Oscar E. Swan, professor in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and advisor for the Polish minor, translated the memoir of a Warsaw ghetto survivor that has topped the list of new releases in Jewish Biographies on Amazon.
Swan met Leokadia Schmidt in 1972 and translated her diary from Polish to English. Schmidt’s journal recounts her traumatic experiences evading the Nazis with her husband and 5-month-old son, and eventually hiding in a tinsmith’s shed in the “Aryan side” of Warsaw. It wasn’t until recent years that Schmidt’s son contacted Swan about publishing his translation.
Swan’s English translation of “Rescued from the Ashes: the Diary of Leokadia Schmidt, Survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto” comes on the 74th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.