EVERYDAY MIRACLES

A Holocaust Survivor
Finally Gets Her Diploma
By Sydney Page
from washingtonpost.com

n 1939, Miriam Schreiber should “It has been a profound regret of

I have started first grade. Instead, she

spent that year—and the following
five—trying to survive. She was living
in Poland when World War II broke
out. “My entire life was disrupted
within minutes,” she says. “I was look-
ing forward to starting school.”
She never made it.
mine, all my life,” says Miriam.
Decades later, though, the now-89-
year-old Holocaust survivor finally got
something she had always longed for:
a high school diploma.
“From the first time I met Miriam,
she told me how disappointed she was
to have never had a formal education,”

40 july/august 2021 Illustration by Gel Jamlang


says Erica Kapiloff, a social worker at
Jewish Family Services in West Hart-
ford, Connecticut, where Miriam now
lives. “Not having a degree has always
been a thorn in her side.”
Kapiloff and Miriam Brander, di-
rector of operations and community
programs at Jewish Family Services,
reached out to the New England Jew-
ish Academy, a Jewish high school
in West Hartford, to ask whether the
school would consider presenting
Miriam with an honorary diploma at
its 2020 graduation ceremony.
Richard Nabel, the principal of the
school, passed the query on to the
students. “It was for the graduating
class to decide, as they would be shar-
ing their graduation with her,” he says.
He brought a few seniors to Miri-
am’s home in October 2019 to hear
her story. She told them everything,
starting at the very beginning.
Miriam was born in a village just out-
side Warsaw in 1932. Life was good,
she says. Then the war started. Miriam
and her family spent months hiding
from the Nazis, starting when she was
seven. They ran from village to village
and forest to forest in a perpetual state
of panic.
“We were on the run all the time
and didn’t know where to turn,” says
Miriam. “We were always cold and
hungry. It was horrible. It was chaos.”
Soon after the war started, the fam-
ily was transported to a slave labor
camp in Siberia, where they spent
Reader ’s Digest
nearly six years living in squalor—and
barely living at all.
“It’s hard to describe the suffering,”
says Miriam, who watched as family
members froze and starved to death.
“My grandfather was lying next to me
dead for three days,” she remembers,
her voice trembling as she relives the
horror in her mind. “We eventually
buried him under the snow.”
Miriam was not liberated until
March 1946—nearly a year after the
war ended, when she was 14 years
old. She and her remaining family
“WE WERE ON THE RUN
AND DIDN’T KNOW
WHERE TO TURN. IT
WAS CHAOS.”
members went to a displaced per-
sons camp in Germany, where they
faced continued discrimination and
anti-Semitism.
There, Miriam met her husband,
Saul Schreiber, also a displaced sur-
vivor at the camp.
The couple married in Germany
when Miriam was 15, and they had
their first child a year later.
“We needed to rebuild our lives in
whatever way we could,” says Miriam,
adding that having a child gave them
hope for a brighter future.
The couple left Germany in 1948
and lived in Israel, then Sweden, and
then in another displaced persons
rd.com 41
Reader ’s Digest Everyday Miracles

camp in Germany before finally im-
migrating to America in 1960.
“Saul worked in a chicken market,
and I went to work in a bakery, mak-
ing 99 cents an hour,” says Miriam.
Getting a formal education was
never an option for her. She and Saul
focused on sending their two sons to
school, thus giving their kids opportu-
nities they never had.
“We became successful because of
my parents,” says Bernie Schreiber, 73,
who was a teacher for 32 years. “My
brother Bob was able to buy and build
his own business successfully. I credit
my parents, but especially my mother,
for her dogged determination.”
Over the years, Miriam learned
seven languages. Her parents taught
her Polish and Yiddish, but she taught
herself Russian, English, German, He-
brew, and Swedish. “I educated my-
self,” she says. “I read books day and
night. I still do.”
“I’m in awe of her,” says Bernie.
So were the high school seniors
who heard Miriam’s story.
“We had a class meeting and
discussed how to honor her,” said
Shoshana Olkin, 19, one of the stu-
dents who went to Miriam’s home.
“The class instantly said ‘Yes, let’s
give her an honorary diploma,’ ” says
Principal Nabel.
The idea was to present Miriam with
a diploma at the school’s graduation
ceremony, but when COVID-19 hit, the
service became virtual and the honor-
ary diploma plan was put on pause.
“But we still really wanted to do this
for her,” says Brander. “I talked to her
family to come up with a way that was
COVID-friendly.”
On August 16, during a socially dis-
tanced ceremony in the school gym,
Miriam Schreiber was presented with
a high school diploma from the New
England Jewish Academy.
Wearing her cap and gown, she
walked to the podium with “Pomp
and Circumstance” playing as her
family and members of the Jewish
community watched with pride.
“When I finally got the diploma,
I kissed it,” she says. “I just couldn’t
believe it was mine.”
“There weren’t too many dry eyes
among the 30 of us there,” says Nabel.
Miriam’s family was especially moved.
“I’m not sure she even realizes the
importance of that moment to me,”
says Bernie. “I am so proud of her.” RD
washingtonpost.com (august 25, 2020), copyright
© 2020 by the washington post.

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