AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH:

LEO D. HYMAS

Leo D. Hymas was born in Sharon, Bear Lake County, Idaho on February 2, 1926. He grew up on a farm near Smithfield, Utah. After graduating from high school in May of 1944, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He served as a machine gunner in the 97th Infantry Division, part of General George C. Patton’s 3rd Army in Europe. His unit of four men were the first to cut the wires and enter Buchenwald, a Nazi concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. When the war in Europe ended, he was sent to Japan for occupation duties under General Douglas MacArthur. He was honorably discharged May 12, 1946.

 

Leo served a mission in the North Central States Mission. After honorably returning from his mission, he married his childhood sweetheart, Amy Bybee, June 30, 1947 in the Logan, Utah Temple.

 

Leo attended college and learned to fly on the G.I. bill. He and Amy have four children, sixteen grandchildren, and five great grandchildren. He worked in the aerospace industry designing and building rockets, missiles, and commercial jet aircraft. He and Amy have worked in the Seattle Temple and as Senior Services missionaries in the L.D.S. Employment Center.

 

Leo is a gun collector, but his passion is flying. He learned to fly a Piper Cub in 1947. In July of 1999, he flew an open cockpit biplane with Walt Bybee, a flying buddy and best friend, from Hemet, CA to Oshkosh, WI to attend the Experimental Aircraft Association Fly-In. He also loves cars. He built a red and orange Tiger Super Roadster in 1982. He and Amy can still be seen waving from it on sunny days driving around Whidbey Island.

 

Presently, Leo is a sought after speaker and lecturer throughout the Puget Sound area and western Canada for the Seattle Holocaust Center. Steven Spielberg sent a film crew to Leo’s home on Whidbey Island in 1995 to video his story. This video has become a permanent record of the Shoah Project, Shoah Foundation Archives in California. Leo returned to Buchenwald as a guest lecturer for the Museum Without Walls program for the University of Washington in 2001. He reminds those he speaks to that he is a living witness to the atrocities that occurred under Hitler’s Regime during World Ward II. “I am a connection to the past. I was there. You have heard me today. Now you are a witness to what happened as well.”

 

On June 13, 2001, Leo D. Hymas was ordained and set apart by President John L. Pedigo as the Stake Patriarch for the Everett, Washington Stake. In his own words:

‘I gained my testimony of Jesus Christ, our Savior, of Joseph Smith, the prophet, and of the truthfulness of the Restored Gospel as an 18-year-old soldier while on a troop ship in the North Atlantic, headed for the war zone. I read in III Nephi, in the Book of Mormon, of the sign that was given at the time of the Savior’s birth and I knew that was the first Christmas Eve on my beloved homeland, and that everything that I had been taught by my parents was true.”