A Holocaust Survivor Finally Gets Her Diploma

EVERYDAY MIRACLES

- Sydney Page

IN 1939, MIRIAM Schreiber should have started first grade. Instead, she spent that year—and the following five—trying to survive. She was living in Poland when World War II broke out. “My entire life was disrupted within minutes,” she says. “I was looking forward to starting school.”

She never made it.

“It has been a profound regret of mine, all my life,” says Miriam.

Decades later, though, the now-89- year-old Holocaust survivor finally got something she had always longed for: a high school diploma.

“From the first time I met Miriam, she told me how disappointed she was to have never had a formal education,” says Erica Kapiloff, a social worker at Jewish Family Services in West Hartford, Connecticut, where Miriam now lives. “Not having a degree has always been a thorn in her side.”

Kapiloff and Miriam Brander, director of operations and community programs at Jewish Family Services, reached out to the New England Jewish Academy, a Jewish high school in West Hartford, to ask whether the school would consider presenting Miriam with an honorary diploma at its 2020 graduation ceremony.

Richard Nabel, the principal of the school, passed the query on to the students. “It was for the graduating class to decide, as they would be sharing their graduation with her,” he says.

He brought a few seniors to Miriam’s home in October 2019 to hear her story. She told them everything, starting at the very beginning.