Alexandria Resident, Holocaust Survivor Charlene Schiff Dies

Charlene Schiff was an integral part of Alexandria’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The Alexandria resident and Holocaust survivor donated the large, gold electric candelabra that is part of the city’s commemoration that day. Agudas Achim Rabbi Jack Moline in a column said it was Schiff who inspired Rep, Jim Moran, D-Va., to establish the United States' first civic commemoration of the Days of Remembrance of the Sho’ah, or Holocaust.

Schiff spoke of her life as a Holocaust survivor and the atrocities she suffered during World War II, as well as the will to live. At that time, she was named Shulamit Perlmutter, born in Horchow, Poland.

Schiff, 83, died Jan. 19, according to the Washington Post. She died of a brain tumor at the Fountains at Washington House, a nursing facility in Alexandria.

In 2011, standing in Old Town’s Market Square, she told a story of how she had been taken to a Nazi office to scrub floors and for other chores. When she asked for some soap to wash her hands, which were black from polishing Nazi boots, she was beaten viciously and for weeks couldn't stand up or sit down.

After that event, she told Patch she liked Alexandria for its diversity.

Last year, she told of having to eat bugs and hide in barns during World War II. Some of her stories are much more graphic. She told many and different parts of the atrocities she experienced through the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC.

After the war, she lived in a special camp in Europe before immigrating in the late 1940s to the United States. She lived with an aunt in Columbus, Ohio, and attended Ohio State University before marrying Army officer Erwin Schiff in 1951.

Her husband died in 2008, but she is survived by a son who lives in Rhode Island with his two sons.