jehovah's Witnesses in the early 1930s. When Austria joined the German Reich in 1938, members of the religion were rounded up. They could get out of the camps if they signed a paper - the ladder of the title - renouncing their religion and accepting the Nazis' warlike ways.
According to the film, the Austrian Witnesses, including Engleitner, refused to do so. Many, of course, paid with their lives.
Through narration and re-enactment, the movie recounts Engleitner's harrowing ordeal, which included the time when, starving on a march back to camp from a work detail, his testicle was crushed by an SS guard's boot, which prevented him from ever fathering children.
Decades later, Engleitner met a young Austrian, Bernhard Rammerstorfer, in a park in his hometown. Taken by the older man's story, Rammerstorfer wrote a book about Engleitner, "Unbroken Will," and produced an earlier documentary about him as well as "Ladder in the Lions' Den."
"I hope that educators will pick it up and realize the important message that is there," the film's narrator, Sun Valley resident Fred Fuss, said. "Leopold did a very significant thing: he just said no. When he was being bullied, browbeaten, threatened with his life to give up his principles, he didn't, because of his conscience. Isn't that the message we try to give our young people?"
While not suggesting that it was in any way easy, Engleitner said that his stubbornness in the face of evil was, quite simply, inevitable.
"It's important that you live your life according to just principles," Engleitner explained. "I found them in the Bible, and that's what also gave me strength - my strong belief in God." |