We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of our cherished husband/father/uncle/opa/brother-in-law and friend, in his 91st year, at his and his wife Joan’s home in the Beaches, Toronto. He leaves us full of love and gratitude for the extraordinary years we shared with him.

Henry was born in the village of Stützengrün, Germany, in 1935, to Ernst Leistner, a brush-maker, and Kamilla Leistner (née Gottsman). He was the fourth youngest of twelve. A child during WWII, he survived twelve years of Hitler’s dictatorship and would have had to endure decades more of Soviet-dominated East Germany had his mother not urged him and his brother Walter to emigrate to Canada to join their elder brother Herbert, who had arrived in Canada a year earlier, in September 1951. Henry and Walter escaped from East Germany to Berlin on December 8, 1952, with a few East German Marks and a rabbit as a gift for contacts on the other side. Three weeks later they were airlifted to West Germany, where they lived for a time in a refugee camp. With sponsorship from Herbert, they sailed to Quebec City, then on to Toronto by train.

From their first years living together in a rooming house on Fulton Avenue in Toronto, the brothers (in 1959, they would be joined by a fourth, Eberhard), went on to build a thriving tool and die company that over the years would employ and support hundreds of Canadian families. Henry’s nephew Martin (Herbert’s son) now heads up Sigma Tool and Machine and other concerns that continue to this day. Henry worked at Sigma for over fifty years, eventually using capital earned there to make bold investments. He was most proud of Berkeley Castle, an old knitting mill retrofit into offices by famed architect Jack Diamond whom the Leistners partnered with. Henry’s daughter Linda and her husband Daniel continue to manage and maintain Berkeley Castle to this day.

In the village of Stützengrün, situated in the Erzgebirge Mountains snowbelt, the Leistner children skied to school in the winters, so it was not unusual that shortly after arriving in Canada they happened upon a group of travelling skiers who had the crazy idea to start their own ski club. The founders of The Alpine Ski Club of Toronto were mostly new Canadian immigrants (among them several Jewish families) who didn’t necessarily feel comfortable at the old established ski clubs in the area. In 1960, under the guidance of Hans Kent, the first president of Alpine, the club purchased a tract of hill in the Blue Mountains near Collingwood. The Leistner brothers, and their wives Colleen, Irma, and Donna, took another leap in a long line of leaps, and were all in! The brothers made up for their as yet undeveloped English language skills with their talent for skiing and with their mechanical skills and industriousness that helped in the building of the new ski club, cutting down trees and constructing and maintaining rope tows. Skiing became the glue that held the family together and the chalet they built at the foot of the hill, which was shared by all four families, remains a hub of Leistner activities to this day. At lunchtime it’s not uncommon to have twenty people around the table, usually enjoying one of Joan’s famous homemade soups. Henry’s children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and grandnieces will always treasure the many hours spent zipping down the hill with him and socializing on the chairlift.

Henry was always interested in the latest innovations. He was an early adopter of electric cars and was a vigorous proponent of the safety aspects of self-driving cars. He had a great eye and loved photographing his extensive world travels. He was especially enamoured with the Great Lakes and the Matterhorn. Henry liked to awake before dawn to watch the sunrise and at night would look up at the stars through his telescope. He was captivated by the historic April 2026 Artemis II orbit around the moon and watched with Joan when the astronauts splashed down safely to earth.

Henry maintained his strong, sinewy physique late into his life, and continued alpine skiing until he was 88. He was an accomplished windsurfer and spent many windy days in the 80s at the Cherry Beach Windsurfing Club in Toronto and at the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, visiting his niece Tina Baylis (Herbert’s daughter), a worldclass windsurfer and sailor. He would still have been skiing this winter had he not fallen while running down Front Street in Toronto on December 12th, 2023, suffering a grave traumatic brain injury. Henry’s miraculous survival was a testament to his will to live, to the love of his family who never left his side, and to Joan’s unwavering dedication to helping him recover.

Henry’s zest for life intensified after the accident. He and Joan drove the circumference of the Great Lakes and visited Joan’s siblings in Florida; they played many games of cards and the German boardgame Dog at the National Yacht Club, where they kept a sailboat for 25 years. Henry travelled to Germany one last time with his daughter Linda and niece Sonya Firth (Walter’s daughter); he attended the wedding of his granddaughter Melanie, the exhibition opening of daughter Rita’s photographs of tree planters at the McMichael Canadian Art Gallery; and got to hold his great-granddaughter Charlotte in his arms. He got to see Lake Mazinaw again, where the family had spent a lifetime of summers under the glow of Bon Echo Rock. He returned with Joan to the Finnie cottage in Muskoka, where Henry’s favourite activity was fixing the boat. Henry was highly mechanically inclined with a great practical curiosity that made him able to fix almost anything, a passion and talent shared by his son-in-law Daniel and grandson Stefan.

The Leistner brothers were forever grateful to Canada for the opportunities given them. Recently, as a reaction to threats to Canadian sovereignty, Henry and Joan joined their neighbours in the Beaches in hanging a Canadian flag in front of their house. During his last days, looking out the window, when the wind blew the flag around its pole, Henry would ask whoever was near to go outside and unfurl it.

During the early years at Mazinaw, Henry would canoe with the children out to the rock, “Old Walt”, where they would read together the inscription from Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself, carved there in 1919 by the founders of the Bon Echo Inn.
“My foothold is tennon’d and mortised in granite
I have seen what you call dissolution
And I know the amplitude of time.”

Our immortality comes from our place in the natural world and in the hearts and minds of those whose lives we have touched. Henry, who had time for everyone, touched many, many lives. He leaves a legacy of kindness, generosity, loyalty, adventurousness, entrepreneurship, love of family, sense of fairness, and joie de vivre.

The last of his generation, Henry was predeceased by his eleven siblings — Helmut, Karl and Johannes (all three killed during WWII), Hertha, Magdalena (Johannes’s twin), Eleonora, Walter, Willi, Klaus, and Eberhard; Herbert and his wife Colleen (née Woolridge) were killed tragically in a plane crash in 2000. He was also preceded by his brother-in-law and good friend Fred Warrilow; by grandnephew Ricky Köehler and nephews Robert Warrilow and Greg Armstrong, gone too young.

Henry is survived by his beloved wife and companion of 45 years, Joan Leistner (née Finnie); by his daughters Rita Leistner and Linda Leistner (Daniel Lavoie), his adored grandchildren Stefan Lavoie (Sarah Lalonde), Melanie Lavoie (Mark Sandell) and their baby Charlotte, a great joy to us all and to Henry in his last year of life; by his former wife, good friend and mother of his children, Donna Leistner (née Warrilow); by more than seventy nieces, nephews, grand-nieces and nephews, great-grandnieces and sisters and brothers-in-law in Canada, Germany and the United States. He also leaves behind many wonderful friends in different corners of the world; as well as Kim the cat, whom he wasn’t sure of at first, but eventually let into his heart.

There will be two celebrations of life. The first will be held in Toronto on Sunday June 7th and the second three weeks later for friends in the Collingwood area at the Alpine Ski Club on Sunday June 28st. Below, please find details and RSVP instructions (so we can better welcome you).