Writer’s note: Ms. Elizabeth’s family was Catholic. While more than two thirds of the Jewish European population were exterminated during the Holocaust, it’s estimated that over a million non-Jews were also killed in concentration camps, with a larger number displaced and persecuted.

Ms. Elizabeth David, an 89-year-old petite woman with a strong Cajun accent, lives in a neat little home in Americana. Her daughter Debbie Guilbeau, a longtime Realtor and Norwood resident, visits daily to check on her. By all accounts, Ms. Elizabeth leads a very normal American life that bears no clues about the atrocities of her early years, and the lifelong heartache she has only recently begun to speak about. 

Her memories of the specifics, like which year exactly, aren’t sharp. Partly because she was so young at the time, but also because her parents did their best to shelter her from all of the facts, and would seldom speak of traumatic events afterwards.

Born Elizabeth Schulin in Yugoslavia in 1935 as the fifth of an eventual eight children, Ms. Elizabeth’s early years were spent in a two-room house with a dirt floor. Though the second World War would not be officially declared until 1939, Hitler and the Nazis had been in power in Germany since 1933, and eventually invaded Yugoslavia in 1941.

Around this time, her father and her oldest brother John (pronounced YOH-han) were kidnapped by the army while working in the fields one day. Her father returned home two weeks later and would never speak about what happened. John was never seen or heard from again. 

“We don’t know what happened to him to this day,” she says with tears in her eyes. “It’s hard to talk about…I’m sure he’s not living.” Soldiers would take boys when they turned 15, kidnapping them to recruit to the military, she recalls. The Nazis also had a program in which children who fit an “Aryan profile” were taken from their families and “re-educated” in Germany, never to be seen by their parents again.  

Yugoslavia was a war zone, the sound of sirens in the background a near constant companion. Ms. Elizabeth recalls the presence of Nazis in the street, particularly at night, as they made the rounds looking for young boys. After John was taken, her family harbored other boys at night to protect them. They didn’t think to look at our house because they already had John, she says. Small victories.

Her mother gave birth to another baby, Karl, around this time, and young Elizabeth, not older than five or six, was his primary caregiver while her mother worked in the garden and around the house. “He cried so much,” she says sadly. “We didn’t know what was wrong. They didn’t have doctors or anything like that,” she says. One night, all the ladies came to pray for him. They were dressed all in white, she recalls. Baby Karl died that night, before he even turned a year old. The family never knew the cause. “He didn’t even know how to walk yet,” Ms. Elizabeth says.

World War II was intensifying, and her other brother Frank was coming up in age. Maria, the eldest sister, was by then married. The family made the decision to leave everything out of fear that Frank would be taken too. Sadly, Maria stayed behind with her husband. They never saw her again, but Maria did survive. They were able to write letters to each other much later in life, but by then, Elizabeth had forgotten how to speak the language, and Maria could not speak English. 

Along with hundreds of other families, by choice, the Schulins boarded a train to Austria. That’s all they knew of their destination. The train was a box car, not a passenger train. For three days or more, they rode in the windowless, dark train with nothing to eat or drink and not enough room to lie down. 

Somewhere along the way, the train stopped, and all passengers were ordered to undress and go into a building to take a shower. “If we go into that building, we’ll never come out,” Ms. Elizabeth remembers her mother telling her, matter of factly. She thought they were going to get gassed. But they did get out, and, she says with a chuckle, “We had a nice shower!” 

The train made one other stop before Austria. Everyone was starving, and there was a little country store. “I’ll go get a loaf of bread,” her mother says. “Don’t follow me.” But the young Elizabeth did follow her, and a plane flew overhead and began shooting at everyone. “Mama threw herself on top of me and said ‘don’t move,’” she recalls.  

Finally, they arrived in Salzburg, Austria in 1942. They, and all of the other families who had made the trip from Yugoslavia, were sent to a camp for displaced persons and assigned living quarters. “Two rooms again,” she says. A kitchen and a bedroom, with bed after bed after bed, she says.

It wasn’t a work camp, and they were free to come and go to school or work. While she doesn’t recall the name of the camp or who was running it, research shows that NATO operated eight  “displaced persons” camps in the Salzburg area, three of which were more permanent settlements. The last one closed in 1952.

Her mama cooked at night—a lot of chicken soup, and wild lettuce soaked in vinegar. Her mother gave birth to two more children, Michael and Theresa, who are still alive and living nearby in South Louisiana. Life began to get a bit better there, although there were soldiers hiding in the woods behind the camp, and the sound of artillery would still be heard for another three years. 

Elizabeth enrolled in an all-girls school, and her teacher was a kind German woman. She became close friends with three other girls, all from Yugoslavia. Three of the four shared the first name of Elizabeth, though they chose to go by Leisl, and one was named Mitzy. “We spent all the time together! Especially on the weekends,” riding bicycles, she recalls.

The Schulins remained there long after the war ended, having forged a community with the other displaced persons. In 1952, they were chosen to immigrate to America under President Truman’s Displaced Persons Act. The act was designed to resettle displaced European refugees by granting them American visas as long as they were sponsored by an American family. 

The Lorio family of New Roads was their sponsor. The Schulins settled in a house on Lakeland Road. Elizabeth learned English eventually, as did her mother and surviving siblings. Her father never did. He worked as a cattle farmer for Dr. Cecil Lorio. 

War and tragedy were all the teenage Elizabeth had known. She thought that’s just how things were; she didn’t know how sweet life could be. The family set sail for the United States, immigrating through Ellis Island in 1952, then boarded a train for New Orleans. Elizabeth was 17 years old. 

“I loved it,” she says of her first impressions of Louisiana. “It was different. It was freedom,” though she missed her best friends terribly and was never able to reconnect.

She met her future husband Leroy David in 1953, and he soon shipped off to Korea after active wartime. For two years, she recalls, they wrote letters back and forth. They married in a small Catholic ceremony in New Roads three months after he returned. 

Elizabeth and Leroy were married 64 wonderful years before he passed away in 2020 at the age of 87. They raised two children, then were blessed with four grandchildren and 11 great grandchildren, who she delights in being around.

Any traces of her native tongue have been erased–having been married to a Cajun for more than six decades, Ms. Elizabeth talks like she was born on the bayou. The family made their home in Central, but spent as much time at their camp on False River as they could. They went Cajun dancing every weekend, loved to fish, and enjoyed entertaining and cooking for a crowd. 

Her mother, Katarine Poss Schulin, outlived her dad by several decades. Ms. Elizabeth recalls that in 2000, as her mother lay dying in a nursing home in Baker, every man that walked through that door – doctor, grandson, etc. – was John to her. She called out to her long lost son as she left this world.

As Ms. Elizabeth reflects on her remarkable life, her story serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of remembering the past. “Everything now feels like deja vu,” she says, referring to the current war in Ukraine and global tensions. “It feels like everything is how it was just before the war started.” Yet, amid the echoes of history, she finds solace in the resilience of the human spirit. For Ms. Elizabeth, each day is a testament to the triumph of hope over adversity, a reminder that even in the darkest of times, there is always the promise of a brighter tomorrow. Through it all, she has cherished the simple joys of life—family, community, and the freedom to savor each moment.