Remembering Leon Tabory

Holocaust Survivor, Friend of Neal Cassady, and Counterculture Figure

by Jerry Cimino

I never thought to ask Leon Tabory for a picture of his tattoo.

Leon was a child when he was sent to Stutthof concentration camp, and upon arrival had a number tattooed on his arm. I had seen Leon’s tattoo a few times. He was not the first Holocaust survivor I’d ever met, nor was he the only person I’ve ever known who bore its permanent mark. There have actually been quite a few others over the years. One man Estelle and I met soon after moving to California in the 1990s, Harold Gordon, wrote a book about his experiences, The Last Sunrise, and we hosted him for a book signing years ago when we were still in Monterey. During the course of his talk he stood onstage, showed the audience his tattoo, and invited them up to look at it more closely afterward. It was an effective technique, and he sold a lot of books that day, but he certainly wasn’t doing it for the money. He wanted his story told, and to ensure it was understood. He wanted to show people his tattoo, to see that it was just as real as the experience behind it, and implored his audience to remember, lest these horrors be visited upon the world again.

When The Beat Museum later moved to San Francisco, we all got to know another Holocaust survivor very well. The poet ruth weiss never had her arm tattooed, because she and her family fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, so they were never rounded up for deportation and sent to a concentration camp. ruth relates the harrowing tale of her escape from the Nazis when she was 10 years old in the movie ruth weiss The Beat Goddess. ruth even wrote a powerful poem about it, which she would often perform with jazz accompaniment, titled “My number was not called.” ruth’s performance was always one of high and low emotion as she wondered aloud why she was saved while so many others perished. Of course, ruth’s number was never called because she never got one. She and her parents had the good fortune of escaping to Amsterdam, then boarding a ship bound for America, where they spent the war.


It was Steve Edington from Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, who first arranged my introduction to Leon Tabory almost 30 years ago. Steve has been a major bridge between the east and west coast contingents of the Beat scene for the last thirty years, visiting California almost every year since I’ve known him. In the 1990s and 2000s Steve would often arrange for me and our mutual friend, John Allen Cassady, to do something special during his annual visit. On one occasion the three of us hiked down to the floor of Bixby Canyon in Big Sur. On another, we visited Camaldoli Hermitage, a Camaldolese Benedictine monastery south of Big Sur. A number of times Steve arranged for John to introduce us to Cassady family friend, Leon Tabory.

John Allen Cassady, Jerry Cimino, Leon Tabory, and Steve Edington

Leon Tabory first met Neal Cassady at San Quentin early in 1958, while Neal was “a guest of the State,” as John likes to say. At the time, Tabory was a research psychologist, working on the “Intensive Treatment Program” at the prison. A randomly selected group of inmates attended weekly therapy sessions with psychiatric social workers in the hope that fewer would violate parole in the first year. Leon’s job was to try and figure out why the program wasn’t working. “It didn’t take long to see what a phony operation it all was and I was struggling to do what I could while I was there,” he said.

Tabory was born in Lithuania in 1926, into a “very orthodox” Jewish family, who owned a factory, cared for their workers, worked hard themselves, and were well-off. “But then the Russians came in,” Tabory says, and everything changed. At the time, the Soviets and Nazi Germany had a non-interference pact; Germany wanted Poland, and the USSR wanted the Baltic states, and soon Lithuania came under Soviet occupation, and eventually became “Sovietized” as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa) in June of 1941, the first German troops to arrive in Lithuania were greeted as liberators. But within days of the invasion, Nazi death squads began executing Jews. By the end of the three-year German occupation, 95% of Lithuania’s Jewish population had been murdered.

Amidst the roundups and deportations of Lithuanian Jews, Leon Tabory and his uncle found themselves packed with others aboard a freight train bound for Stutthof, east of Danzig in northern Poland. From there they were sent to Dachau, in southern Germany, where they were put to work building underground factories, building roads and laying railways. Then as the Allies began to close in on Germany, their captors began a death march out of Dachau, walking endlessly in circles through the woods. He describes starved, skeletal figures fighting over the last loaves of bread, and being told there would be no more.

Death march from Dachau, 28 April 1945. Photo by Benno Gantner.

They managed to survive, and following the Allied liberation Tabory spent some time in Munich with his sister, before going to Sweden, then sailing aboard a liberty ship to the United States, to where his father, a rabbi, lived in Baltimore. He then went to Brooklyn, where some of his aunts lived, and worked as a laborer by day, while attending the Rose Preparatory School by night. He then attended college in Michigan, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, earning a masters degree in psychology.

By the late 1950s, Tabory was in California, where he took the job with the Department of Corrections, working with the Intensive Treatment Program at San Quentin, where he met Neal Cassady. After Neal’s parole, Leon visited the Cassady home, which led to him being fired for “associating with ex-convicts or their families.” Tabory appealed the decision, which took two years, during which he was without work. He’d become close friends with the Cassadys by then, and they suggested he move in with them in Los Gatos. Carolyn Cassady accompanied him to the hearing where he pled his case before the Department of Corrections, where the hearing officer ruled that “Tabory acted reasonably under all the circumstances” and ordered him reinstated, though the personnel board claimed that they could not work with Tabory “due to philosophical differences.” He took the first job he was offered at Santa Clara Community Mental Health Services.


In the mid-1960s, Tabory was the owner/operator of The Barn, a bastion of hippiedom that brought psychedelic rock and light shows to then-conservative, bucolic Scotts Valley in the Santa Cruz mountains. Regulars included Janis Joplin and Country Joe McDonald, Eric “Big Daddy” Nord, Ken Kesey, and Neal Cassady. As expected, residents didn’t take the venue nor its clientele well, and the Scotts Valley city council ordered The Barn closed, citing Tabory’s lack of an entertainment license. Not to be dissuaded, Tabory ignored the order, and was arrested for contempt of court, beginning a long series of court battles with the City.

John Allen Cassady (center) at Leon Tabory’s memorial in Santa Cruz.

“One spring day about fifteen years ago,” Leon said, “my son, Ari, asked me ‘But Dad, what have you got to show for it?’ I told him ‘Every time I walk somewhere in Santa Cruz, some young person’s eyes light up, they are so happy to see me. It revives for them the wonderful spirit that we shared there.’”

Leon Tabory died in September of 2009, a week before his 84th birthday.