Holocaust Remembrance Lecture with Erika Schwartz

The Thaler Holocaust Remembrance Fund and Kirkwood Community College welcome Guest Speaker Erika Schwartz for this year's Holocaust Remembrance Lecture. Schwartz will speak at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 2, at Ballantyne Auditorium on Kirkwood's main campus in Cedar Rapids. This event is free and open to the public.

At 79 years old, Schwartz is one of the youngest survivors alive today, so almost all of her memories are those of her mother, who was the only other survivor from her family. Schwartz’s story has elements of miracle, much like those of other survivors: assistance from non-Jewish acquaintances, fortunate timing, sacrifices from family members, and even at times divine intervention. But she also has a second survivor story to share.

Schwartz was born in the Nyiregyhaza, Hungary, ghetto, just one day before the Nazis sealed it off. Knowing the imminent danger of staying in the ghetto, her father secured papers showing that Schwartz and her mother were actually residents of Budapest, Hungary’s capital, where he believed it would be safer. But even in Budapest, Schwartz, her mother, and her aunt Olga had to take on identities as Christians, not Jews, to ensure their survival.

After the war, mother and daughter stayed in Hungary, then under a Communist regime controlled by the Soviet Union, with conditions no better for them than they had been during the war. Thanks to relatives in the United States, Schwartz's mother emigrated to the U.S., and four-year-old Schwartz followed six months later.

That’s when Schwartz’s second survival story began. Raised by a mother who suffered from PTSD and who led a nomadic lifestyle, Schwartz says she experienced low self-esteem and struggled to find meaning in her life. She says it wasn’t until near-middle age that she was able to finally come to terms with everything she had experienced.

Schwartz will share her experiences at this lecture: a story that in many ways is different from other survivor stories.

This event will be livestreamed here: https://www.kirkwood.edu/vod/12583