These days, Paul Schwarzbart doesn’t hear anything around his San Rafael home more intimidating than his cat, Miss Adventure, pleading for — or rather, demanding — a little quality time.
It’s a demand to which Schwarzbart is all too happy to acquiesce, and with a smile he picks up the kitty.
The retired French professor’s stature — though not his demeanor — is Napoleonic; his long, white hair is pulled back into a tightly braided ponytail, and he has a predilection for tweedy suits and eye-catching silk bow ties.
Schwarzbart, 73, practically radiates friendliness; it’s no surprise he connects so well with young audiences. The surprise, considering what he’s talking about, is his cheerfulness.
Schwarzbart’s smile fades when he recalls the sounds of his youth, sounds far removed from Miss Adventure’s impassioned meowing. After several constantly terrifying years as a hidden child in a Belgian boarding school, Schwarzbart returned home to Brussels, where the ominous buzz of the Germans’ V-2 rockets was a frequent reminder that liberation did not necessarily equal safety. The rockets were intended for London but, often enough, Brussels would have to do.
“I can still hear it. I can hear those engines. And if you heard them cutting off, it was falling, and you knew someone was going to die,” he recalled with his eyes closed. “If you heard it real close, you knew it’d be somebody in the neighborhood.”
Schwarzbart’s improbable life has taught him to consider the meaning of the word “never.” But he never expected his life story would lead him to Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation.
“I’d have told you you’re out of your gourd,” he says with a laugh, his smile returned.
Schwarzbart’s adventure began years ago, when a teacher named Colleen Whalen saw him speak at the Jewish Community High School. She teaches on the reservation, and asked him if he’d consider making the trip. Schwarzbart was surprised when it actually came to fruition. When he learned he was to speak 10 times in four days, he was doubly surprised.
So Schwarzbart and his wife, Sharry, also a retired French professor, headed to the reservation, a remote enough locale to earn the description “three hours from Jackson.”
Their guide during the weeklong engagement in May was John Yellowplume, a teacher and the Arapaho tribe’s “keeper of the drum,” who is required to perform at gatherings the Jewish community commonly refers to as a “lifecycle events.”
Schwarzbart addressed audiences ranging from the youngest to the eldest and possessing equally varying degrees of knowledge about the Holocaust. One young girl asked him if he’d ever met Hitler, a question the normally quick-on-his-feet Schwarzbart found himself utterly unable to comprehend. Another audience member admitted she had never heard of the Holocaust.
“The girl might have been 11 or 12 years old. And I asked, ‘Does anyone not know what I’m talking about if I say “Holocaust?”‘ She put up her hand. So, I give her credit,” he recalled.
Even for students who knew more, it was probably their first interaction with a Jew directly affected by the Holocaust.
The reservation has no shortage of veterans, however — the plaques dotting the landscape don’t rival the ubiquitous World War I memorials at the center of every small French town, but Schwarzbart couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer number of Arapaho and Shoshone who volunteered to fight in World War II. And, much to his delight, he was able to express this in person.
Schwarzbart and Star Weed, an inhabitant of the reservation, have a similar taste for flashy menswear, and both were on the continent during Hitler’s last push — but Star Weed was on the front lines.
The lively veteran took in one of Schwarzbart’s speeches, and then tracked him down afterwards to tell his own story of fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and being captured by the Nazis. Thankfully, the story had a happy ending, as Star Weed gleefully recalled how all the girls couldn’t wait to line up and kiss him after he was released from the prison camp.
Schwarzbart’s experience at the Belgian school struck a chord with many in his Native American audiences, who likened his sojourn to the boarding schools that Native Americans were forced to attend, where speaking one’s native languages and practicing traditional customs was forbidden.
On one of their last days in the reservation, the Schwarzbarts were led by Yellowplume to the grave of famed Shoshone Chief Washakie.
“I’d never been in an Indian graveyard — they leave stones on top of the tombstones just like us!”
The keeper of the drum wanted to tell the Schwarzbarts goodbye, but he couldn’t. There is no word for “goodbye” in the Arapaho language.
“He said, ‘I don’t like to see you go. Good luck and see you soon.'”