BALTIMORE (Map, News) - In the springtime of his 87th year, Leo Bretholz and his wife, Flo, left their Northwest Baltimore home last week and went to Vienna, Austria. It was their fifth such trip to that haunted city, and each time it delivers an implicit message: Leo’s still alive. He’s been living on borrowed time for the past 70 years.

He left his birthplace when Adolf Hitler arrived. It was the start of the Anschluss, the takeover of Hitler’s native Austria by the Third Reich, and the beginning of the rule of the mob. Bretholz was a 17-year-old schoolboy ordered by his mother to run for his life because she could see the future, in which people were put to death for the crime of being born Jewish.

Last week, Bretholz returned to the high school he’d been attending before he was forced to flee. During the war, he learned, its basement was used as a holding cell for Jews who were later deported to the death camps. Now it was the site of an exhibit: “When Schools Become Prisons.”

“A very emotional experience,” he was saying Monday. He was back home, and sounded a little tired. He gave three speeches at his old school, two of them to students and one to visitors at the exhibition. “Very emotional.”

His old school sponsored the trip, and the city has long since taken pains to express its official remorse for its enormous role in the Holocaust.

Ten years ago, Bretholz authored a memoir (point of full disclosure: I was his co-author) called “Leap Into Darkness: Seven Years on the Run in Wartime Europe.” The book has now been published in Austria (and several other countries), and the city of Vienna recently placed a plaque outside the apartment building where Bretholz lived as a boy.

The plaque honors the memory of his mother and two young sisters, who were pulled from the apartment and put to death because they lacked the strength to run before the mass killings commenced.

But history has a habit of imprecision.

In his running, Bretholz survived the war by a series of audacious escapes from the Nazis. On a raw November morning in 1942, after he’d crossed the Alps on foot but been turned away at the Swiss border and imprisoned in France, he and 999 others were herded onto freight cars from the French holding camp at Drancy and headed for Auschwitz.

The Germans kept records of everything, and they were detailed but not always accurate. Some of the records included France’s role in the Holocaust. It was tabulated in a book published three decades after the war, called “Le Memorial de la Deportation Des Juifs de France.”

It merely lists those who left the railroad station at Drancy and were sent to concentration camps across Europe. It is the size of a telephone directory.

Among the 76,000 names listed in the book (including 11,000 children) are those 999 who left Drancy in the transport that carried Bretholz. By the Germans’ own calculations, 773 were gassed on arrival at Auschwitz or died en route. An additional 145 men and 82 women were selected for forced labor. Four men survived.

Bretholz is listed as one of the dead.

In the vast machinery of the Nazi killing, they did not notice his escape. He and another youth, Manfred Silberwasser, vanished by squeezing though the iron bars of a window at the top of their freight car. They leaped into the darkness somewhere in the middle of Europe, found an overnight hiding place with a village priest, and eventually made their way to the French Resistance.

The other day, when Bretholz was in Austria, my wife and I were in Paris. We went to the Memorial de la Shoah, the French museum memorializing the Holocaust. Shoah is a Hebrew word. It means catastrophe.

At the museum, you find the Wall of Names: the 76,000 Jews who were deported from France during the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis, their names now engraved in stone. Of the 76,000 sent to the camps, only about 2,500 survived.

Leo’s name is there.

He’s listed on a wall in France, with no distinction between those murdered and those who survived. And he’s listed as one of the dead in the Germans’ own records.

It’s one reason he keeps going back to Austria. It’s his cry across the generations. It’s a cry to his former home, to his mother, and to his sisters: I’m still here. I’m still telling what happened in that time of madness.