RCS High School students enrolled in Literature of the Holocaust had the incredible opportunity to meet Holocaust survivor Murray Jaros, who shared his powerful personal story of survival, from his childhood in Poland to his eventual immigration to the United States.
Students traveled to meet Mr. Jaros, where they listened to his experiences and asked thoughtful questions about his early life and the realities of living through the Holocaust.
Mr. Jaros was eight years old in the summer of 1941, living in a very rural area of Poland, when he saw his first airplane fly overhead, unknowingly witnessing the beginning of the German invasion. “We didn’t have electricity or communication with other towns. I didn’t even know there was a war,” he explained.
Soon after, the German army arrived, followed by SS officers tasked with enforcing Nazi policies that led to widespread atrocities and the murder of six million Jews. Mr. Jaros and his family endured unimaginable hardships in the years that followed, including the death of his grandmother and the beatings and torture of his parents.
Through community connections, Jaros and his family were able to escape, hide, and survive the occupation. A local priest, permitted to enter the spaces where the Jaros family was held, smuggled bread, water, and outside information to them, support that became essential to their survival and eventual escape. In 1942, after learning of mass executions in a nearby ghetto, a plan was formed. With help from partisans, Mr. Jaros and his family escaped and hid in the woods. He was later sheltered by a local farmer and reunited with his parents in 1943. For two years, until the war ended, the family survived while living in the forests alongside partisans.
After the war, Mr. Jaros and his parents returned to their hometown before making their way to the U.S. sector of Berlin, where they lived in a displaced persons camp while awaiting visas. The family eventually immigrated to the United States and settled in Schenectady, where Mr. Jaros later became a lawyer.
RCS thanks Mr. Jaros and the coordinators who made this meaningful experience possible for our students. As time passes and fewer survivors remain to share their stories firsthand, opportunities like this are invaluable in helping students understand history through lived experience.