Before being marched off, he caught sight of his wife, Else, and son, Barney, being loaded on to trucks. It was the last time he ever saw them.
The tragic unfolding of events for the Greenmans began when Leon gave his family's British passports to a non-Jewish friend for safekeeping – only for the friend to burn the documents for fear of being caught with "Jewish" papers. And without a means to prove their identity, the family were arrested.
The Greenmans were then taken from their home in Rotterdam in October 1942 and imprisoned in Westerbork camp in Holland. Leon's desperate attempts to secure substitute documentation to prove their identities came to nothing, as although papers eventually reached the camp, they arrived on the day the Greenmans were deported to Auschwitz, unseen by the authorities.
While Leon would go on to survive Birkenau, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a death march, and Buchenwald concentration camp, Else and Barney were murdered within a few hours of arrival in Auschwitz in the gas chambers of bunkers one and two.