In her 100 years, Polish-born Dvora Schweitzer, of Wynberg, has visited six continents, rubbed shoulders with famous figures, and lived through moments that have changed the course of world history.
“People committed suicide almost daily trying to scale the Berlin Wall,” she says of her visit to Germany before the fall of the wall. “There were big headlights and they shot at anybody that tried to escape from East Germany to West Germany.”
“They had no food and they suffered terribly under Russian occupation. And people here now think the Russians are too wonderful for words.”
Born in Poland in 1923, Ms Schweitzer, who turned 100 in May, has fond memories of her native homeland.
“I could walk as a toddler from my maternal to my paternal grandparents because it was one of these typical Polish städte (cities). I used to go along the square; there was no traffic, there were no cars. We had horses with carriages, and, in winter, we had beautiful sleighs with bells and everything was covered in white.”
Her family moved to Czechoslovakia when she was 6 years old. In Brno, Moravia, she and her sister were the only Jewish children at school, despite that she never felt any anti-Semitism until the Nazis showed up.
“I remembered preparing accommodation for some of the refugees streaming in from Austria – then there was anti-Semitism. There may have been before, but I did not know it,” Ms Schweitzer recalls of the days that led up to the Sudeten crisis after Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938.
Once Austria was officially proclaimed a state of the German Reich, Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia, to gain control of the Sudetenland, a largely German-speaking area.
“Obviously my parents were worried,” Ms Schweitzer says. But they never told her anything. As an adolescent, she began socialising more with her friends.
“I spent a lot of time in the library, reading newspapers. I was very much occupied with my group in a youth movement, and I didn’t know where they were going to go. But the group were Jewish people who started to realise what’s coming.
“There were the trains,” she says, describing the Kindertransport (children’s transport), a pre-war effort to rescue children, but not their parents, from Nazi-controlled territory.
“They sent groups of children to England then towards Mandatory Palestine, which belonged to Britain at the time,” Ms Schweitzer says.
She left Czechoslovakia in June of 1939, with the war breaking out in September, when Germany invaded Poland. She was one of 10 000 Jewish children brought to Britain from Nazi territory between 1938 and 1939. Through the Youth Aliyah organisation, overseen by Henrietta Szold, Ms Schweitzer was resettled into a cooperative agricultural settlement in Palestine.
“We worked in the mornings, milked cows, fetched chickens, and planted trees. I was 16. I had never worked on a farm before,” she giggles.
“During the war, they fed the cows with all the oranges. So they couldn’t export the cows, and I didn’t eat oranges for a long time. In the afternoon, there was school, but we fell – at least I fell asleep; we were tired,” Ms Schweitzer recalls.
“What’s interesting is that when we came to Palestine, the girls stopped menstruating. It is strange, but that is what happened.
“Eventually my sister came. My parents thought that they would follow. At the time, you could still get one or two people. Apparently my father got an exit permit. And he gave it up for a chap that was going to be arrested. I don’t know about my mother, but she was always, always very delicate. When I read about concentration camps I don’t like to think about it.”
In Palestine, she joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the women’s branch of the British Army during World War II. Posted to Egypt, she fixed carburettors and then was put in charge of the spare-parts store.
After meeting a South African in the army, she came to live in South Africa. This, she describes as a fleeting romance of her 20s. She was introduced to her late husband, Rudolph Michael, in Muizenberg, by a mutual friend and concert pianist, Rachel Rabinowitz. “He was on a holiday from the mental hospital where he worked. He bet his brother ten shillings that he would find himself a wife,” she recalls.
The domestic life that followed Ms Schweitzer describes as chaotically busy, raising her four children, Robert, Martin, Judy and Beverly, with her husband.
She revisited getting further education when her first-born went to university and obtained a BA at Unisa then worked as a social worker.
“I was very blessed with a very interesting life. I had my tragedies too,” Ms Schweitzer says. Her biggest life lesson, she says, is that people think critically, “because they don’t”.
