Leon never spoke to me of that period, nor did he mention any of these family members. Only now, as a consequence of accepting the invitation to deliver a lecture in Lviv, could I begin to comprehend the scale of the devastation that he lived with for the remainder of a life that ran to the end of the twentieth century. The man I came to know in the second half of his life was the last person standing from the years in Galicia. This was the cause of the silence I had heard as a child, a silence that dominated the small apartment he shared with Rita.
