Holocaust Survivor Tells Wisconsin Students To Fight Modern Anti-Semitism

A Holocaust survivor spoke to college students in Milwaukee on Wednesday, expressing concern about continuing international attacks on Jews.

In 1944, when she was 10 years old, Agnes Schwartz was smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto the Nazis had created in her town in Hungary. Schwartz then lived with her family’s housekeeper. Her mother and other relatives died in a concentration camp, but Agnes and her father were reunited, eventually coming to the U.S.

Seventy-two years later, Schwartz says she is concerned that violence against Jews in Paris and elsewhere shows anti-Semitism is again on the rise in Europe.

“You know, we say, ‘never again,’” she said. “And we mean never again, that it should never happen again, and it seems to be happening all over again.”

Schwartz is urging young people to reject much-discredited claims that the killing of millions of Jews during World War II never happened.

Schwartz said the time to hear directly from witnesses is running out.

“Your generation is the last one who’s going to be able to hear a survivor speak,” she said. “The Holocaust really did happen. Don’t ever, ever let anybody deny that it happened.”

Schwartz lives in suburban Chicago. She spoke to 900 students at the annual Holocaust Rememberence Service at Alverno College in Milwaukee.