“I was born Erika Hornstein on April 23, 1944, in the Nyíregyháza, Hungary ghetto. Two weeks later, all of the women and children in my family were transported to Auschwitz to be murdered.” – Erika Schwartz
The St. Louis Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) drew a full audience at Temple Israel on Sunday, April 27 to pay tribute to the six million Jews killed, their descendants and survivors. The program included Erika Schwartz’s survivor testimony, in which she described the horrors of the Holocaust. Her father was drafted into a forced labor camp, she said, and her mother was alone and frightened.
“A wall topped with barbed wire encircled the entire Jewish neighborhood,” Schwartz told the gathering. “Jews from all the surrounding towns were herded into the ghetto. On April 24, the ghetto was sealed. I was one day old.”
In addition to Schwartz’s remarks, the program included descendant and liberator descendant testimony. The solemn service began and ended with the blowing of the shofar and a Torah procession.
Myron Freedman, executive director of the St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, said this year’s Yom HaShoah, “Liberation, Loss & Life,” marked a key milestone.
“It’s been 80 years since the end of the war, since the displacement of all of the survivors, and the fact that so many of them settled here in St. Louis gives us a chance to reflect on what it means to continue to hear their stories, and how do we carry on that message,” Freedman said. “The next phase of Holocaust remembrance and education really starts now with so many of the survivors leaving us.”
