CARLSBAD UNIFIED CONNECTIONS
January 27, 2023
Holocaust Survivor Rose Schindler Visits Calavera Middle School
“Make sure you stay alive so you can tell the world what they are doing to us!” This is what Rose Schindler’s father said to her the last time she saw him at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Mrs. Schindler has carried out her father’s plea. And, at 93 years old, she is still telling her personal story of suffering and loss.
At Calavera Hills Middle School, hundreds of students sit in silence, watching a video recounting Mrs. Schindler’s harrowing experiences under the Nazis. The video tells the story of the Schwartz family—Rose, her parents, five sisters, and two brothers—from a tiny town in Czechoslovakia, now western Ukraine. Her father was a tailor and owned a farm where the family raised chickens and ducks and grew most of the food they ate. When World War II broke out in Europe, all was disrupted. Because the Schwarz family were Orthodox Jews they were isolated and persecuted in the village where they had worked, played, and attended school. The Jewish men in the town were forced to work without pay in a factory, and their businesses were taken away. Then, in 1944, German soldiers descended on their village, rounded up all Jewish families, taking all of their possessions, and crowded them into carts pulled by oxen and then onto trains bound for the Auschwitz concentration camp. In the film, Rose recounts the horrendous conditions—the disease, starvation, and death—that prisoners endured in the camps. By claiming that she was 18 years old, rather than 14, she was spared from immediate death in the gas chamber, a fate met by her mother and two younger sisters. Her father and two brothers also perished before the camps were liberated at the end of the war. Rose experienced inhuman atrocities, but never gave up hope, and in the end she and two of her sisters survived. When they returned home the girls found that, of the 600 Jews who lived in their village, only eighteen had survived.
After the war, Rose was flown to Scotland as part of a program for Jewish war orphans, and eventually was transferred to a hostel for orphans in Bedford, England. It was there that Rose met Max Schindler, also a concentration camp survivor. They fell in love, married, and settled in San Diego, where they raised their four children.
The Schindlers vowed that they would do their part to ensure that the world would never forget the six million people who died in the Holocaust. Together, Rose and Max told their stories in their book Two Who Survived: Keeping Hope Alive While Surviving the Holocaust. Sadly, Max passed away in 2017. But Rose continues to honor his memory, and that of their lost family members, by sharing their message of peace and tolerance, describing the horrors they witnessed so this shocking epoch will never be repeated.
After watching the video, students were invited to ask questions. Mrs. Schindler showed them the identification numbers tattooed on her arm in the camp and her necklace – her father’s pocket watch chain — two reminders of all that she suffered and lost. But her powerful testimony is that she was one of the lucky ones who survived to tell their stories.
The students are studying a unit on Social Responsibility, part of Carlsbad Unified’s Secondary English Language Arts Curriculum. They read either Night by Elie Wiesel or The Diary of Anne Frank. They learn that in their own lives they can be “up-standers” rather than “bystanders.” They can “see something, say something” rather than letting hate and discrimination prevail.
“Mrs. Schindler showed us a tattoo from the camp on her arm. It’s so important for us to learn about what happened and to tell others so it won’t happen again,” said an eighth grader. “She was very brave.”
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Carlsbad Unified School District
Email: cusd@carlsbadusd.net
Website: https://www.carlsbadusd.k12.ca.us
Location: 6225 El Camino Real, Carlsbad, CA, USA
Phone: 760-331-5000
Facebook: facebook.com/CarlsbadUnifiedSchools
Twitter: @CarlsbadUSD