As the approximately 500 members of the Nixa High School freshmen class finish up their focus on American History World War II, they had a chance Tuesday to hear from one of the youngest survivors of the Holocaust.
There was hardly a sound from the teens at the Aetos Center in Nixa as they listened to Ericka Schwartz tell her story.
Schwartz, who moved from the west coast to Springfield in 2019, was just a few months old when her father died in a forced labor camp in Hungary. It was shortly after Schwartz’s birth when many members of her extended family were killed at Auschwitz. Her story is a tragic one, but part of telling it is, she said, is to show that being a victim doesn’t have to shape who you are.
“My story begins in a Nazi ghetto in 1944. Hungary," she said. "I was marked for death from the moment of my birth. Today I’m living the happiest years of my life.”
Schwartz was born Erika Hornstein in 1944 in Nyíregyháza, Hungary, just two weeks before most of the women and children in her family were transported to the concentration camp where they were murdered for being Jewish.
Schwartz said her mother, Jolan, grew up surrounded by grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins in a family that included her mother and father and two sisters and two brothers. Jolan was just a teenager when she met and married Schwartz’s father, Hermann, and less than two years later Hermann was imprisoned in a forced labor camp.
“At first wives were permitted to visit their husbands in the camp," she said, and in the fall of 1943, my mother learned she was pregnant. She was terrified to be alone and by then was no longer permitted to visit my father. So she left their Budapest apartment and moved in with her parents...Nazis occupied the town.”
By April 17, she said, Nazis completed construction of the ghetto — a wall topped with barbed wire encircled the entire Jewish neighborhood, including her grandparent’s home. Jews from surrounding towns were herded into the ghetto as well. They were mostly women and children, as most men had already been forced into labor camps. Schwartz was born on April 23, just one day before the ghetto was sealed.
“All of the women and children who remained in my grandparents' home were transported by cattle car to Auschwitz," Schwartz said. "The Jews were loaded shoulder to shoulder into the cattle cars. There was no room to sit. There was no food or water. The trip took days, and there were always numerous dead bodies by the time the train arrived. When they reached Auschwitz, my great-grandmother, grandmother and three little cousins were murdered in the gas chamber. By the end of May, all 17,580 Jews in that ghetto had been transferred to Auschwitz, and it has been estimated that between 600 and 800 survived the war.”
At the end of the day of liberation, only Jolan’s sister-in-law had survived. Her sister, Margaret, had made it to the last day, but she was shot by the Nazis who, instead of fleeing the allies, stayed to kill as many Jews as they could.
Schwartz and her mother survived because her father managed to escape the labor camp and convinced those at the office of the authorities, which in Hungary was the Arrow Cross, that they should officially be in Budapest where their apartment was.
“After he received permission to take us to the city, my mother suddenly insisted on staying with her mother. He told her that, after getting us to Budapest, he was going back to the labor camp. He knew that he was being hunted, and he was afraid to be with us in case he was discovered with us," she said. "So, again, terrified of being alone, my mother refused to leave, but my grandmother literally pushed her out the door and locked it behind her. My father took us to Budapest and went back to the labor camp where he died on March 8, 1945, just two months before the allies liberated the camps.”
Schwartz said her mother’s sister, Olga, had managed to slip out of the ghetto and reunited with her sister and baby Erika in Budapest. They were able to obtain Christian identity papers and lived quietly until one day when Olga, who was 19, left the apartment to get food.
“Just as she stepped out of the building, a former neighbor recognized her and yelled, 'she's a Jew!' Nearby, Arrow Cross soldiers immediately ran in her direction. She turned and ran back into the building with the soldiers close behind," said Schwartz. "She must have realized that she had very few options or none at all that wouldn't lead the soldiers directly to my mother and me hiding in the apartment. So she made a fateful decision. My teenage aunt raced to the roof of the building and jumped. She died on a Budapest sidewalk on July 5, 1944, and my mother and I were never discovered.”
Even though Jolan clung to the hope that some of her family may have survived and might try to find her, she was convinced by an aunt living in the U.S. to immigrate there. It took marrying a distant cousin to do so, and that relationship turned out to be a violent one, from which she had to escape.
The emotional damage caused by the tragic events Jolan endured had a profound impact on both mother and daughter – and on Schwartz’s two half brothers born in a later marriage.
Schwartz struggled for years, but one day, when she was 1944 and living in California, she heard a quote:
“You may not have control over anything that's happening around you, but you have complete control over what happens between your two ears, and that message sunk in immediately," she said. "For the first time in my life, I realized that my happiness or lack of happiness just might be a choice. I could find joy in my day or I could very easily find misery. I could see only the bad or I could seek what was good.”
Today, Schwartz is 80-years-old, living in Springfield with her husband, near their granddaughter and her husband and their great-grandchildren. She said she is happier than she’s ever been. And she continues telling her story of survival, including writing a book to share her story and her family's story.
