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Community Corner

Holocaust Survivor Remains 'Inveterate Optimist'

The San Rafael resident, who has spoken widely and written about the secret life he led during World War II, is recognized for his dedication to educating the public about the Holocaust.

In 1943, 10-year-old Paul Schwarzbart was spirited out of Brussels by an underground group that saved thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis. He was hidden at a Catholic boys school in the Ardennes forest, where the Austrian-Jewish émigré assumed a Christian name and a Belgian Catholic identity. He learned the Latin prayers and served as an altar boy until the war-torn region was liberated by American soldiers in the fall of 1944. 

“We’d heard a lot about miracles, studying the Catechism and all that, but we hadn’t personally witnessed a miracle until the Americans arrived. We thought they’d fallen from heaven,” Schwarzbart says, sitting in the hilltop San Rafael home he shares with his wife, Sharry.

Somehow, the young boy made his way back to Brussels  – he doesn’t remember how – to look for his mother. His family had fled to the Belgian capital in 1938 from Vienna. His father was arrested two years later, on the day war broke out between Germany and Belgium, because he was Austrian (a bitter irony for a man deemed less than human in his native country because he was Jewish). He was never heard from again.  Schwarzbart and his mother, who learned many years later that Paul’s father had been killed at the Buchenwald concentration camp, found each walking on the streets of liberated Brussels.

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“We started running to each like in a bad movie,” says Schwarzbart, a retired Tam High French teacher who has shared his painful and inspiring story with hundreds of school groups and other organizations over the years. The sprightly survivor, who calls himself an inveterate optimist, was recently honored for that work by Assemblyman Jared Huffman at the annual California Assembly Holocaust Memorial Ceremony at the state capitol.

As part of the Assembly’s project to record the stories of Holocaust survivors throughout California, Schwarzbart was interviewed on video by students Emily Packer and Spencer Clarke.  Clips from that video and others were screened in Sacramento two weeks ago, when Huffman gave Schwarzbart a resolution thanking him for his commitment to keeping alive the memory and legacy of those who perished in the Holocaust,  and for being “an example to others who strive to overcome intolerance and indifference through learning and remembrance.”

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Schwarzbart, who was the keynote speaker at the Assembly’s Holocaust commemoration in 1992, didn’t speak this time. But he gave all 120 member of the state legislature his potent 2004 memoir, “Breaking the Silence . . . Reminiscences of a Hidden Child.”

The book recounts his wartime experiences at the Catholic boarding school where he picked up Latin so quickly, “the priest made me his altar boy and I served mass every morning for almost two years,” he says. “It didn’t stunt my growth. That was already taken care of,” the diminutive Schwarzbart adds with laugh. 

“It was a matter of survival. Playing the role came almost naturally. I’m a quick study. And I did my crying at night after I went to bed.  That’s when I allowed myself to be me, to wonder about things and to miss my parents.”

It wasn’t until 1988, 40 years after Schwarzbart and his mother immigrated to the United States, that he learned he wasn’t the only Jewish boy who’d been hidden at the school. There were about 60 others, many of whom attended a reunion there in 1988. Schwarzbart, who was reunited with some of the priests and other Christians who’d protected him, was accompanied by a TV crew from KRON, which made an award-winning documentary about him.

 After the film aired, people started stopping Schwarzbart on the street, urging him to talk about his experiences. “And I haven’t shut up since,” he says with smile.

 When he speaks to students, Schwarzbart stresses the necessity of speaking out when you know  something is wrong. He talks about what happened during the Holocaust, “and how good people, by shutting up, let it happen,” he says. “I tell the kids to never think they can’t do anything or that they don’t count.  You count if you believe you do.” He points to the example of the young people in the Belgian resistance who risked their lives to save him and thousands of others.

Sometimes people ask Schwarzbart if he wonders why he survived while so many millions of other perished. 

“I was no better or worse than anyone else,” he says. “So why was I picked to survive? There's only one reason: to be a witness. So that’s what I do, no matter how painful it is, or much it takes out of me. I feel compelled to do it.”  

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