Leon Weliczker Wells (1925–2009)

Leon Weliczker, later Wells, was born to a Jewish family in Stojanów, Poland, one of seven children of a modestly prosperous timber merchant. He was a teenager living in Lvov when Nazi Germany invaded his country in World War II. He and his family were first forced into a ghetto and then deported to the Janowska concentration camp. His parents and siblings were all killed by the Nazis and their helpers.

Wells kept a diary of his experiences as a member of the "death brigade" of prisoners at Janowska forced to aid in the disposal of Jewish bodies. He escaped from the camp in an uprising in 1943 and was hidden along with other Jews in a cellar under a cattle shed at the Kalwinski family farm on the outskirts of Lvov. In 1946, he was able to leave Poland for the American Zone in Germany. Living in Munich, he helped organize the Jewish Historical Commission there. This group gathered documents on the Holocaust that became part of the original collection of the Yad Vashem archive in Israel.

In 1949, he completed his PhD in mechanical engineering from the Technical Institute of the University of Munich. He emigrated to the USA in 1949 and did postgraduate work in physics at Lehigh University. At New York University,

Dr. Wells was an assistant professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences until 1953 and was a research fellow at the Naval Research Office. Later he worked in the private sector as an engineer in the field of applied optics and mechanisms. He held several patents on inventions of motion picture projecting systems.

His memoir based on his wartime notes, The Janowska Road (aka The Death Brigade), was published in German in 1958 and in English in 1963; it was later translated into 12 different languages. In 1987, he published Who Speaks for the Vanquished? American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust. Dr. Wells was married and had three children.