Leon Leyson will forever remember a boyhood entangled in one of the 20th century’s darkest tales.

Born 1929 in Poland, Leyson — once Leib Lejson — lived through the Nazi invasion of his country and survived the Jewish ghetto in Krakow that served as one of the outposts of the Holocaust and the setting of one of its rare tales of survival.

The Krakow ghetto is where Leyson and his family, among more than 1,000 other Jews, came under the unlikely protection of German factory owner Oscar Schindler. Now 80, Leyson is the youngest among the more than thousand Jews saved by Schindler, the German factory owner whose efforts were famously dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, “Schindler’s List.”

Sunday evening, Leyson will share his remarkable story at Folsom Lake College in an event sponsored by the Chabad Jewish Community Center in conjunction with FLC’s Multicultural Subcommittee and Interdisciplinary Studies Department.

“The Nazis did not kill millions,” Leyson said in a release. “They killed individuals.”

One of those individuals was Leyson’s eldest brother, Hershel, who was killed after escaping to Narewka, the Polish town where Leyson and his four older siblings grew up.

A year after his brother’s death, the 13-year-old Leyson was reunited with his remaining family members in Schindler’s enamelware factory, which the sympathetic Schindler used to shield Jews from the Nazi death camps. It was a risky gambit that required Schindler to call in favors from his connections and make considerable bribes.

Leyson, who didn’t respond to a request for an interview, spent three years in a displaced persons camp in Frankfurt, Germany following the war, moving to the United States at the age of 20 in 1949. He served in the Korean war with the U.S. Army and returned to become a high school teacher in Los Angeles, retiring after nearly 40 years.

It took decades — and Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film — before Leyson spoke openly about a childhood tainted by one of the 20th century’s darkest periods.

“The first time he did talk about it publicly was after ‘Schindler’s List’ came out. It wasn’t a simple decision he came to,” said Rabbi Yossi Grossman, director of the Folsom Chabad Jewish Community Center and organizer of the event.

Grossman said Leyson feared people wouldn’t understand or be able to relate to his harrowing experiences, but reconsidered after witnessing the worldwide impact Spielberg’s film had.

Alice Textor, the student life coordinator at the college, said Grossman approached her about hosting the event.

“He had this idea and he wanted to know if we could host it at our campus,” Textor recalled. “And we have a multicultural committee as well as interdisciplinary studies, so I thought it would make sense for us to collaborate with him on it.”

Grossman hopes people take away important lessons about honoring the past and people’s ability to positively affect the course of history.

“There were people who stood up. There were people who did what they could,” Grossman said of Schindler and others like him. “The power of one individual saved over a thousand people.”

Scott Crow, the public information officer for the college, likened the relevance of Leyson’s appearance to a 10-minute video the college made for Veterans Day. The video spotlighted a local Folsom veteran who spoke of his service in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, as well as the impact those conflicts had on his family and friends.

“How do we make history come alive for people who didn’t live through it or weren’t around?” Crow said of the challenge to educators. The answer, he said, is to give voice to extraordinary, everyday people like Leyson.

“That’s a real person there. That’s not just a name on a page,” he said. “That’s someone with real life experiences to share.”