Dr. Boyd triumphs over hardships of relocation and adversity

Editor’s Note: This is the final part of a two-part series.

April Klaassen - Features Beat

Dr. Zohara Boyd faced the looming danger of the Holocaust during the early part of her life, but its impact on her has been long lasting.

Because her father involved himself in anti-Communist activity, Boyd and her family were forced to flee Poland in 1949.

“After the war, he became a judge again, but he was very outspoken in his opposition to the Russian Occupation and to Communism,” said Boyd. “So, we quite literally had to leave over night with a couple of suitcases on a train to Paris. I just woke up one morning and we were going. It seemed no stranger to me than anything else in our lives had been. When you’re a kid, you just assume that everything that’s happening around you is normal.”

After living three months in France, Boyd and her family were admitted to Canada as displaced persons. Although she suffered no persecution in Canada, the impact of the war left Boyd in constant fear.

“I think the worst of it was the years in Canada,” said Boyd. “If a plane came flying overhead, I’d dive under the desk, and the teacher thought that I was being bratty. I used to insist that my parents take me to school over the weekend so I could make sure the building was still standing. That kind of knowledge is written in your nerve endings.
It doesn’t have to be in your brain.”

Her new freedom left young Boyd feeling confused.

“I was sent to the Jewish school and suddenly fully immersed in this Jewish identity and that scared me because all of a sudden, I could be the same person in all these different places and I wasn’t sure that was the right thing to be,” said Boyd. “I was a pretty tense little kid.”

One of the few of Boyd’s surviving family members lived in America and brought Boyd and her family to Trenton, N.J., in 1952. There, the 10-year-old Boyd was reunited with her 16-year-old cousin, who survived the concentration camps. The rest of her family perished during the Holocaust.

“I don’t even really know how many brothers and sisters my parents had because they would never talk about them,” said Boyd.

While Boyd lived what she calls a normal American life, the notorious Red Scare brought on her a new opposition.

“It was because we had come from Poland and in the early 1950s. It was the height of the McCarthy Era and all that the little kids in the neighborhood knew was that anyone from a Communist country was a Commie and was bad,” said Boyd. “I had kids in the neighborhood throw eggs at me because I was a dirty little Commie, never mind that we had left because my father was anti-Communist, but we spoke Polish and we spoke Polish to each other in the streets. I got beat up a few times for being a Commie.”

“The thing that I remember about getting beat up or ragged on in the United States was some kid throwing a dozen eggs at me and I remember thinking what a wonderful, rich country it must be where people can afford to throw eggs at each other,” said Boyd laughing.

Boyd, now almost 60, still faces the trauma of the Holocaust.

“[I am] maybe very distrustful of the world,” said Boyd. “I never expect anything good to last.”

Because she has battled hatred all her life, she is afraid a predominant anti-Semitic attitude will again arise.

“Right now with what is happening in the Middle East, I have no idea of when people will decide that it’s the Jews’ fault again, no matter how many suicide bombers there are,” said Boyd. “In 1973, the Arab countries cut off oil to the United States with the OPEC Oil Embargo, and I was living in New York at the time and on the subways there was graffiti reading, ‘Burn Jews, not Oil.’ I have no idea how quickly people would turn on us if the oil got choked off again.”

Boyd faces her past in the classroom by giving presentations to history classes and co-teaching a Holocaust literature and history class with Dr. Rennie Brantz. She deals with her emotions every time she speaks of her experiences.

“When I teach, I think of myself as being inside this Plexiglas cube where nothing can touch me, and where I am totally dissociated with my own emotions,” said Boyd. “In that class, on two occasions, that Plexiglas has shattered, and I’ve had to run out of the class crying. One of the things about being a survivor, it is true of all the people I have talked to, is that we very rarely cry about anything for the same reason. We are all afraid that if we ever start crying, we’d never be able to stop.”

Tears come to her eyes at the memory of her parents. It is they who and past generations that give her strength, she said.

“I get my strength, and this is going to sound really corny, from all the generations before me who survived the crusades, the inquisitions without losing their faith, without converting, with the belief that they were what God intended them to be and particularly from the memory of my parents,” said Boyd.

Boyd is married to a Quaker but still practices Judaism. She appreciates the love and support she has found in the Appalachian State University community.

“I think how wonderful the ASU community has been and how much I’ve loved it here and how secure and happy I have felt,” said Boyd.
“I’ve been here since 1977, and I’ve always felt tremendously encouraged and supported here.”

“I have had, in the past, some Baptist students come to my office to pray for my soul because they don’t want me to go to hell, but even that is a loving-sort of gesture.”

So while I may feel a little put-off by the idea that they think I must be going to hell because I am Jewish, I can still sense the love and concern in it.”