This might be an exercise for your genealogy program! When Yitta Schwartz died last month at 93, she left behind 15 children, more than 200 grandchildren and so many great- and great-great-grandchildren that, by her family’s count, she could claim perhaps 2,000 living descendants. Mrs. Schwartz had no trouble remembering everyone’s name and face. She may have generated one of the largest clans of any survivor of the Holocaust — a thumb in the eye of the Nazis.
She was born in 1916 into a family of seven children in the Hungarian village of Kalev, revered as the hometown of a founder of Hungarian Hasidism. During World War II, the Nazis sent Mrs. Schwartz, her husband, Joseph, and the six children they had at the time to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
When the war ended, the family made its way to Antwerp, Belgium. There, Mrs. Schwartz put up refugees in makeshift beds in her own bombed-out apartment. In 1953, the Schwartzes migrated to the United States.
You can read more in the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/nyregion/21yitta.html.
NOTE: The New York Times often publishes articles for a few days, then removes them. The article about Mrs. Schwartz is available as I write these words but might be removed at any time.
My thanks to Linda Vixie for telling me about this article.
