With a face that lights up at the talk of her granddaughter, and eyes that read through papers telling the story of her life and her family, Erika Schwartz is a Holocaust survivor who came to Nixa High School on Jan. 21.
That day, freshmen from NHS were seated in the AETOS auditorium, where they heard Schwartz tell her family’s story of change during a period of turmoil.
Schwartz reached out to NHS teachers with an offer to share her story.
“This has never happened here, as long as I’ve been here for 13 years,” U.S. history teacher Matt Walker, the event supervisor, said. “We’ve never brought anyone here to talk about the Holocaust, or really any other event that… [U.S. History classes] cover.”
Born in April, 1944, Schwartz was a 1-year-old who was too young to remember anything when the war ended. However, its impact on her mother, Jolan Petrover, greatly influenced her life.
“It was very, very difficult because, until my mother passed, I had never ever given up hope that I’d get through to her, that I could get her to say, ‘You’re so good to me, I don’t know what I’d do without you,’” Schwartz said.
The toll the war had on her mother fractured the person Schwartz needed while she was growing up. Petrover lost her husband, and all the family from her parents. They immigrated to the United States when she was 4. When Schwartz was a child, they kept on moving from one place to another.
“She trusted no one,” Schwartz said. “She was very broken. I don’t know how else to put it. It was very extreme and it was very, very difficult for me to grow up with that and have no one to tell me, ‘It’s not about you, Honey.’ Nobody told me that. So I grew up just a dry sponge, thirsting for validation and thinking it was my fault.”
She grew to mirror her mother. In turn, she said she also treated her family poorly.
“I was constantly yelling at them,” Schwartz said, “Constantly saying, ‘You don’t know what I’ve been through, how can you be this way to me?’ Which is exactly [how] my mother used to talk to me.”
For her life to be different, she needed to work on the person she was. A change in her is what brought a difference in her family and relationships.
“The family that I have now is a product of my changing,” Schwartz said. “They didn’t change first, I had to change first. … The people that I thought were so horrendous, I realized were responding to the person I was.”
Her transformation from the person she was to who she is now began at age 44 when she heard a man say: “You may not have control over anything that’s happening around you, but you have complete control over what happens between your two ears.”
She wrote gratitude lists, smelled the roses and listened to the birds sing.
“When I first started on that journey, you know… it just felt so strange,” Schwartz said. “But I knew, immediately, that it was bringing something to my life, to my emotions, that I had never experienced before. ‘Cause I didn’t know how to tap into anything that was good in my life, or around me.”
While working to transform her mind, Schwartz put the Holocaust out of it. She didn’t want to think of it, until a program for a Jewish holiday caused her to realize why she should.
“And that’s when I realized that as one of the youngest Holocaust survivors, I had to start telling the story of my family,” Schwartz said. “So it started as just a need to tell the story of my family, and then it evolved very quickly to the rest of my story, and talking about my recovery-my emotional recovery.”
Schwartz has finished writing her rough draft for a book and is looking for an agent. She now lives in Missouri, minutes from her granddaughter’s house.
“Of course, the light of my life is my granddaughter, who’s the one that brought us here to Missouri,” Schwartz said. “She and her husband, who urged us to move here … with their three sons … they’re a huge part of my life, and I’m happy beyond words.”
Schwartz speaks publicly about her experiences to make her family’s story not just known but remembered.
After her presentation to the freshmen class, she visited with journalism students. While answering questions, there was a gentle pause. Her voice, leveled in the beginning, wavered at the last sentence.
“I would like to be remembered as someone who made a difference in the lives of some young people who needed it,” Schwartz said. “I wish I had a me when I was a kid.”
