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Paul Schwarzbart was born in Vienna in 1933, the only child of Sarah and Friedrich Schwarzbart. His family had lived in Vienna since the Eighteenth Century, and his father worked with an import-export company. His mother had been trained as a hat maker, but stayed home with Paul. At age five, the family left Vienna for Cologne, Germany. From there, his father snuck across the border to Belgium. Paul and his mother were caught on their first illegal attempt to join his father in Belgium, but they succeeded the second time.
In May of 1940, Paul’s father was arrested and sent to a labor camp. Paul and his mother remained in Belgium, where she worked for a Belgian family. In 1943 a member of the underground approached Paul’s mother and offered to take Paul to safety. She agreed, and Paul was sent away under the name Exsteen, the name of the family for which his mother worked. Paul spent the rest of the war in Jamoigne, Belgium, in a Catholic home for boys. Though many Jewish boys were hidden there, Paul thought he was the only one.
After liberation, he returned home and found his mother still living there, waiting for Paul and his father to return. His father Friedrich was killed at Buchenwald two months before liberation.
Paul and his mother left for the United States in 1948 and lived briefly in New York before joining relatives in Petaluma, CA. After graduating from UC Berkeley, Paul pursued a teaching career. He married in 1969, and he and his wife have two sons.
Click here to view an excerpt from Paul's testimony.
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Jacob Harari was born in Poland in 1932. He lived with his parents and younger brother in the town of Ludmir, where his parents ran a grocery store. In 1941, Nazi troops invaded his town, and Jacob and his family, along with all of the town’s Jews, were moved from their homes into a ghetto. Jacob and his brother were briefly detained during the first pogrom, but were set free after two days and allowed to return to their home in the ghetto, where their parents and other relatives had hidden in the potato cellar.
Jacob and his family spent the rest of the war in underground hiding places, mostly in a shelter they dug under the floor of a barn.
After liberation, Jacob returned to school under an assumed identity. He and his family immigrated to Israel when Jacob was in the 11th grade. Jacob’s parents remained there, but he left for the United States in 1952, and then pursued an engineering degree. Jacob married in 1959 and has two children.
Click here to view an excerpt of Jacob's testimony.
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