By Maya Rosenberg
Speaking to a room packed with students, staff and other members of the UMD community at Maryland Hillel Nov. 26, Holocaust survivor Linda Schwab recounted what she and her family experienced during the Holocaust.
Schwab, 82, talked about how her family avoided most of the violence and concentration during that time. For 18 months, she hid with her parents, her cousin and her two older brothers in an underground cave, deep within the Polish forest.
She said talking about her experience is difficult, but necessary.
“My heart tells me I have to be here to tell you people how I survived,” Schwab said.
Schwab’s speaking engagement was sponsored by the Special Topics in Leadership: Jewish Leadership (HESI 418F) course, which is a part of the Higher Education, Student Affairs and International Education Policy (HESI) department. The class is taught by Hillel executive director Ari Israel and associate director Allison Buchman. Buchman monitored the event, providing an introduction and facilitating the question and answer session that proceeded Schwab’s story.
“Every semester we try to bring in a Holocaust survivor,” Buchman said.
The Jewish Leadership course was able to bring in Schwab to tell her story because her granddaughter, junior communications major Caroline Rubin, was in the class.
Multiple members of Schwab’s family were present in the audience, including her granddaughter, her daughter and her son, Steve Rubin.
Rubin said he began hearing his mother speak about the Holocaust when he was about 12 years old. Prior to then, he said she hadn’t spoken at all about her experience to him nor a large audience.
Schwab said it was difficult to speak about because when she immigrated to the United States after the war, she was determined to live normally and forget about her past.
But when she was asked to speak in front of a group of students about 25 years ago, she said she couldn’t deny a chance to keep history alive by telling young people what she went through.
“I didn’t talk about my experience until 1992,” Schwab said. “But I always felt guilty not talking about it.”
Schwab was born in Vilna, Poland (now Belarus) in 1935. She grew up in a shtetl, a small Jewish village, by the sea, and had a relatively calm and peaceful childhood until the rise of Adolf Hitler. Schwab remembers hiding behind her mother when she was forced to wear a yellow Star of David signifying her as a Jew in order to be protected.
Schwab and her family were protected and sheltered by a Christian farmer whom her father was friends with. But when the farmer’s sister found out he was hiding Jews, she threatened to bring the German secret police, the SS, on her brother. Thus, Schwab’s family fled to the forest and remained there for the next 18 months.
“At night, my father would go begging for food,” Schwab said. “He would bring us maybe boiled potatoes, maybe a loaf of bread, maybe rotten apples in the summertime. We ate very little.”
For entertainment, Schwab said her father would read stories from the Bible every single day her family lived in the cave. Other daily rituals included shaking lice out of their clothes because the itching was “terrible.”
Schwab continued to live in the forest until the end of the war, when she and her family went to Foehrenwald, one of the largest displaced person camps after World War II. She went to school, took piano lessons and attempted to adjust to life outside of the woods. Schwab’s mother had a cousin in the United States, so the family soon immigrated to the United States, settling first in Binghamton, NY, and later in Harrisburg, PA.
Schwab said that even though speaking out on her experience is difficult, she believes it is imperative to continue to talk and learn about the Holocaust. Not only does she tell her story, but she sponsors a scholarship essay in her name in New York, as well as funding a reading room with mementos and documents from her survival at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg.
According to Rubin, his mother has a very profound impact on those she speaks with. She regularly receives messages from audience members, thanking her for sharing her story.
During Schwab’s final remarks, she implored her listeners to never forget the Holocaust and her story.
“I am here speaking to you, to all of you, because I don’t want this to be forgotten,” Schwab said. “You all are my ambassadors. If anyone tells you the Holocaust never existed, you tell them you met Mrs. Schwab.”