Leon Weliczker Wells papers

Leon Weliczker Wells was born in Lvov, Poland, on March 10, 1925. Wells was a prisoner in the Janowska concentration camp outside Lvov during World War II. He escaped from the camp in an uprising in 1943 and was hidden in the basement of the Kalwinski family on the outskirts of Lvov.

Wells kept a written record of his experiences as a member of the "Death Brigade," and these memoirs were published in Poland after the war and reissued in the United States as The Janowska Road. In 1946 Wells left Poland for the American Zone in Germany, and while in Munich he helped organize the Jewish Historical Commission there. This group gathered documents on the Holocaust which became part of the original collection of the Yad Vashem archive in Israel. Wells gave testimony at both the Nuremberg trials and the Eichmann trial.

In 1949 Wells received his Ph.D in mechanical engineering from the Technical Institute of the University of Munich. He came to the United States in 1949 and did post-graduate work in physics at Lehigh University. He has worked in the field of applied optics and mechanisms and holds patents on motion picture projecting systems.

Wells published Who Speaks for the Vanquished? in 1987. In this work Wells investigated the "non-response" of American Jewish leaders of the plight of Jews in Nazi Europe. He contended that Zionist organizations in America failed to respond in a significant way to save the Jews of Europe because they were focusing their time, influence, and money on preparations for a Jewish state in Palestine.

Wells lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey. He and his wife have three children.