“I stand before you as proof that miracles happen,” said Rosian Zerner last year at the annual Yom HaShoah ceremony at Faneuil Hall.

Zerner’s place at the podium was inspirational, and apropos. Her advocacy on behalf of Holocaust survivors and work in German-Jewish relations is well-known. A child survivor of the Holocaust, she is the former Vice President, and current Governing Board member of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust. The contact person for the Greater Boston Child Survivor group, she is the JCRC representative from the American Association of Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Greater Boston, where she serves on the Executive Committee. She is also on the Holocaust survivor Advisory Board at the Jewish Family and Children's Service, the Yom HaShoah planning committee, and has represented Boston survivors at restitution issue meetings. She worked on a successful drive to honor rescuer/diplomat Hiram Bingham with a US postage stamp.

Although her native Lithuania holds the dread distinction of being the country that lost the highest percentage of its Jews, Zerner survived World War II in the Kovno Ghetto, and in hiding. How? Her parents dug a hole under the ghetto’s barbed wire fence and pushed her to safety. “I was 6 years old,” she said. “They timed and avoided the changing of the guards, the searchlights, the dogs.” With an upcoming Kinder Aktion that would mark children for certain death, they had no choice.

“I was hidden in homes, attics, barns and woods, an orphanage. I was baptized,” said Zerner, who had grown up in a privileged environment. “There were times when I was ready to stop running, but my will to live was greater.” Miraculously, she was reunited with her parents after the war. En route to Palestine, they had to remain in Italy for six years, before moving to the US in 1951. 

“My life has been so cyclical that some would call it many lives in one,” she says. This is true. She was immersed into Newton High School at 16. “I sang the St. Louis Blues without knowing English with the a capella sextet the Newtonettes,” she recalled. An officer of many clubs, she found it refreshing to be with people not touched by the Holocaust. “It certainly did not fit into my Senior Prom as the date of the class president or into the values that I was absorbing within the ‘melting pot’ of the 50s,” she said.

Zerner found herself at Barnard. “In Italy I had listened to Radio Free Europe and thought I would come to the land of spirituals and jazz,” she remembers. Instead, it was all rock and roll. Her mother, who is still alive today at 98 in a Waltham nursing home, had been the Konzertmeister of the Lithuanian Opera, and Zerner had been a student at Milan’s La Scala Ballet School. She had read all the works of Shakespeare, Zane Gray, and Jack London in Italian. Despite class structures and educational strictures, she says that “the world, the time, was my very own oyster.”

Zerner was a runner-up for Miss Barnard, President of the Fine Arts Club (her major was art history and her thesis, the female nude), and a class officer. Her future husband, John Zerner, was in her music class. In 1961, she began graduate school at Columbia, but embarked upon a world quest, arriving in India before even the Beatles’ George Harrison. She spent four months in Japan, Thailand and Persia. “I bicycled in Nepal among Tibetan refugees, lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, bathed in the Ganges and went to its Source.” She has since traveled to 64 countries.

Zerner went to Israel, the home of her mother’s surviving relatives. “I lived on a kibbutz with one aunt and family, in Tel Aviv with another and visited with my grandmother and cousins.” She married Zerner in 1962; they had two sons but divorced in 1970 following his graduation from medical school. “I was totally unprepared for either motherhood or independence, and yet, in those feminist days, I declined to take alimony,” she says.

In the freewheeling 60s, Zerner’s car had a flower instead of an antenna, she was teargassed in Washington anti-Vietnam war marches, and started to sculpt again, painting, writing and publishing Beat poetry, making candles, pottery, enameling. Her father convinced her to buy a home in Chestnut Hill. “Newton schools were the best at that time and my kids were my priority,” she says. They lived on a cul-de-sac; the house bordered 56 acres of conservation land and the back yard had wild blackberries and a hammock. She had started a salon at her prior apartment in Brookline which grew to the Sunday Brunch Club at the Newton Highlands Women’s Club. Now the founder and president of a nonprofit corporation, with nationally and internationally known speakers, she organized trips, tennis parties, support groups, and radio, TV, and press attention, joined boards of arts organizations and chaired art-related events.  

“In 1987, having touched the lives of 26,000 people, it was time to move on,” she said. She joined her pro-baseball player son Jay in Australia (he is now a physician). Although caring for her father curtailed graduate school hopes, she studied Spanish and pre-Columbian civilizations at San Miguel de Allende and Oaxaca in Mexico, climbed pyramids and became a Mayan Solar Initiate. “I spent a month in New Mexico and Arizona with the Zuni and Hopi, explored Eastern philosophies and religions that took me to Brazil, Japan and Thailand, and followed the Celtic and other paths that led from Stonehenge throughout Portugal and Spain,” she said.

In 1996, her father died at age 90, and she cared for her mother while researching her family’s story, learning that her father’s sister, Lyda, committed suicide weeks after the Nazis murdered her composer husband Edwin. In 2000, Zerner joined a group of child survivors, and a German-Jewish Dialogue group. She was invited to accept an award bestowed posthumously by the President Adamkus of Lithuania to one of her rescuers. “I re-connected with my childhood friend who was in hiding with me and retraced my steps from the house of my grandfather to the Kovno Ghetto, to the homes where I was hidden.”

At Faneuil last year, where son Lang lit a candle, Zerner quoted presidential candidate Dennis Kuchinich: “If we can change ourselves, we can change the world. We are not the victims of the world we see, we are the victims of the way we see the world.”

“Let the saying NEVER AGAIN have a true meaning,” she continued. “Let us learn from the past and honor and cherish the future with our thoughts, with our words, with our deeds - with our love.  Peace as in the world, peace as in our hearts.”