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Leon Bakst was one of four siblings born in Ivie, a small Polish town. Leon was 15 when the Germans occupied Ivie in the summer of 1941 and forced the town’s Jews into a ghetto. When the Nazis asked Leon’s father what his job was he lied and told the Germans that he was a brush maker. e guessed they would have more use for a tradesman skills. His guess was correct as he was spared from the initial massacre of Jewish men.

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Leon Bakst a teenager from Ivie escaped from a work camp and hiked to the Naliboki forest with over a dozen other Jews to join the Bielski Brigade.

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Before the first World War Ivie was part of the Russian Empire,
then Poland then part of the Soviet Union, Now in Belarus which is a country in Europe.

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organization of Jewish refuges who rescued Jews from extermination and fought against the Nazis.

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The forest in which he was staying at had a massacre a few years before The Naliboki massacre the mass killing of 129 Poles, including women and children, by The soviets on 8 May 1943 imagine trying to live where prior many more human beings had been slaughtered.

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¨The tragic separation from his family actually saved his life¨

“Even if we saved a few lives and shortened the war we made a contribution,”

“Sheer survival was the great motivator”

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Yes and the month of may on the second was his 92nd birthday

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This memorial was for the Bieliski brigade ,embers who lost there lives.

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These where some of the Jews who fought for others

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Holocaust museum on Leon and his amazing life

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Leon Bakst was one of four siblings born to a wholesale merchant in Ivie, a small Polish town 73 miles west of Minsk. Leon was 15 when the Germans occupied Ivie in the summer of 1941 and forced the town's Jews into a ghetto.

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Leon and Libby Bakst in 1944.