Abe and Esther Schuster grew up children of Holocaust survivors. Their father, Judel, lost his parents and sister in the Sarny ghetto. Pauline, their mother, lost her entire family — they were murdered during the Nazi occupation of Uman, then part of the Soviet Union.

Pauline and Judel met in Stalingrad and married there in 1945, shortly before they entered a displaced persons camp in Italy. Four years later, they left Europe and arrived by boat in New York to begin a new life.

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At StoryCorps, Abe and Esther sat down to remember their parents’ philosophy of life. And as Abe’s high school math teacher would learn, that didn’t always mean following the rules.

Top photo: Pauline and Judel Schuster on their wedding day in Stalingrad, April 1945. Courtesy of Esther and Abe Schuster.
Middle photo: Abe and Esther Schuster for StoryCorps in Birmingham, AL in February 2019. Photo by Jacqueline Van Meter.

Originally aired May 3, 2019, on NPR’s Morning Edition.