The idea to launch a Holocaust education foundation came to Ann Arnold in 2016 after she published a book about how her father, aunt and grandmother survived the Holocaust. It included curricular content, but after Arnold, who lives in Norwood, N.J., talked to schools, she learned that they couldn’t cover the $300 budget required to purchase sets of the book.
Arnold was “shocked” to learn that a donor was necessary for that sort of thing, she told JNS earlier in the month on a video call with her father, Mark Schonwetter, now 90.
“I could not find any place as an educator to get funding for Holocaust education. I found a lot of professional development courses that could be taken—many for free. I found museums that would help you come to their museum. But nothing if I wanted to build a curriculum,” Arnold told JNS.
And so, she, her father, and her sister, Isabella Fiske, created the Mark Schonwetter Holocaust Education Foundation in 2019. Since 2020, the nonprofit “has offered grants to schools across the country to support field trips, programming, books and having Holocaust survivors speak to students,” per its website. “Through this work, we aim to educate our youth about the dangers of hate and inspire them to create a better, brighter future.”
Schonwetter, who lives in New Jersey with Luba Schonwetter—his wife of 55 years—works with schools to provide talks and resources, which teachers can incorporate into curricula. The nonprofit has granted about $300,000, which has reached more than 114,000 students in 32 U.S. states, according to Arnold.
Hid under in barns, under pigsties and floorboards
The Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 when Mark Schonwetter, then 5½ years old, was living in Brzostek. Not long thereafter, the family was forced from its home. As a leader of the city’s Jewish community, Mark’s father, Israel Schonwetter, was often brought in for questioning by the Nazis. When he didn’t return home from one such interrogation in 1942, his wife, Sala Schonwetter, fled with her two children—Mark and his younger sister Zosia. (She later learned that he was murdered by the Nazis in the forest and buried in a hole.)
Sala Schonwetter had also heard from the wife of the local police chief who overheard her husband, the chief, talking to a Gestapo officer who said that they would soon round up all of the Jews. The chief’s wife told Sala Schonwetter to run away with her children.
The trio fled 15 miles on foot that first night and stayed with Polish friends, who suggested that the mother, son and daughter would fit in at the Dembica ghetto. They stayed in the ghetto for four months before word came that it would be eliminated. The family scaled the fence and found their way to a nearby farmer, who hosted them for a few months before forcing them to leave. Schonwetter, his mother and his sister hid in forests in the Polish countryside for three years.
“The problem was the winter time. The cold, the snow,” he told JNS. “My mom was walking around and asking farmers to take us in and hide us—give us shelter.”
“Sometimes, they took us for a week or two,” he said. He and his mother and sister would live in attics, under pigsties, in barns and under floorboards.
“Then, we’d have to walk around, sleep in the snow if they wouldn’t take us,” he said. “That’s how we would survive the winter times until we were liberated by the Russians in 1945.”
By the end of the war, the three were among very few Jews who survived Brzostek.
They lived in the town of Tarnów in Poland after the war until they moved to Israel in 1957. Four years later, Mark Schonwetter headed to the United States. He spoke no English and had just $5 in his pocket, he told JNS.
He found work at a Newark, N.J., jewelry factory sweeping floors. Within five years, he was managing the factory, and in 1971, he bought a wedding ring manufacturing company, Lieberfarb. He worked there for four decades.
“Over the years, Mark dramatically diversified and expanded beyond plain wedding rings by adding a complete line of high quality, exquisitely designed engraved wedding rings, engagement rings, men’s diamond rings and diamond anniversary rings,” per the company website.
‘The effect of learning this subject’
After Schonwetter and his two daughters launched the nonprofit in 2020, they received a letter from a teacher in rural Yancey County, N.C.—some 125 miles from Charlotte—informing them that the neo-Nazi group 88 Club was actively recruiting in the middle and high schools.
“The teacher wrote to us and said that because of our grant money, two classrooms in the middle school were learning about the Holocaust, and we were actively pushing back against neo-Nazis,” Arnold told JNS. “That’s amazing.”
Arnold told JNS that a teacher informed her, her father and her sister that a lesson on the Holocaust, which the nonprofit’s grant money funded, helped students understand that even African-American students shouldn’t use negative terms to refer to themselves, and that hate words and labels have real effects.
“I have so many amazing student statements of what they have learned, and the effect of learning this subject has had on them,” Arnold told JNS.
The foundation, which aims to raise $2.5 million annually to fund educational programming in every U.S. state, will soon include a database of resources for teachers on its website, Arnold told JNS.
After the foundation developed a relationship with the Michigan Department of Education, it went from receiving three grant applications to 91, according to Arnold. “We know there is a huge need, and we are developing more of those relationships with more departments of education,” she said. “We know Michigan is a very large state, so we know it will be an average of $40,000 to $50,000 per state if we want to be able to fund all the teachers who would like to teach Holocaust in that state.”
The nonprofit’s Journey for the Living annual fundraiser in May is a month-long virtual fitness challenge, in which participants commit to walking 15 miles—the distance that Schonwetter, his mother and his sister traveled that first night fleeing the Nazis—for which they are sponsored. The foundation also has Journey for the Living mitzvah projects throughout the year that draw participation from many bar and bat mitzvah-aged students.
‘You cannot hate a whole nation’
Schonwetter tells students that there is a larger story of hate and discrimination than just Hitler’s “final solution.”
“Hitler didn’t only kill the Jews. He started to slowly go after other sects of society that he didn’t believe in their existence,” he told JNS. “If you have the knowledge of what happened in the past, maybe you can stand up and do anything you can to prevent something like that from happening again,” he tells the students.
“It doesn’t matter our religion or how we look. We should unite all together and make sure by being all united together, we have the will, the power, with our voices, to make sure those things won’t happen again,” Schonwetter added.
Sometimes, children ask the nonagenarian for a picture together or a hug, Schonwetter told JNS. They often ask him if he is depressed, whether he has nightmares, and if he hates Germans.
“Let me make clear,” he tells them. “I do not have hatred against German people. I have hatred against the Nazis. You cannot hate a whole nation.”
“There were so many Germans killed by Hitler, too. We have to distinguish,” he tells the students.
One child offered Schonwetter an apology for his grandfather being a Nazi. “This is nothing for you to apologize for,” he told the kid. “You didn’t do anything.”
“Just to see how the story affected this young man and how he felt the need to come up to my dad,” Arnold told JNS. “I was a mess. It was beautiful.”
