The Last Survivors: Leon Prochnik

This story is part of “The Last Survivors,” originally published Jan. 8, 2016.

Leon Prochnik was 6 and on a family vacation away from their Krakow home when his father, the owner of one of the largest chocolate factories in Eastern Europe, received a telegram from an employee. It was 1939, just days after Germany had invaded Poland. The Nazis were looking for him.

The Prochniks never returned, eventually slipping away through Lithuania, hopping the Trans-Siberian Railway across the Soviet Union to Japan, taking a boat to Canada and, a year and a half later — after being held up by U.S. Customs (“America would not let Jewish refugees in at that point; it was not a very proud moment in America’s history”) — finally settling in New York with the help of a Yankee uncle. “It was the first night I remember sleeping without my fists being clenched,” Prochnik says of his arrival.

The epic journey was punctuated by fraught moments internalized as only the child of a chocolatier could. Prochnik — who went on to a Hollywood career as a screenwriter (Child’s Play, directed by Sidney Lumet) as well as a trailer editor on films like All That Jazz and Tommy — had loved to visit the giant tub in which the factory melted industrial-sized chunks of cocoa, sticking his arm in to his elbow, “then I’d lick it all off.” He privately named it Milka, coming to believe during his time on the run that it had magical powers and repeatedly returning to his happy place when breakthroughs emerged: the moment his father finally connected with the Lithuania-based, transit visa-bestowing diplomat Chiune Sugihara (the “Japanese Schindler”), the point when a bayonet-wielding German officer with a scar on his face that looked like a snake (“You remember these things”) missed his mother’s Hebrew prayer book on an otherwise thorough search of their belongings.

Yet Prochnik, now 82 and living in Los Angeles, also was haunted as a child by his imaginary savior. “I had a dream about Milka one night where she was as big as a lake,” he says of the tub, which these days still is in use — as a storytelling device he deploys in regular speaking gigs to engage schoolkids to begin to digest the enormity of the Holocaust’s horror. (A book, Milka & Me, will be released in the spring.) “She invited me to swim, and there was my friend, Oleg, a Lithuanian Jewish boy who had stayed because his family would not think of leaving Poland. What Milka was telling me was that this boy would not survive the war.”