By Andrea Waxman
Though tiny in physical stature, longtime Sheboyganite Fela Warschau’s strength of character easily commanded complete silence from a room full of middle school students, said Laurie Herman, who teaches Milwaukee Jewish Day School eighth graders about the Holocaust.
And those eighth graders remained silent for an hour-and-a-half when Warschau visited the school every year to tell the young teens about her life as a teenager in Poland during the Holocaust, according to Herman, who is the library/media center coordinator at the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
Warschau, who died at home, surrounded by her family, on Wednesday, Sept. 20, “impacted many young people in our community with her story and her intelligent and patient responses to all of their questions,” Herman said.
“Despite the horrors and hardships she lived through, she spoke a passionate message of tolerance. She stressed to the kids to be grateful for their parents, siblings and warm homes and told them how hers were taken away and how it felt to be hungry,” Herman said.
She also told her story to audiences at many schools, churches, colleges, universities and other organizations throughout Wisconsin, her family said.
MJDS graduate Abigail Backer, now a sophomore at Whitefish Bay High School, remembers that Warschau “looked so loving, like the quintessential grandmother,” not someone burdened by her past. Backer also recalled that Warschau placed great importance on telling her story.
“She felt required to tell it, not only to keep it from happening again, but also in memory of her loved ones who perished,” Backer said in a telephone interview.
Nicolet High School freshman Matan Koplin-Green, who also heard Warschau speak while he was a student at MJDS said, “She took something horrible and turned it into something incredible by teaching it to kids. She was short, but she was tall inside.”
Warschau’s elder daughter Martha told The Chronicle that her mother was “a people person” with a deep interest in all kinds of people. Though her formal education was terminated at a young age by the Holocaust, she possessed a great thirst for knowledge and a vast array of interests and educated herself, her daughter said.
Martha said that her family was very close and that she and her sister Sally grew up knowing and talking openly with their parents about their Holocaust experiences. “It was never a hidden topic,” she said.
Born Oct. 15, 1926, in Ozorkow, Poland, Warschau, nee Jakubowicz, and her family were forced into a ghetto in her hometown when she was 13.
From there, the family was sent to the ghetto in Lodz, Poland. In 1944, they were deported to Auschwitz, where her two brothers and parents were killed. Fela and her sister Helen were sent to the Sasel death camp in Hamburg for nine months and then to Bergen-Belsen, where they were liberated by British troops in 1945.
The next year, she met and married Anschel Warschau of Lodz in a displaced persons camp in Germany. Five years later, the couple and their daughter Martha immigrated to the United States, settling in Sheboygan in 1951.
Formerly employed at Plastics Engineering, Warschau began to speak about her Holocaust experiences after retirement.
In addition to Martha and Sally Warschau, both of New York City, Fela Warschau is survived by her husband.
Allen I. Stressman officiated at funeral services Sept. 25 in Sheboygan. Burial was in Sheboygan Hebrew Cemetery.
The family would appreciate memorial contributions to the Fela and Anschel Warschau Room at the Mead Public Library in Sheboygan; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.; or Sheboygan’s Congregation Beth El endowment fund.
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