SHAVE AND A HISTORY LESSON.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY

For $20, you get a haircut and a history lesson in Leon Green's barber chair.

The haircut is great, his loyal customers say. The history lesson is unforgettable.

Herb Weiner found that out years ago, when he sat down in Leon's chair and noticed a faded tattoo on the forearm of his longtime barber.

``You weren't one of those younger guys who got a tattoo just for the hell of it, were you, Leon?'' Herb asked, laughing.

``No, I've had this since 1943,'' the 80-year-old Encino barber said. ``Got it free from the Nazis.''

That's when Herb, like Merritt Buxbaum and so many others who have sat in Leon's barber chair for more than 35 years, got their first history lesson along with their haircut.

When they found out that faded tattoo on their barber's forearm was really a series of numbers - 144688 - Leon's identification number in the labor camps in Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II.

He was a 17-year-old apprentice barber when he went into his first labor camp at Konin - one of 2,000 Polish Jews incarcerated there. When the camp was liquidated a year later and the survivors sent to other camps, 200 Jews walked and crawled out.

``Everybody else was dead,'' Leon says. ``The only reason I survived was because I was a barber.

``I had one customer, the camp commandant. I shaved him every morning, and gave him a haircut once a week for a year. He never said one word to me, but he liked my work and kept me alive.''

This is where Leon always pauses in his history lesson to sharpen his straight razor.

``He treated people like dogs, worse than dogs,'' Leon says. ``How many nights I dreamed of having one more chance to give him a shave.''

All his longtime customers know the full story by now - at least the ones who want to know about it.

``Many of the older Jews who come in don't want to talk about it,'' he says. ``They've seen the numbers on my arm. They know, but they don't ask. But I'm always open to questions from anyone.''

Because some history lessons are too important not to talk about.

Leon's experiences were among the personal Holocaust stories chronicled by Steven Spielberg in the TV documentary ``Survivors of the Shoah.''

That program, along with the movie ``Schindler's List,'' and now ``The Pianist'' have brought many people to this Leon's shop - Trojan Hairstyling, at 16545 Ventura Blvd., Encino - for a real-life history lesson.

``They come to look at me and talk to me because I was there, but they don't stay to have their hair cut,'' Leon says.

It's too bad, because Leon gives a great haircut with that history lesson, Weiner and Buxbaum say.

``He used to have a big clientele when I started with him more than 30 years ago,'' Buxbaum says. ``But his customers are dying off, and he's still out here trying to make a living.''

Giving anyone who wants one a great haircut and an unforgettable, first- person history lesson for $20.

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Photo:

Barber Leon Green, right, poses with longtime customer Herb Weiner, left. Green is a Holocaust survivor; his World War II concentration camp tattoo is visible on his left arm.

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Staff Photographer