Surviving the Holocaust: Interview with Rose Schindler

Rose Schindler was 14 years old when she stepped foot in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Schindler, unlike so many, survived the horrors of the Nazi concentration camp. Now, Schindler is 90 years old and carries out the last words her father said to her: “Stay alive so you can tell the world what they are doing to us.” 

Schindler, who was born Roysie Schwartz, grew up in Seredne, Czechoslovakia. She was the fourth child in a family of six girls and two boys. Daughter of Rifka (Regina) and Shlomo Zalman (Solomon), Schindler was raised as an Orthodox Jew. She lived a comfortable and happy childhood with parents that adored her and siblings that took care of each other. 

In 1938, things started to change. Schindler was bullied by kids that used to be her friends. By 1941, she was forced to wear a gold Star of David on her sleeves, along with the rest of her family. By 1944, Schindler was a prisoner in her own village, and then the order came. 

Schindler and her family were loaded into a cattle car and taken to Auschwitz, Poland. Before she exited the cattle car, Schindler encountered a man in uniform who asked her how old she was. After telling him that she was 14, he murmured that she should tell them that she was 18. Schindler didn’t know this at the time, but the man saved her life. 

Schindler and her two older sisters, Hiyasura and Yutke, were directed into one line; her father and older brother into another; and her mother, aunt and four younger siblings into yet another. That was the last time she saw her mother, aunt, three younger sisters and younger brother. 

In October 1944, Schindler and her sisters decided to try the selection process so they could leave Auschwitz and work in a factory instead. Despite being selected for the gas chamber line, Schindler gathered her courage and snuck into the factory line where her sisters were saving a place for her. 

Before they were transported to the factory, Schindler was given a number: A25893. A number to replace her real identity. A number that she still has tattooed on her arm 76 years later. 

Schindler and her sisters were transported to a sub-camp of Auschwitz in Bruntal, Czechoslovakia, or Freudenthal, as the Germans called it. They were used as slave labor for the Germans, and Schindler spent her days inspecting gas masks. 

May 8, 1945: Schindler’s personal independence day. Russian soldiers entered the sub-camp, and Schindler and the other women were liberated. 

With their freedom, Schindler and her sisters decided to travel home to Seredne, knowing that her father and brother would know to meet them there. After four weeks of travel, they arrived at their looted, empty house. The girls waited for more survivors to turn up with news of their family. When they finally encountered a man who had been in a camp with their brother Fischel, he told them that just days before the end of the war, he, along with the 300 men in his camp, were forced to dig a large hole that they were then all shot into. Later, another man who was with their father in a Buchenwald factory told them that he became very sick, was shipped back to Auschwitz and murdered.

After learning the tragic fate of their family, Hiyasura left for Prague while Yutke and Schindler remained in Seredne for a few more weeks. Soon, Yutke fell in love and decided to settle down. Not wanting to interfere with her happiness, Schindler left for Prague to stay with Hiyasura. There, Hiyasura informed her of an opportunity for orphaned survivor children of the Holocaust that was sponsored by the Central British Fund (which is now World Jewish Relief). Because Schindler was 16, she was eligible and decided to leave a place that had nothing left for her. 

Schindler was flown to Poulton House in Scotland where she was housed, fed and clothed. The orphaned children attended school, had daily chores, talked to counselors and attempted to assimilate back into real life. After some time, Schindler decided to leave the hostel in Scotland and moved to one in Bedford, England. The Bedford hostel originally only hosted boys, so when Schindler arrived, she was one of only five girls. However, this worked for her because one particular young gentleman, Max Schindler, caught her eye. She became great friends with him and his older brother Fred.

After some months, Schindler got a job and moved to a home with a family that had two children where she shared a room with another survivor. During this time, Max visited her often. 

July 27, 1950. Schindler married Max, the boy she couldn’t take her eyes off when she first got to Bedford. After living in London for a year, the newlyweds decided to take the leap and move to America in October 1951. They moved to New York and lived next to Max’s relatives for many years. In 1954, they welcomed their first child Roxanne, and by 1956 the young family moved to San Diego. Their son Ben arrived in 1957, and they went on to have two more sons, Steve and Jeff. 

In 1972, something changed the rest of Schindler’s life. Her son, Steve, was cast in the play The Diary of Anne Frank at his middle school. Steve mentioned to his teacher that both of his parents were Holocaust survivors, which prompted his teacher to ask Schindler if she would come and speak about her experiences. Nervously, she gave her presentation and afterwards was flooded with sweet letters from the class telling her of their desire to change the world. From then on, Schindler realized the power behind her story and that she must be the one to tell it, to whomever would listen. 

After he retired, Max joined her at speaking engagements. The Schindlers were interviewed extensively, spoke to over 200,000 people, earned many awards, gave video testimonies that were included at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute and traveled often. 

Max Schindler passed away in 2017 with his loving family at his side. Rose Schindler, now 90 and a 12-year cancer survivor, continues to tell her story, to honor her husband and the families they both lost.

This interview with Rose Schindler was conducted on August 12, 2020. Edited for clarity and length. 

Never to be forgotten

“How can you forget something like that? You can’t. My whole family was wiped out; there were eight children, three survived. 250-350 people [in my family] and maybe a dozen came out, including us three. No parents. No children. No grandchildren. No sick or weak [people]—none of those survived because when we came into Auschwitz, they were taken right into the gas chamber. 

You can never forget something like that, as much as you’d want to forget. Actually, there are some survivors that refuse to talk about the past because it’s so horrible. It’s so horrible, it’s so unbelievable what happened to us, we can’t even put it down in words, what we went through in Auschwitz. I mean, we were treated worse than animals.”

On Auschwitz

“It’s an amazing place to see, to see how they’re taking care of it. Tourists are there all the time, but for me, you see, it’s not a very pleasant place to go visit but my mother, three sisters and brother are all buried in Auschwitz. You know how they’re buried? They burned them and scattered the ashes. So, that’s their cemetery over there.”

“If you’ve seen Schindler’s List, you can know what Auschwitz looks like. They had different camps separated by 12-foot electric fences. Do you know how many people died on those electric fences? Some of the people didn’t know it was electric; they just touched the fence, and 20 seconds later, blood comes out of your nose, and you’re dead. It was the fastest way to commit suicide. 

The camp that I was in for four months was a transitional camp, which means you come, you get selected and you leave. The ones that they picked were the ones that were going to work in factories because they needed slave labor. They used to do selection two or three times a week, and they would always put me in the gas chamber line because I was never heavy and the food we were getting was worse than what animals eat. I was skin and bone after about two weeks because I hated the food. I mean all we ate, God, was a pot of coffee [in the morning] that we would share between 10 women. We had no cutlery, no plates, no nothing. Just take a sip from the pot. At lunch time, we would get a piece of bread with some margarine and for dinner time, we would get soup in the same pot the coffee was in. We would share between 12 women. The soup was horrible; it was not edible, let’s put it that way. It was, like, cabbage and maybe some rice, and I don’t know if there were vegetables in there, but there was a lot of sand and dirt. It wasn’t anything you could live on. 

But, you see, Auschwitz II-Birkenau was a transitional camp. Most people would stay there a few days then leave. The only people that stayed behind were the ones that were selected to go to the gas chamber, but they would run out of line. That’s what I did. They would put me in the gas chamber line all the time.

Every barrack had a thousand women; can you believe that? We were hoping the war would end, so we stayed behind when they would come to the barrack and said they needed 300 women—you are not forced to go and get selected because everybody, of course, wants to go. The people that stayed behind, like me or the sick people, knew they would not be selected to go to a factory to work.” 

How Schindler left Auschwitz

“When they came to our barrack once, after we’d been there for a month, I said to my sisters, ‘You go out front and get selected, and I’ll see how I can steal myself into the transport.’ The barrack had the door in the front and the door in the back, so in the front, they were going to the selection. In the back, there was a woman guarding the door, so I waited until someone else went to the back and they let her out. It was a woman I somewhat knew, so I chased her to the back, and the guard said, ‘Where are you going? You’re supposed to go through the front to get selected to work.’ I said, ‘My mother walked out; I want to go with her.’ She let me out, and my sisters saved a place for me in line, and that’s how I got out of Auschwitz. 

You had to have a lot of guts and a lot of brains. Being in Auschwitz for four months, we had no cleaning whatsoever. We all had lice. We couldn’t sleep at night because the lice were biting us so much. It’s a transitional camp, so [usually] no one stays long enough. Of course, every few days, they would bring fresh people into our barracks, too. So many horrible things happened that you can’t even imagine. You had to have a lot of guts to survive, but a lot of people did not have it. A lot of women couldn’t take it, and they would just put their hands on the electric fence, and they would be gone in 20 seconds.”

Faith after the camps

“After you go through what we went through, how can you believe in God? Where was God when this was happening? Millions of religious Jewish people who believed in God so strongly—how did He allow this to happen? Innocent people, OK? Children. Parents. Grandparents. All kinds of people. They were killed like animals, worse than animals. A lot of us went back to religion, but we were very strictly religious; we wouldn’t even put on a light on Saturdays—that’s how strict we were. But after what we went through, I was very upset [about] how our God did not help us when we needed Him. It was a terrible thing what we went through; you have no idea.”

Freudenthal factory

“After they took us to factories to work, they treated us like human beings. When we went to this working camp, we had three meals a day and took a shower once a week and had clean clothes once a week—from hell to heaven. But, of course, a lot of people didn’t make it out of Auschwitz.”

The fate of the Schwartz sisters

“Three of us survived, but one of my sisters Hiyasura (Helen) met a [Czech] soldier on the train station [in Czechoslovakia]. She probably was going to stay in Prague, and she did stay in Prague until 1962, by the way. She met the soldier, and they fell in love, but he was in the military. When we went home to my hometown [of Seredne in Czechoslovakia], Helen stayed a few days and as soon as we found out that my father and my brother were killed, she just went to Prague because the boyfriend she met at the train station had a house there, so they were going to get married after he finished the military. In the meantime, he impregnated some woman—you know what some soldiers do when they’re in different cities. I don’t know if you know but it’s just a common thing. So, when he came home crying [to Helen]—and they were not married yet—and told her what happened, my sister said to him, ‘You better do the right thing and go marry her.’ She was very upset. 

After I left home [in Seredne] for Prague, my sister Yutke (Judy) stayed because she was going to marry this guy there, and they were planning to come to Prague but they never did. They decided to stay because the boyfriend got his house back, and they stayed there. I never saw my sister Judy again. She died in 1960 because she had some problems in the camp; she was not very healthy. Then after she got married and had a child, she became sick and she died. 

Of course, my sister Helen came here [to the U.S.] in 1962. She came to San Diego and stayed six months with me, but she lived in Prague and she was a bookkeeper and she had a very high position over there, so when she came here, she couldn’t speak English. She was here in San Diego for six months, then she went to New York, and after being there for six months, she was introduced to a gentleman, and she got married there. She was married for 25 years, and then her husband had a heart attack, and he died. She stayed in New York another 20 years or more, and then she got sick and was getting old, so we brought her to San Diego. She ended up in a retirement community, and she died when she was 94.” 

Living in England

“First of all, we (the orphaned survivors) were taken to England. We were in England for five years, and little by little, we came to speak the language and we started working. If we wouldn’t have gone to England, I probably would have ended up in Israel. I would not have stayed in Europe.”

Meeting Max

“I started in Scotland (with the orphaned survivor program) and stayed about eight or nine months. Then we went to England, to another hostel. That’s where I met my husband, and when I saw that gentleman standing in the row there with the other boys, I said, ‘That’s the man I’m going to marry.’ And let me tell you, it took me a while to get him! All the non-Jewish kids in the town would come to the hostel; they liked the Jewish boys. I don’t blame them. So, he had a girlfriend already, but I had time. I was not even 16 yet when I came to the hostel. Then they sent us off, and I stayed in somebody’s house; they were renting out the room. Max came to the same neighborhood, we started dating and that was it. By 1950, we got married. When I first saw him, I couldn’t even put my eyes on anybody else, even though he had a girlfriend. I had patience. I said, ‘I’m gonna get him sooner or later’ and I did! So, if you ever see anybody that you want, don’t give up hope.”

Schindler and her husband were married for 67 years.

“We had a wonderful marriage, a wonderful life. I tell you, I miss him so much, it’s unbelievable.”

On Holocaust films

“When Schindler’s List came out, we went and then we left in the middle. We couldn’t take it, and I never went to see it again even though I have the tapes in my cupboard. A lot of us couldn’t take it; we would break out in tears and cry. Steven Spielberg did a good job on the film, but you can really never have a good enough film to tell exactly what happened. 

[Holocaust films] are important because so many people don’t know what happened during the war. I speak a lot to middle school kids—sometimes I have 500 or 600 people in a school, and you can hear a pin drop. They’re so into it, they’re listening so well. The world needs to know what happened. We don’t want this ever to happen again, whether you’re Jewish or Catholic or whatever religion. We’re all entitled to have a religion because this is how we live, by believing in God.”

Living through a pandemic as a Holocaust survivor

“It’s a terrible thing that’s going on, I tell you. First of all, this started probably way before we all knew about it—November or December—and our president didn’t do anything about it. He needs to be blamed for that. Everything will be fine by April, and if it’s not, I think this country is going to go to pot,” Schindler said while laughing.

Schindler’s book

In 2019, the stories of Rose and Max Schindler were published in a book entitled Two Who Survived: Keeping Hope Alive While Survivng the Holocaust. The book, written by M. Lee Connolly, tells their journeys to survivorship chronologically. 

As it says in the forward, “Both Rose and Max tell their stories to the best of their ability, but admit that after over forty years of recounting these events, they remember some scenes more vividly than others. All of the stories contained in this book are accurate to the best of Rose and Max’s knowledge, which has the unique benefit of having been repeated many, many times over the course of more than 40 years. The Schindlers make it their goal to give only an accurate recounting, and withhold anything that is uncertain in their minds.”

“A lot of people that I come across that are reading the book, they start reading it and after four or five pages, they can’t put it down. It’s all exactly what happened to us; nothing is made up. Some books—you know you read all kinds of ridiculous stuff. But this is everything and just what happened. If you buy my book and you’re not happy with it, I’ll give you your money back. I’ve never had anybody unhappy with it. 

We want the world to know what happened. That’s the only reason I wrote this book, so the world would know what happened to us. We don’t deserve such treatment, nobody deserves such treatment.” 

Schindler’s new normal

Currently, her best advice is to “stay well, and make sure you put your mask on when you go out.” 

Rose Schindler still resides in San Diego, California. She has four children, nine grandchildren and one great grandchild. Schindler continues speaking to students, the military and fraternal and religious organizations.

For more information and to buy the Schindler’s book, visit twowhosurvived.com or visit their Facebook, Instagram or Twitter page.

*Author’s note: I’d like to say a few words of thanks to the people who made this interview and piece possible. First, of course, I’d like to thank Rose Schindler for taking the time to talk to me and for being so gracious and compassionate. I’d also like to thank Sabrina Allison Garcia for connecting Rose and me and for coordinating the interview. Thank you, also, to Diane Meier for sending me Rose’s book and for giving me the wonderful idea to interview her. I’d also like to thank Chloe VanGerpen for being my proofreader and letting me bounce ideas off her. Finally, Rose’s story is so powerful and important, so thank you to anyone who took the time to read this. This, like the Schindler’s book, is in memory of the millions of innocent people who needlessly lost their lives in the Holocaust. We will never forget.