It wasn’t a nightmare, it really happened
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Lizzy Schwarz Dyszkiewicz was born in Boskovice on 11 May 1927 to Jewish parents Hilda and Moritz Schwarz who owned a delicatessen shop in the square. After the occupation and the Nuremberg Laws, she had to leave school in Boskovice and attended the Jewish high school in Brno for several months. Her parents lost their house and shop and the family was deported to Terezín in March 1942. Mother Hilda died of a long-term illness a few months later. Lizzy fell ill with scarlatina, typhoid fever and finally encephalitis. Her sister Kitty was murdered in the gas chamber in Auschwitz on 6 October 1943 and Father Moritz on 28 October 1944. Lizzy went to Auschwitz on 1 October 1944, went through several selections and endured the worst conditions of the Auschwitz concentration camp. She was selected to work for the aircraft industry and went to Dresden where she was caught by Allied bombing in February 1945. She survived a death march and transport to Mauthausen, where she lived to see the camp liberated by the US Army on 5 May 1945. After returning to her native Boskovice, she entered a two-year public business school in Blansko. In 1947, at the request of her only relative, aunt Lily, she went to London. Tragically, her aunt accidentally burnt to death in the house where she worked in 1950 and Lizzy was left alone in England. She met a young Polish prisoner of war and refugee, Jerzy Dyszkiewicz. They married in 1955 and had two daughters, Caroline (1962-2001) and Nicole (1965). British historian Ted Bailey wrote a book about the couple’s lives of the couple, Survival and Love: The Double Escape from the Nazis in 2019, which was published in Czech translation in 2025. After her husband’s death in 2016, Lizzy lives alone in a London flat and is incredibly vital at 98 (2025).
