Dr. Zohara Boyd: Once A Teacher,
Always A Teacher

By Frank Ruggiero

Even after retirement in late 2005, Dr. Zohara Boyd still finds herself in the college classroom. Some hours may be out of necessity, but Boyd does this by choice, fulfilling her role as a useful and necessary member of society.

Boyd taught American literature in Appalachian State University’s English department, but she now focuses her scholastic efforts on a far heavier topic — the Nazi Holocaust. She helped found ASU’s Office of Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, which was recently granted center status by the university’s board of trustees.

Dr. Zohara Boyd helped found ASU’s Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies. Photo by Mark Mitchell

The center seeks to educate students not only on the atrocities of the Holocaust, but also the factors that led to it and the psychology involved. Summer symposiums reach out to elementary and high school teachers, offering methods and ideas on teaching the Holocaust in the precollegiate classroom.

Boyd, along with Dr. Peter Petschauer, visits elementary and middle schools to deliver lectures and answer questions. Both are experienced in the matter. Petschauer’s father was an officer of the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS), while Boyd is a Holocaust survivor. As such, the two have teamed to present two different childhood histories to today’s students.

Born Zohara Muszinska on April 17, 1942 in a town called Piotrkow Trybunalski in Poland, Boyd does not celebrate her birthday. That same date is known as Black Friday, the day Nazi High Command in Warsaw invited the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto to a conference advertised as a meeting to discuss the maintenance of the ghetto. The conference, in reality, was a massacre — 50 or 60 of the ghetto’s leading educators, politicians and rabbis were slain that day, in preparation for the liquidation of the ghetto.

Boyd’s hometown was the first ghetto that the Nazis established after the invasion of Poland in 1939, because it had a Jewish district, a fair-sized Jewish population, and a railroad line that led to what eventually became the Auschwitz death camp. Boyd described the town in that time as an experiment, of sorts, to see how the ghettos would function.

By the time she was born, Auschwitz had already been established. Her father, Moses, was of fair complexion — blond, blue-eyed, what Boyd called “very, very Aryan looking.” Her mother, Esther, had Slavic features and light-colored eyes, despite her black hair.

“My father realized that trains that were leaving the ghetto supposedly to resettle people in the east were returning too quickly, and no one was being heard from again,” Boyd said.

When she was about three months old, her father decided it was time to leave. The ghetto was fairly porous then, as Boyd described it, and items were able to be smuggled in and out. Her father was a judge before the war broke out and was able to acquire birth certificates and baptismal certificates to disguise his family as Polish Catholics.

“How he actually got us out of the ghetto, I don’t know,” Boyd said. “Instead of trying to go to the countryside to hide, which many Jews did, my father put us all on a train directly to Warsaw, which was the last place the Nazis were looking for Jews to be coming in. They were looking for them to escape.”

She said her father had a swashbuckling mentality, having preferred to avoid danger by venturing right into the middle of it. In keeping with their disguises, Moses called himself Edward, Esther became Stanislawa, Boyd’s aunt Iska became Irena, and Zohara became Zofia.

Once in Warsaw, the family moved about from one place to another, renting rooms with Polish families and leaving upon the slightest hint of suspicion.

“Towards the end, when Warsaw was being bombed, we’d just move from one cellar to another,” Boyd said.

The family remained on the move until 1945, when liberation occurred. However, the war had already taken its toll.

“What I remember mostly about liberation was all of a sudden there was food, and that it was very painful to eat,” Boyd said. She had developed a severe eating problem that didn’t fade until her preteens. “From what I remember of starving is that it doesn’t feel like much of anything after a while. Eating became painful.”

After liberation, the family moved to Krakow, where her father regained his position as a judge and was then posted in Wroclaw, formerly Breslau under German rule. For a couple years, life was luxurious until her father ran afoul of communists through an article he published.

“We quite literally left Poland over night with two suitcases,” Boyd said.

The family arrived in Paris, where they stayed with friends who had also emigrated there. Eventually, they received visas to Canada and lived in Montreal for a few years, where Boyd attended the Jewish People’s School, before moving to the United States in 1962. They moved to Trenton, N.J., where Boyd enrolled in the Dr. Herzl Zion Hebrew School.

Since anti-semitism was still rampant in Poland after the war, Boyd’s family had maintained the Catholic ruse, though they pretended to be lapsed Catholics.

“But they were also supposedly wanting their children to have Catholic education, so I was being shipped off to church and communion classes with my little Catholic friends,” Boyd said. “And then I was plopped down in this Hebrew school, knowing nothing of Judaism and very little English. It’s safe to say I had some identity problems.”

She attended public school from grades seven through 12, and then attended Douglas College, the women’s division of Rutgers University, where she met her husband, Bill. Boyd earned her master’s degree in teaching English as a second language from Columbia Teachers College, a division of Columbia University in New York. Boyd earned her doctorate in American literature from the University of Massachusetts.

She and her husband first visited Boone in 1975, when Bill had inquired about Appalachian’s teacher education program. A couple years later, Boyd was one of 300 applicants vying for a professor position.

“I was the only one who knew where the place was, what the territory looked like,” she said. “At that time, it was a pretty isolated spot, and I was the only applicant who didn’t talk about wanting to come to the sunny south and throw away my snow shovel.”

Teaching in isolated locales was not new to the Boyds, as they both taught in Newfoundland, Canada. They moved to Boone in 1977 and eventually built a home in Blowing Rock. They later moved to Wilkesboro, as Bill had accepted a job with the Lowe’s Corporation.

Boyd, though, continued to teach American literature, inspired by her own professor, Everett Emerson, a relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“I tried to apply the methods of his teaching in my classes,” Boyd said. “He was just an inspiration and somebody that you can try to live up to and always fall a lot short of.”

Boyd retired in Dec. 31, receiving professor emerita status, but continues to teach Holocaust studies with Drs. Rennie Brantz, Petschauer and Rosemary Horowitz. She co-directs the center, but acknowledges the help from the center’s friends, such as the Grad family. Ed Grad died last fall, and his wife, Molle, donated library space for the center to maintain a collection of books and artifacts.

The center has risen in prominence, receiving funding from the Holocaust Claims Conference and the N.C. Governor’s Council on the Holocaust. The increasingly popular summer symposiums also continue, featuring Holocaust survivors like Morris Rosenblat and Miriam Klein Kassenoff to share their stories.

“Each passing year, I feel a sense of urgency that we have to get the message out to as many people as possible, while there are still survivors ... to tell their story,” Boyd said. “While the eyewitnesses are dying off, the deniers are young and thriving. With the symposiums, it’s certainly not a sense of ‘mission accomplished’ but ‘mission necessary.’ God knows that it is necessary.”

Looking back, Boyd would not trade her experiences, instead choosing to learn a lesson and pass it on to others.

“I wouldn’t want for my parents and my family what happened to them, of course, but on the whole it’s been a very satisfying and happy life,” she said.

“I think people think of trauma as something you never recover from and as something that’s kind of supposed to sour your whole existence. The one lesson to be learned from survivors is everybody carried scars and post-traumatic stress disorders, but nobody saw that as a reason to stop living, stop working, stop loving and stop being a useful member of society.”