Leo Bretholz was born in Vienna, Austria on March 6, 1921. He left Vienna at the age of 17 amid the growing menace of Nazi control. For the next seven years, he evaded Nazi concentration camps by living as a fugitive from 1938 to 1945. He assumed aliases, slept in ditches, and found sanctuary with relatives, in Jewish ghettos, and among orders of Roman Catholic nuns and priests. He jumped from a transport carrying him and a thousand other Jewish deportees to Auschwitz on November 5, 1942. The transport was a French train operated by the state-owned railway, the Soci�t� Nationale des Chemins de fer Fran�ais (S.N.C.F.). Toward the end of the war, he joined a Jewish resistance group… known as La Sixi�me. He wrote about his experiences in a 1998 memoir entitled Leap Into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe. After the war he settled in Baltimore, Maryland. He found work in the textile business, then as a partner in a liquor store, then in the book selling business. Recently, when S.N.C.F. became involved in commuter rail contracts in Maryland, he became a witness at congressional hearings on the proposed Holocaust Rail Justice Act, which would allow Holocaust victims and their families to sue S.N.C.F. in the American courts. He died on March 8, 2014 at the age of 93.