Jeanne Schwabach
Jeanne Fay Schwabach, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, passed away April 3, 2017, in Nanaimo, British Columbia.
“Jeanne lived by her wits and survived many close calls until the war ended,” her family said.
Mrs. Schwabach was born on March 29, 1919, in Warsaw, Poland.
Her skills as a seamstress enabled her to work on a Warsaw Ghetto production line and elude the early deportation round ups to the camps. After her parents were deported to Treblinka, Mrs. Schwabach devised a plan to escape the ghetto and go into hiding in Warsaw.
She assumed a false identity as a non-Jewish Pole and survived the war in a labor camp in Gera, Germany.
Mrs. Schwabach lived in New York City, 1947-1952. During that period, she was treated for tuberculosis for six months at Denver’s National Jewish in 1949.
That’s where she met fellow survivor and TB patient Philip Schwabach. They were married in July, 1954. Her husband passed away on June 21, 1996.
Mrs. Schwabach, who earned a medical assistant certificate at Paine Hall School in New York, worked as a medical secretary at Denver’s Child Research Institute in the 1950s.
She belonged to a local glass art guild that exhibited annually at the Denver Botanic Gardens in the 1990s.
The Schwabachs enjoyed collecting artwork, and the family later donated a portion of their collection to National Jewish Health.
In 2014, Mrs. Schwabach relocated to British Columbia to spend her final years with her daughter and son-in-law.
She is survived by her daughter Deborah Schwabach Goodman and son-in-law Robert A. Goodman of British Columbia.
Contributions may be made to National Jewish Health.
Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News
