At the age of 81, Eliezer Schwartz has come full circle. Once a young forced laborer in the Nazi concentration camps, he has now received a doctorate from the University of Haifa for his study of "Forced Laborers in the Third Reich."
"At 16, I was taken to Auschwitz and then moved from camp to camp for a year, until the end of the war. After liberation, I returned to my hometown in Hungary, but I saw that no other members of my family had returned, so I decided to emigrate to Israel," he related.
Israel news photo: Eliezer Schwartz receives his doctorate from Haifa University
In 1947, at 19, he landed in Israel. Another 57 years would pass before he would complete his doctorate study. Before doing so, he had to build a family, find work and, of course, complete his bachelor's and master's degrees. He completed his bachelor's degree at the age of 45. He acquired two master's degrees: one in sociology and anthropology and another in his work field of urban planning.
When Schwartz retired at 75, his grandchildren advised him to fill his time by dedicating himself to writing a doctoral thesis. Years passed and technology developed, but this did not deter him. "It went by smoothly. I had no problem becoming accustomed with the changes," he said.
He set about his doctorate with a scientific and composed approach. "I cut myself off completely from my personal and emotional story. I forced myself to," Schwartz explained. But he still used his past for the sake of his professional work. "For example, I worked in the adaptation of mines for underground industries. I labored there. I have first-hand familiarity with the topic and how the process was managed. It is a source of information that no other historian has access to."
One of the conclusions that he proposes in his thesis is that many elements of construction in Nazi Germany were carried out unprofessionally. "To understand how a people that was considered meticulous and precise did such clumsy work, you will have to read the full study," he suggested.