“The secret to a happy life is to make the very best of every day. If you can do that you can get along very well. You can have memories and wishes but the moment now is the important thing.” –Yvonne Campbell

Strolling on West 83^rd Street the other day, I noticed a familiar building and was instantly flooded with memories. It was the entrance to the Rodeph Sholom School, where I would occasionally accompany my aunt Yvonne during school breaks to be her nursery room classroom assistant. She was magical with the children, treating them with such respect, always asking them questions, and guiding them with her steady hand and kind heart. 

A beloved teacher at Rodeph for more than three decades, as well as the founder and director of its summer camp, Yvonne could not go anywhere in New York City without being approached as if she were a celebrity. “Yvonne! Do you remember me?” they’d say. “You were my teacher back in 19…” (fill in the blank). At the ballet, in the streets, in a museum, it was a delight to watch it firsthand everywhere we went.

Yvonne was a lifelong educator. After retiring from teaching nursery school, Yvonne continued to educate as a speaker in middle and high school classrooms, sharing her Holocaust story through the organization Facing History & Ourselves. She was a gifted storyteller, and used her talent whenever she could to spread the message of “Never Again.” 

Eventually moving full-time to Palm Beach, Florida, after retiring, Yvonne created yet another teaching opportunity and formed a small group of adult students who wanted to learn about France and its art, literature, and music. Her student following grew so rapidly that she began to offer the class through the Four Arts Society in Palm Beach. 

Attending her class one late afternoon, I was in awe of the engagement of the students as Yvonne commanded the class with such humor. Only permitted to speak in French, the students—spanning in age from their fifties to eighties—talked about current events and the life and art of Claude Monet, and then one brave soul volunteered to role play, in French, as a travel agent to Yvonne’s playing a customer trying to book a vacation. She really was one of a kind.

Not only a teacher, Yvonne was also a lifelong learner with boundless energy. After retiring from Rodeph Sholom, Yvonne decided to volunteer one day a week at five different organizations she loved, hopping on the bus daily from Riverdale to Manhattan, Monday through Friday. She thoughtfully chose where she’d lend her gifts—the School of American Ballet, the YIVO Institute, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Facing History & Ourselves, and the American Crafts Museum. Yvonne did whatever was asked or needed, enjoying these years as a full-time volunteer, reveling in meaningful work and sharing her joyful tales of being around young ballerinas and beautiful art.

Yvonne Fersen Campbell was born in 1929 in Hamburg, Germany, and raised in Paris, France, where my grandparents, Maurice (né Moshe) and Annette (née Chana) chose to live and where my mother, Renée Fersen Osten was born in 1934. Living on the outskirts of Paris, life changed after Maurice was recruited into the French army in 1939. A year later, sensing the dark fate for Jews in Paris, Annette packed up her two daughters and mother-in-law and headed south, which was considered “free” at the time. Not long after, Maurice fled the army and found his family living in a small town called Grenade-sur-Garonne, near the city of Toulouse.

Once Yvonne’s parents realized that the Nazis were getting dangerously close to their village, they managed—with the help of the Archbishop of Toulouse—to hide their two daughters in a Franciscan convent, signing a document affirming that Yvonne and Renée would be baptized and follow Christian rituals. 

In 1943, Maurice and Annette were deported to concentration camps. Yvonne, then twelve years old, had the responsibility of caring for her seven-year-old sister, my mother, who cried often. Yvonne told me later that taking care of Renée became her raison d’être, reason for being. “I needed my sister as much as she needed me,” Yvonne said. “For me, she was like a ship anchor, and the ship would’ve floated away without the anchor. I wouldn’t have survived without her. She became the center of my life.”

When the war ended, Yvonne and Renée were sent to a Jewish orphanage, from which they would eventually be sent to Mandatory Palestine. To their shock and surprise, Maurice showed up one day to retrieve his daughters after having been liberated by American troops from the Buchenwald concentration camp. They went back to Grenade, and months later they heard over the radio that their mother and wife, Annette, was looking for them. She’d been transferred from Auschwitz—where she’d been in Dr. Mengele’s cell block—to Ravensbrück, where she had been liberated by the Swedish Red Cross.

Once reunited, Yvonne’s family moved back to Paris in 1946 to make a new life. Yvonne worked in a hat shop, Renée was studying to be a professional ballet dancer, and my grandparents sold clothing at flea markets. In 1949, Yvonne, now 19, married James Schulz, a young Jewish man from America to whom she’d been introduced when he was in Paris on business. The couple brought the rest of Yvonne’s family to New York in 1950. Yvonne and James had two children, Lynda (b.1950) and David (b. 1954), and eventually were divorced.

Yvonne later married Andrew Campbell, a Scottish-American, and together they traveled around the world and created a beautiful life. Yvonne and Renée remained close until Renée’s death in August 2017. They were two sisters, bonded by trauma, yet resilient, brave and successful, building lives filled with love, family, and future generations to come.

Yvonne passed away peacefully on March 10, 2024, two months shy of her 95^th birthday. She leaves behind her children, Lynda and David, three grandchildren, Daniel, Myriam, and David, and four great-grandchildren, Hannah, Naomi, Naphtali, and Emerie.