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"I was just a kid. A frightened kid," she remembers.
The Schwartz family eventually was loaded into cramped, filthy railroad cattle cars and taken to Birkenau, a small Polish village, where the Nazis had built a camp and begun exterminating Jews.
"It was horrible. There were no bathroom facilities, no drinking water, no nothing," said Schwartz, who is now 78 and living in Manheim Township.
The family was separated by guards at Birkenau — and never reunited.
"That's the last time I saw my mom. I'm sure if she was alive she would have found us. I'm sure she was killed immediately, I hate to say," Schwartz said.
"I've never seen any of my family. Not my sister. Not my cousins. Not my people from my hometown."
Schwartz recalled her painful story in an interview Sunday at the Yom HaShoah memorial, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, held at the Jewish Community Center.
The ceremony is a remembrance of the 6 million Jews put to death by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and '40s, accounting for about two out of every three Jews in Europe.
"We remember not only the 6 million Jews, but also the millions of others who were slaughtered," said Dolly Shuster, who chaired the memorial service. "We honor and remember all who were murdered."
Some 150 Jews attended the memorial service, during which six candles were lit for the 6 million murdered Jews. The event is in its 17th year at the Manheim Township facility.
The group then watched a screening of the 2009 documentary "Four Seasons Lodge," which follows a community of Holocaust survivors who meet each summer at a bungalow in the New York Catskills. The film focuses on their final meeting at the lodge.
The memorial was sponsored by Temple Beth El, Congregation Shaarai Shomayim, Congregation Degel Israel, Franklin & Marshall College's Hillel and Jewish Community Alliance of Lancaster.
Schwartz is among six local Holocaust survivors, many of whom have shared their horrific stories over the years. The others are Suzy Baer, Michael Gleiberman, Sophie Kessler, Henry Simmons and Anne Wascou.
Simmons, who was only 13 when the war broke out in Poland in 1939, was sent to various camps and finally ended up at Buchenwald to work in an ammunition factory. He never saw his parents again.
Simmons is now 83 and living in East Hempfield Township. Yom HaShoah serves as a painful reminder of the horrific wartime experience.
"I don't like to talk about it. Too hard, too hard," he said. "The memories are all the time. They don't go away."
Schwartz said she survived the death camp by being determined.
"I was lucky, I guess. I was a little bitch, let's put it that way. I was a real fighter," she said. "I used to scream and yell and ask for things, even though I didn't know how to speak German. I barely survived."
When she was liberated, she had to be carried out of the death camp on a stretcher.
"I was so sick I couldn't walk, having rats run all over on your body," she said. "The rats were eating dead people next to you. My best friend's mother, she died right next to me.
"Sometimes I wonder how I made it, believe me."
Schwartz, who still has ailments associated with the beatings she suffered at the hands of German guards, has attended every one of the annual Yom HaShoah memorials at the Jewish Community Center.
"It celebrates the dead," she said. "It gives me closure to say a prayer and recognize what happened."
