The story of Thomas Leo

Thomas Leo grew up in troubled times.

"I was a kid in Nazi Germany," he says.

His father's family—after three generations of following the Jewish religion—began converting to Christianity in the early 1900s.

"That's what people did in those days," Thomas says. However, the Nazis weren't impressed; despite the rejection of their former religion, the family was persecuted anyway.

"The Nazis were only interested in terror, and taking peoples' money," he says.

Thomas's father was a professor in their hometown of northwest Frankfurt, near the Taunus Mountains. In 1933, he went on a trip to Italy. When it became close to the time he was due back, Thomas remembers his mother sent him a wire that said, "Things are getting really bad here. Don't come back." However, his father returned to his family in Germany, despite his mother's warning.

By 1938, Thomas says his mother's concern and frustration had grown even more, and she sent his father to Venezuela, the only place there seemed to be any job prospects. He became a professor there. With the pay being so low, he took on a second job as a librarian.

Thomas remembers the night of Nov. 11, 1938, which, in German history, is referred to as "Kristallnacht"—a night of crystals or broken glass.

"It was the first big, public persecution of Jews," he says. After that horrific night, his mother sent Thomas and his brother to a Quaker school in Holland, which Emily Leo explains also served as a refuge for children of German descent, to help get them out of their country. Thomas learned some English there.

In September of the following year, World War II broke out in Europe. Thomas's mother took her two children to Venezuela to meet their father. However, they experienced great difficulty trying to get the boys into school there.

"They wanted to set me back three whole grades, just because I hadn't had any Venezuelan history," Thomas remembers.

Thomas's mother was at her wit's end, so she did what most mothers would never be able to bring themselves to do—she boarded her children onto a Japanese freighter, and sent them to San Pedro by themselves. Old colleagues of her husband's from his days teaching in Germany, who had made it out of the country early after getting job offers at Stanford, agreed to meet the children in San Pedro, and then bring them to California.

"I keep thinking to myself, what would have happened to Thomas and his brother if they had docked in San Pedro, and the professors weren't there?' " Emily Leo says.

"But it worked like a home run. Everything connected," Thomas says.

Thomas was taken in by Frankel Hermann, and his brother was taken in by Gerda Isenberg; they were Quaker, as Thomas and his brother had been raised, and were professors of classics at Stanford.

Thomas went on to attend high school in Palo Alto, then earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at Stanford. Back then, he remembers, school was much tougher.

"There were no summers off. It was what you could call 'accelerated education,' " he says. He then went on to do a few internships at various places on the East Coast. However, he says he had always loved California, and he eventually came back. He went on to become a fellow in cardiology at Stanford, and started his own practice in 1969.

Thomas treasures his ancestry. His father was a descendant of both the renowned composer Felix Mendelssohn, and Moses Mendelssohn, a well-known Jewish philosopher of the 18th century. He speaks proudly of how hard his father worked—of how he was a "dirt-poor" bank clerk in the town of Dessau, who walked more than 100 kilometers to the city of Berlin to start a better life, including writing many of his philosophies for the people to read.

"He started his family there, and became well known for his thoughts," Thomas says.

The story of Emily Leo

Emily Leo's mother was a Navy nurse based in Pearl Harbor, where she met her husband, a Naval officer. However, their courtship was not without its difficulties—in fact, Emily's mother sacrificed her job to be with him.

"Back then, you weren't allowed to be married in the service, because Navy nurses—women—were considered officers," Emily explains. "In fact, she wasn't even allowed to date my dad. They had to sneak around."

When they decided to get married, Emily says her mother was forced to resign from her job.

"Then World War II hit," Emily says, and her father was sent to fight. Emily remembers how they would stay with her grandparents in Portland when her father was serving. Whenever they were in Portland, her mother would go and work at the local hospital, the same one where she had attended nursing school.

"My mother believed that women should contribute to society what they learned in college," Emily says. In other words, she says, just because women get married, they shouldn't have to give up their careers, and she felt it was honorable for women to use their education to give back. As a result, Emily's mother continued to work as a nurse whenever she could. Years later, after Emily married Thomas, she followed in that path and went back to work.

"Some people criticized me because after I was married, even though my husband was a physician, I went back to work. They thought I should have stayed home and done community projects or something," she says. "For me, I just needed to go back to work. I was raised like that. That's my dilemma with women and college education; we want to be equal. I think we need to contribute what we went to college for."

Emily Leo has worked at the Community Hospital of Los Gatos for more than 30 years, in various capacities. Currently she is a diabetes educator.

"I run both the outpatient and inpatient programs," she says. She teaches people with diabetes how to treat their condition, and live with it on a day-to-day basis. In addition to seeing patients, she also teaches many classes and clinics on diabetes.

Her chosen career was also the path that led her to Thomas.

The story of Emily and Thomas

"I was new to the area in 1969," Thomas says. So, he says, he went around to local hospitals introducing himself.

At the Community Hospital of Los Gatos, Thomas says Emily has always been the one who knows everything that is going on, at all times.

"She knows and hears everything. She is a fountain of information and gossip," he says. Naturally, when he visited her hospital, everyone went to Emily to get the scoop on him. However, Emily has long-disputed her reputation as being the one who knew everything.

"Another nurse asked me if I had heard about Dr. Leo, and I said, 'No, I don't know everything!' "

Later that day, when standing with the same nurse, Thomas walked by, although Emily did not know at the time who he was.

"I said, just as a joke, 'There he is, here comes Dr. Leo!' " Emily says.

Emily then got the surprise of her life when Thomas walked up to her and said, "Hi, I'm new to the area; I'm Dr. Leo. I don't believe we've met."

Being a devout Quaker, that Sunday Emily went to her usual Quaker meeting—and who should walk in but Dr. Leo. He went up to Emily and said hello. That night, they went out for coffee—their first date. He called her at the hospital the next day. The two soon realized how much they had in common—they both already had children from previous relationships, they were both in the medical field, and they were both devoted Quakers—and they fell in love.

"In this area, I thought, what are the chances of finding that?" Emily says.

They were married, and had two children of their own, bringing the total to five—Paul, Karin, Ivan, David and Elisabeth.

Revisiting the past

At the town's invitation, Emily and Thomas recently traveled back to Germany to visit the town where Thomas and his family had lived. Someone had written a book and had rounded up survivors of the Holocaust to come back to the town and speak about their lives and experiences.

"I met actual classmates of mine, from the 1930s," Thomas says. "They wanted to know what my life had been like."

Thomas says the experience reinforced how "the horrors of the 1930s are not likely to be repeated."

Emily says the experience was eye-opening for her as well, and she thought it was a great opportunity to teach people about the past. "There are still people who think the Holocaust didn't happen," she says.

Emily doesn't speak German, and couldn't understand most of what Thomas said in his talks to the schoolchildren in Germany. But when a translator stepped in to help, many of the students had questions for her about her country, the United States.

"It was a marvelous experience," says Thomas.