AFTER THE FIRST 63 years of her life, Eliane Strosberg figured she knew everything there was to know about her parents, Isak and Lilly Leuwenkroon.
She knew they were Polish Jews who met in Belgium in the late 1930s, survived World War II, and lost relatives in the Holocaust. She knew they raised four children in Antwerp and built a successful chain of perfume stores, her father once bicycling 200 miles to Paris for the latest fragrances. She remembers her parents were always “madly in love,’’ made sure their kids went to the best schools and gloated over their grandchildren. And she remembers her father writing poetry for family events, her mother always wearing fine clothes.
Then one day in 2010, Strosberg received a phone call from a stranger with a revelation she knew nothing about: In 1943, four years before she was born, her young parents helped smuggle 239 unaccompanied Jewish children in war-torn France to safety in Switzerland, under the noses of the Nazis.
Isak, 23, and Lilly, 21, were busy enough as first-time parents; Robert, Strosberg’s older brother, was born a year earlier in Lyon, France, where his parents had fled after the Germans invaded Belgium. But they still made time to play crucial roles in a rescue operation led by French resisters with help from a Zionist Youth Movement.
They made fake passports, many carried by Lilly posing as a pregnant woman in a bag under her coat. They helped create families of unaccompanied children sent from distant towns with adult refugees posing as their parents.
On the first three of what turned out to be 24 convoys from August to October 1943, 43 unaccompanied children were loaded onto trucks driven by “Isy,’’ as Strosberg’s father was called. He ferried them through the French Alps, dodging German patrols, to the Swiss border where they were met by chaperones who helped them slip through barbed-wire barriers to safety.
Isy and Lilly could have saved themselves, gone on one of those rescue convoys and escaped to Switzerland. They chose to stay and help their fellow Jews escape. Eventually, they went into hiding, sleeping with their clothes on in case of a hasty escape, and returned to Antwerp after the war ended in 1945.
In the decades after the war, as they rebuilt their lives, raised a family and launched their perfume business, Isy and Lilly never told their four children about the rescue missions. In fact, Strosberg said, they rarely talked at all about the war, “a dark period” in which the Nazis murdered Lilly's father and Isy’s grandmother, who’d raised him after his mother died when he was 4.
Strosberg and her siblings learned about it only when contacted in 2010 by Nancy Lefenfeld, author of “The Fate of Others.” The 400-page book details the wider rescue efforts by the resistance group working from a base in the Haute-Savoie region where the French border intersects Switzerland and Italy.
Lefenfeld learned about the Leuwenkroons when she spoke to some of the rescued children, who remembered the young “glamorous couple” that came to their aid, with Isy behind the wheel of the truck.
Strosberg said she arranged for Lefenfeld to interview her 88-year-old mother, warning the author that her elderly mom didn’t have the best memory. Then she sat “flabbergasted” for 90 minutes as her mom shared vivid details about what she and Isy did in 1943. At one point, Strosberg said, Lilly started humming a song that she’d heard Italian soldiers sing nearly 70 years ago in the Italian Occupation Zone of France.
“I asked my siblings if they had ever heard about this, and they were just as stunned as I was,”” Strosberg, 77, recalled.
Over the next 10 years, as they absorbed the revelation, a deep appreciation took root — not just for the selfless courage and bravery of their parents but for the impact their actions had on generations of Jews.
‘’We were pretty humbled by the whole thing,’’ Strosberg said. “They could have crossed the Swiss border to safety, yet they chose to help others first. It's pretty humbling that they did that.’’
Isy and Lilly Leuwenkroon’s story is being told again in a new permanent exhibit at the Richard and Pat Johnson Palm Beach County History Museum in downtown West Palm Beach.
“Stories of Rescue,” in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, highlights 12 ordinary individuals from diverse faiths and backgrounds who chose to intervene and save Jews during World War II, at great personal risk. Among them:
Paul Grueninger, a Swiss Border Police captain who turned a blind eye to fake visas and backdated entry visas to prevent the expulsion of at least 2,000 Jewish refugees.
Leopold Socha, a Polish sanitation inspector who used his knowledge of the sewer system in German-occupied Lwow (now Lviv, Ukraine) to help Jews hide.
Marion Pritchard, a Dutch social worker who hid and cared for Jewish children in The Netherlands — and who shot and killed a Dutch collaborator who discovered a family she was hiding.
“Everyone who survived has at least 20 stories of miracles to tell,” Strosberg said. “This could only happen because this one helped a little bit here and that one helped a little bit there. It was extremely dangerous for the locals who helped. They risked their own lives.”
Isy and Lilly’s story enriches the exhibit with a local connection. Strosberg moved to Palm Beach County from Paris in 2005 when her late husband, Donny, took a job at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter. Donny died in 2012 at age 67. Their son Serge lives in Palm Beach and works as a portrait artist.
Their inclusion in the exhibit is the result of a happy accident. One day in 2023, Serge stopped by the museum to see a collection of his paintings on display. A museum staff member mentioned the upcoming “Stories of Rescue” exhibit, which opened a year later in September 2024.
Serge casually remarked, “My grandparents saved lives during the Holocaust. Maybe you’d like to include them.”
Thrilled to add Isy and Lilly’s story, museum curators recruited Eliane, who lives in West Palm Beach, to help with the exhibit. They asked her to host lectures for students on field trips, part of the museum’s new designation by the Palm Beach County School District as a Holocaust Education Center.
“Working with Eliane was a true privilege,’’ said Erica Grant, the collections curator for the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. “We are grateful for the time she dedicated to ensuring that both her personal story and the broader narrative of the Holocaust were communicated accurately.’’
While the exhibit’s individual rescue stories are condensed to just a few sentences each, Isy and Lilly’s story is enhanced with a video of Strosberg talking to her teenage grandson, Joshua, about what her parents did.
Joshua’s participation was by design, Strosberg said, because she wants to connect with young students, many of whom she said have no knowledge of the Holocaust.
“For them, when they hear the Holocaust, it's like they hear something about in the distant past. It's almost a century ago,’’ she said, noting that the students were born 20 years after the movie “Schindler's List.”
Her field trip lectures include stories about other relatives, like her Uncle Albert, who survived by jumping from a train bound for Auschwitz.
“It’s an obligation to talk about it,’’ she said. “This can happen any time anywhere. That's what I think these kids need to know.’’
The revelation of her parents’ heroic past inspired Eliane to do her own research about the lives and deaths of relatives during the war. She compiled it all in a booklet and gave copies to everyone in her extended family.
The booklet does for the family what Isy and Lilly could not do for their four children.
“We just never talked about the war, the dark period. That was specific not just to my family. It was the culture of my Jewish generation,’’ Strosberg said. “We knew it was very painful for them. My dad lost everybody. My mom lost her dad and her best friend. It would never even occur to us to talk about it or raise the question.’’
Isy died in 2006. On Feb. 14, 2020, he received a posthumous citation from the Jews Rescuing Jews Committee of B’nai B’rith International. Lilly died nine months later on Nov. 17, 2020.
“Their biggest gift, I really think, was their sense of values,’’ Strosberg said.
A few years after Strosberg learned about her parents’ experience in World War II, she visited France to meet some of the grown up “rescued.” She remembers going to an apartment on the Seine River in Paris where she was greeted by Lydie Weissberg, who was 15 when she crossed the Swiss border on the first convoy in August 1943.
“I arrived and she went, ‘Ha! You are the daughter of Isy and Lilly!’ — like she was talking about gods that came down from Olympus,’’ Strosberg recalled. “It was incredible to have this 80-year-old woman talking about this whole thing and by extension I became a goddess as well.’’
Serge Strosberg credits Isy, an art lover, with encouraging him to become a portrait artist. And Serge is still amazed that, after all the time they spent together, his grandfather never talked about the rescues.
“They did it to save lives because it was the right thing to do. They could have gone on the convoys, but they didn’t. I guess they were a bit crazy, ‘’ he said with a laugh.
“The extraordinary aspect of this story is that my grandparents did not accept victimhood, did not go where the French police aiding the Nazis forced Jews to go and did not follow the other Jews to the camps or to ghettos. Instead they hid in the French Alps aiding Jewish children to escape to the Swiss border and also helping the French resistance,’’ he said.
“They didn’t trust anyone having experienced antisemitism in Poland in their youth. My grandparents decided to take control of their own destiny. They were Jews who fought back and actually rescued many others at the peril of their own lives.’’
(Editor’s note: Joe Capozzi is a marketing writer for Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County, a co-sponsor of the Stories of Rescue exhibit.)
Special thanks to graphic artist Amy Bernard for the cover photo illustration.
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About the author
Joe Capozzi is an award-winning reporter based in Lake Worth Beach. He spent more than 30 years writing for newspapers, mostly at The Palm Beach Post, where he wrote about the opioid scourge, invasive pythons, the birth of the Ballpark of the Palm Beaches and Palm Beach County government. For 15 years, he covered the Miami Marlins baseball team. Joe left The Post in December 2020. View all posts by Joe Capozzi.