One of youngest Holocaust survivors brings new story to remembrance to Cedar Rapids

When Erika Schwartz started attending a Holocaust survivor group over 40 years ago, she didn’t quite fit in.

Born in the Nyiregyhaza, Hungary, ghetto one day before the Nazis sealed it off in 1944, she had the paperwork to prove she is one of the youngest remaining survivors alive today at 79. But despite most of her entire family being murdered before World War II ended, it wasn’t until about nine years ago that others started taking her story seriously.

As an infant, Schwartz’s father helped her and her mother escape to Budapest with the right paperwork, where the two lived disguised as Christians into the early years of the Soviet Union’s control. Her father, a labor camp escapee, lived on the run to avoid making his family a target. Before long, he was returned to the Hidegseg labor camp in Hungary and murdered, too.

At age 4, Erika was sent after her mother to the United States. It wasn’t until she was about 70 that she started to tell the story.

“I got the sense that people didn’t really see me as a Holocaust survivor. I didn’t remember people getting slaughtered in front of me,” she said. “The fact that I’d lost my entire family didn’t seem to matter. It was difficult to have that sense of loss and feel that it wasn’t important enough — that everyone else who remembered it was more important.”

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Unlike many survivors, Schwartz’s story starts with her mother’s memories about how parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins were exterminated. But her mother’s personal experience — never recounted aloud to her — affected her all the same.

After being emotionally destroyed by the loss of her entire family, her mother who had post-traumatic stress disorder led a nomadic lifestyle. By the time she was an adolescent, Schwartz had attended nine elementary schools.

Despite that her most vivid memory of Hungary was playing with pebbles around a train station as her mother left the country, she inherited all the same effects of trauma as an adult — low self-esteem, bitterness and a struggle to find meaning in life that lasted until she was middle-aged.

How she overcame it

After growing up with a mother who refused to talk about her personal experiences, Schwartz started to shun her family history, too. For about a third of her life, she refused to think, talk or read about what had happened as she battled depression.

“I needed to reprogram what was in my head,” the Missouri resident said.

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The need to speak out wasn’t realized until she was called at a religious ceremony in her former California home. In a room of about 350 people, survivors of the Holocaust were asked to stand to be honored.

She resisted the urge, until her husband jabbed her. After heeding his call, she was the only one in the room standing.

“That’s when it hit me that, being one of the youngest Holocaust survivors, I had an obligation,” she said. “I needed to bear witness to what had happened to my family.”

The next day, she called the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, where she learned how to document the story of her mother, and her own story.

Now, many of her lectures are geared toward students who have similarities: they have no firsthand memories of the Holocaust, and they’re growing up in an era when antisemitism is again on public display. Impacted by a history beyond her control, her story has touched students whose lives also have been a byproduct of their parents’ trauma.

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With a message of hope, Erika tells stories of finding joy again. Today, she tells others how she lives a life happier than she’s ever been against the backdrop of tragedies — hard-earned through years of research — that would alter her family forever.

“I was walking around with my head in a black cloud until my mid-40s,” she said. “I had an epiphany that I didn’t have to spend the rest of my life in that head space.”

In addition to the story of those who impacted her, she tells the story others who can’t speak — even ones she’s never met. In 2017, for example, she placed a headstone on her youngest aunt’s grave in Hungary, where for 73 years she had been buried anonymously.

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Her message for others

With antisemitism on a rise and a sharp increase in violence against Jews domestically and abroad, her message plays a role for the next generation.

“The most astonishing part is what’s happening in this country and how brazenly open it is,” Schwartz said.

She urges students today to study not just the Holocaust, but the events that led up to it and the parallels they have today for Jews and other marginalized groups through proliferating propaganda that have pitted groups against each other “from all sides.”

“You’ll see it happening in this country now,” she said. “I’m not talking about just Jews.”

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Comments: Features reporter Elijah Decious can be reached at (319) 398-8340 or elijah.decious@thegazette.com.