Walter Schwarz
Until Hitler’s rise to power, Walter, Elizabeth, and their son Heinz Schwarz enjoyed a normal family life in Berlin, Germany. Walter owned a clothing store and treated his diverse clientele with universal kindness. Heinz loved school, and played with Jewish and Christian children alike. Walter was a proud veteran; he had served in the German Army in WWI and was awarded an Iron Cross medal by Germany for bravery in combat. The Schwarz family was also Jewish – but like most German Jews, considered themselves full members of German society and loyal citizens.
Heinz was only six when Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933. Germany underwent drastic change in the following year at the hands of the Third Reich; Dachau concentration camp was established, thousands of “un-German” books were publicly burned, and new laws excluded Jews from civil service positions and mandated the forced sterilization of the disabled. The Schwarz family was not unaffected; in the summer of 1938, Walter was forced to “give up” his business to a non-Jew. That same year, the Schwarz family was issued identification documents stamped with a large “J” to easily identify them as Jewish. The following spring, the last trace of normalcy disappeared from Heinz’s life when he was forced to leave his German school.
Like many Jewish veterans, Walter Schwarz believed that his service to the fatherland in WWI would save his family from Nazi persecution. He saw his Iron Cross medal as a guarantee of his family’s safety. The tradition of the Iron Cross began with the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1813, during the Napoleonic Wars. Walter’s cross, embellished with Wilhelm’s initials and the year Iron Crosses were created, symbolized the medal’s history. However, as the Schwarz family cherished their protective medallion, a new generation of the Iron Cross was being forged, each carved with a sinister swastika.
In April of 1939, Walter purchased passage for the family to Shanghai and the family joined the Jewish refugee community there. Heinz turned 12 during the two-month journey. In Shanghai, Jewish immigrants found themselves relying on charity and living in cramped conditions. Despite such hardships, the Schwarzes valued their freedom and became members of Shanghai’s Jewish community.
In 1948, the family was finally legally and financially able to leave Shanghai for San Francisco. They became naturalized U.S. citizens and registered to vote. Walter only lived for five more years before his death in 1953. Heinz Schwarz lived in Seattle for many years, and when he passed away in 2010, his estate donated his father’s Iron Cross, along with other family artifacts, to the Holocaust Center for Humanity.
