Historic Laredo

and me, four at once in World War II, two of us
in Korea,” he said.
“Some of the Japanese were terrified of the
American soldiers after the war ended. Rather
than surrender, some of them threw themselves
off the high cliffs at Okinawa,” he recalled.
“In 1946 I went to Yokohama. To this day I
have a very vivid memory of something I saw
there. A few days before reaching land, the ship’s
garbage doesn’t go into the water. It gets stored.
We had plenty of it before reaching Yokohama.
We docked and tied up there. We weren’t
allowed off the ship. We were taking on troops.
What I remember so clearly is Japanese civilians
going up the ship’s ropes to find something to
eat in our garbage,” he said.
“I lost my mother right after I got back. She
died in 1946. I think the stress of having all her
sons in the service got to her. It affected all of us.
You grew up overnight. The experiences of
those years are inside all of us. They hardly ever
surface, but they do. I still think of those desolate
and remote cliffs where the Japanese
jumped off rather than face their captors. You’d
think all these years later that those memories
would dissipate. We came back street-wise, full
of new lessons. If my innocence was all I lost, I
was lucky,” Leyendecker said.
Boat Swain’s Mate Second Class Leyendecker
was 19 when he was discharged on July 4, 1946.
“A troop train took us from San Diego to
Galveston. I came home to join the family business,
City Lumber. I stayed in the reserves and
was called to the Korean War in 1950. I reported
to Houston and went to orientation in San
Diego and then to Treasure Island near San
Francisco,” he said.
“I made 13 trips to Alaska on a tanker that
delivered jet fuel. It was always an adventure on
very turbulent waters. It was beautiful. You
couldn’t fill your eyes enough with the beauty of
it, the whales at St. Lawrence, the porpoises
escorting the ships. Standing watch at night,
you would ask, ‘What am I doing here? Will I
ever get home?’ I prayed that I would,”
Leyendecker said.
“World War II veterans came home to a grateful
nation. They tell their stories with pride and
they are selfless. They did not whine. The wars
since then have been different. I believe in my
country, and I’m proud I served. I think about
those years, though, the years of my life that
were put on hold, the years a young man should
be making his luck and his life,” he said softly,
feeling the weight of memory.
“War destroys more than men. It destroys the
souls of men and whole landscapes and families.
Wars are fought over imaginary lines and parallels.
It was two wars, two sets of experiences
that I went through. I was on the fringes of it,
but I saw enough of it to know I wouldn’t want
my children or grandchildren to have the same
experiences,” he said.
ONE OF MILLIONS:
A HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR’S STORY
David Sanitzki has lived in Laredo since Labor
Day weekend 1974, when he moved from Valley
Stream, Long Island where he had lived since
emigrating from Germany in March 1950. His
demeanor is that of a man younger than his 74
years, buoyant and talkative. One wouldn’t imagine
that he spent the entirety of World War II—
the entirety of his boyhood—imprisoned by the
Nazis in nearly a dozen concentration camps, but
the faded blue numerals tattooed on his forearm
bear sobering witness to the horror of the
Holocaust that consumed six million Jews as well
as millions of Roma (Gypsies), handicapped,
Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians, and others),
homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Free Masons,
political dissidents, Communists, and Socialists.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939,
Sanitzki was 14 and living in the town of
Zychlin, where he was born, some 80 kilometers
from Warsaw. Once the Nazis occupied
Zychlin, they proceeded to pull Jewish men
and youths from their homes and press them
into forced labor gangs. Sanitzki was among
these laborers. He and his eldest brother
Nathan were taken to Wizengrunt, a work
camp across the Polish border in Germany. “I
was a big strong boy, but they didn’t see me as
a boy,” Sanitzki said of the Nazis, “they saw me
as a man.”
Sanitzki was at Wizengrunt for about six
weeks when they took Nathan away to work.
Sanitzki was ill at the time and so was left behind.
A Nazi commander called the Tiger came for
the prisoners at Wizengrunt and marched them
to Roksn, another camp about 20 kilometers
Chapter VI ✦ 49