‘Too much to say’
Survivor recalls a vanished world

By Andrea Waxman
of The Chronicle staff

This is part of an ongoing series featuring Holocaust survivors. If you have a story to share, contact us at chronicle@milwaukeejewish.org.

When Cyla Schwerd, 15, went out on Sunday, June 22, 1941, she did not know that she would not see her parents, grandparents, or siblings ever again. And every detail of that last relatively normal day is etched on her memory, right down to the clothes she was wearing.

“I remember I was wearing a white dirndl (Austrian-style dress with fitted bodice and full skirt) with flowers on it and new sandals — red and blue with stripes — something I [had] longed for.”

“It was a beautiful Sunday morning. We were planning, in the evening, to have fun at the movies,” she said, naming the Russian-language movie she never got to see those many years ago.

As spoken in real life, Sylvia Blasberg, now 82, remembers the words she and her parents said in Polish and those between herself and her grandparents in Yiddish.

The eldest of four children, the former Cyla Schwerd had come with her parents, two sisters and a brother to live with her paternal grandparents in Magierow, Poland, her father’s hometown, a small town some 60 kilometers from her native city of Lvov, in 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland.

The family’s experience in the last war told them that surviving would be easier outside the big city.

After a year in Magierow, where her father’s family operated a wholesale fruit business, Blasberg returned to Lvov to live with her maternal grandparents and go to school. At the end of the school year, in early June 1941, she went back to Magierow.

On the morning of June 22, Blasberg met with a group of area teens and some Russian soldiers to spend the day doing public works projects, as was required in the Soviet system.

Blasberg didn’t mind filling potholes that morning, she said. It was fun being outside in summer with her friends. “We were working and playing and singing….”

End of childhood

Blasberg remembers her last conversation with her mother, an echo of an age-old mother/child exchange:

“My mother [had] said, ‘Take your trench coat.’”

“But, it’s a beautiful day,” Blasberg replied. “I don’t need it.”

Her mother prevailed and she took the coat. Later, she found photos and other mementos in her coat pockets. Besides her memories, they were all that remained of her childhood.

Blasberg, now a resident of Chai Point Senior Living Apartment Complex, spoke with The Chronicle in the Oasis Restaurant at the Jewish Home and Care Center last week.

A pretty, petite woman with sparkling grey eyes, Blasberg’s delicate appearance and gentle demeanor belie the horrors she experienced as a survivor of the Holocaust.

That Sunday in June, when Blasberg’s life and that of millions of others turned sharply into the path of the Holocaust, was the day Germany began its invasion of Russia. Less than a week later it had taken full control of Lvov.

While Blasberg and her friends were working to repair the streets, they suddenly heard German bombs falling. Everyone knew the Germans were invading, she said, and the Russian soldiers rushed the teens into trucks. “They drove us away from the bombs,” she said.

As they made their way east in the midst of chaos, the soldiers stopped along the way and took on people fleeing the German assault.
After several days they reached the freight train station at Tarnopol, where they were told to continue by train.

Now on their own, they had to decide quickly what to do. Though some wanted to try to get back to Magierow, Blasberg and two friends elected to stay together and continue east into the Soviet Union.

One of them, Esther Kramer, later Esther Bankier, eventually came to Milwaukee. She died in July 2004. The third friend, Hannah Langer, now lives in Israel.

In Tarnopol, Blasberg saw a Russian man she knew and “he asked the three of us to stay with his wife and travel with her,” Blasberg said.
“We were tired. We had been on the road for days.” They climbed into a freight train and slept on sacks of grain. When they awoke, the train was moving.

Thus began a three-year quest to stay alive. The girls had been told they should go to Kiev and, knowing it was a large city, they thought they would have an adventure they could report to their parents. Before they could get there, it was bombed and they went to Kharkov, Ukraine, instead.

Blasberg was then sent to work in a collective, taking care of small children. One day she heard the announcement: “After severe fighting, our [Russian] army has lost the city of Lvov.” She began to cry.

“Kharkov was taken in a few weeks…. We kept moving in front of the battles,” Blasberg said.

The girls stayed on the move, surviving as they could, sleeping in fields and in woods.

Sometimes they worked the fields of collective farms and sometimes they slept in dormitories, but they were cold and usually had very little to eat. Blasberg contracted typhus and malaria.

“What I went through there is too much to say,” Blasberg said softly. “What kept us alive and going [was] the hope, the belief, that we would see our parents, our families.”

During this time, Blasberg started to write about her experiences on any pieces of paper she could salvage or find. “I started writing a diary,” she said. “It was not a book, like Anne Frank had, but just any scrap of paper I could find. Each day I wrote the date.”

Blasberg’s friends supported her efforts to record their experiences and did her chores so that she could write. When she later lost the diary, she felt its loss deeply.

“Besides losing my parents and everyone in my family, my heart was aching because I lost my diary,” she said.

A vanished world

In the spring of 1944, when Ukraine was being liberated, the three girls began to walk back to Poland. “We walked miles and miles, and also hitchhiked. When we crossed the River Don, the water was frozen, but it was red from the blood of a big battle” fought there. “We saw terrible things,” Blasberg said.

When they got to the Polish city of Rovno, they found work, Blasberg and Kramer in schools and Hannah in a hospital, and met other Jewish survivors. In early June, they heard that Lvov had been liberated.
Esther married Michel Bankier, who had survived in a cave, and Blasberg and Hannah decided to walk to Lvov in search of their parents and siblings.

“Don’t expect happy reunions,” warned a Russian official who provided their travel papers.

When Blasberg arrived in Magierow, people were surprised to see that she had survived. When she went in search of her grandparents’ house, she found it had been burned to the ground.

She learned that her mother and siblings (the men had already been sent to a work camp at Komionka Strumilowa), together with the other Jewish women and children, had been rounded up and locked in the two synagogues for several days.

They were then taken into a square and forced to walk to a train station miles away, where they were herded onto trains and transported to Belzec, the extermination camp.

They found a similar situation in Lvov, where Blasberg’s house was bombed out, and a Ukranian family was living in her aunt and uncle’s house, with all of their possessions. None of her family, no aunts, uncles, or cousins had survived.

From there they went to Rawa-Ruska, near Belzec, where the former Cyla Schwerd met and married Harry Blasberg. Thirteen years her senior and a native of Rawa-Ruska, he had lost a wife and a son.

The Blasbergs went to Warsaw, where their first child, Joel, was born.
In December 1945, they left Poland via the port city of Szczecin for Berlin.

“We did not want to stay in Poland and we thought if we went to Germany the world would have to recognize that we need a home,” Blasberg said.

From the displaced person camps being run by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Germany, Jews were registering to go to Palestine and some made the trip illegally, but that was not an option for the Blasbergs because they had a baby.

Instead, they followed Esther and Michel Bankier to Milwaukee, where the Bankiers had relatives. They arrived on Sept. 21, 1949, Erev Rosh Hashanah.

Blasberg said she is happy to have come to this community. Her three children — Joel and twins Shelly and Serge, born in 1951, grew up here. She now has 11 grandchildren and one great-grandson.

After her children were grown, Blasberg and her husband divorced and she took a position as a social worker at Jewish Family Services, Inc., where she had been volunteering with immigrants from the Former Soviet Union.