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and my sister, and left me by myself. I wanted to go with them, but they pushed me into the corner. I just sat there crying. I’ll never forget that.”

She never saw them again. More than 70 years later, the wounds of the Holocaust run deep for Rosalie, now 88. She and her husband wrote a book about their experience in 2007, titled “William and Rosalie: A Holocaust Testimony.” William died in December 2010.

For 23 years, Rosalie volunteered with the Dallas Holocaust Museum, sharing her story with churches, schools and other local groups. The longtime Preston Hollow resident recently moved into an independent living community in Plano.

“I have dedicated my life to teaching people not to hate,” she says.

Despite hundreds of public speaking engagements, she still struggles to explain the horrors she endured.

“One day, I was looking out the window,” she says with her thick Polish accent. She pauses as tears well up in her eyes. She clasps her hands and hangs her head. “It’s still difficult to talk about. I was looking out the window, and I saw long lines of people. They were sending thousands of people to their deaths those who couldn’t work — women, old people, little children just like them,” she says, pointing to her two great- grandchildren frolicking around the living room.

It wasn’t long before Rosalie found herself standing in that same line.

“I was standing in the line, and a man came over and said, ‘You’re too pretty to be in this line.’ He gave me a stamp to leave.”

That man was Oskar Schindler, the German responsible for saving more than 1,000 Jewish people during the Holocaust.

“If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

William and Rosalie were later transported to the Plaszow labor camp run by the infamous SS commander Amon Goeth — the principal villain in “Schindler’s List” — responsible for killing 2 million Jews. He put William to work in the factory while Rosalie was on “heaven patrol,” cleaning up dead bodies.

Then, the couple was separated. Rosalie headed to another work camp while William ended up at Auschwitz, the Nazis’ largest concentration camp.

“We were separated for three years,” Rosalie says. “I didn’t even know what Auschwitz was. We were locked up like dogs.”

The Russians freed Rosalie from her camp, but by that time, she was gravely ill, coughing up blood. She had no fam-

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“It was not easy after the war,” she says. “I had nightmares. I was very upset.”

Then, one day, a stranger on the street told her that her husband was coming home.

“I fainted,” Rosalie says. “He came back. I saw him walking up from the third-floor window, and I wanted to jump out.”

The two eventually made their way to U.S., where they built a new life and generations of Schiffs.

“Her story has always been a part of my life,” says Rosalie’s granddaughter, Jennifer Mayes. “When you think about how much they lost, they still get to see the generations of their family live on.”

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