High schoolers use symbol to relate the journey of Holocaust survivor Anna Levin-Ware.

By E.J. Schultz / Bee Capitol Bureau

You could begin with the time she danced with a future pope.

Or you could start with her dreams of medical school.

The obvious choice would be Auschwitz. The gas chambers. Losing most of her family.

But Rachel Pevsner and Darrow Pierce decided to begin with the bowl.

"A simple bowl," the high-schoolers write, "usually doesn't mean the difference between life and death, as it did for Anna Levin-Ware."

Ware is a Holocaust survivor. Pevsner and Pierce were charged with telling her story.

The three of them came to the Capitol on Monday and were recognized on the Assembly floor along with other survivors and high school students.

Ware's story, as written by Pevsner and Pierce, was combined with the stories of 81 other survivors.

The resulting book was presented to the Legislature as part of California Holocaust Memorial Week.

Like many survivors, Ware doesn't like to share her story, even with her four children and five grandchildren.

"She will never be able to escape," her husband, Robert Ware, said. "In her mind, in her memory, in her dreams ... it still haunts."

But Pevsner, 16, and Pierce, 15, sat with her for at least eight hours over two days.

The two volunteered for the project as part of their affiliation with Temple Beth Israel in Fresno.

Ware opened her home to them. And she shared her story.

She was born in Poland in 1922, she told them. She took dancing, ballet and piano.

As a teenager, she danced with Karol Wojtyla.

He would later become Pope John Paul II.

The girls learned of Ware's medical school dreams.

But after the Nazis invaded, "everything changed," the high-schoolers write.

Ware's family was sent to the Krakow ghetto and, later, to an extermination camp.

Ware lived outside the ghetto, she told the girls, with her Hungarian husband.

After Hungary was invaded, Ware and her husband were sent to Auschwitz, then to the Birkenau camp.

The men and women were separated. Ware never saw her husband again.

Pierce and Pevsner describe the details:

Six to a slab in three-tiered wooden bunk beds.

Mattresses made of straw.

No privacy in the latrines.

The lice.

"To stay alive," Ware told the teenagers, "one had to work."

For meals, a thin soup, she told them. Which led to the bowl.

"Without that bowl," the students write, "one would starve."

After the British vanquished the Nazis, the survivors were fed thick, hot soup.

But it was "too rich for starved people," the teenagers write, and some died.

"Anna's typhus made her too weak to eat at all," they write. "That saved her life."

Sitting in a Capitol conference room Monday, Ware has trouble repeating her story.

She doesn't want it in the newspaper.

She doesn't want people to feel sorry for her.

She finally agrees, but asks that people not pity her.

And please, don't send her food.

Ware came to the United States at age 23. She married Manuel Levin, a doctor, and later followed him to Fresno.

Ware earned degrees in art and theater at California State University, Fresno.

She invented a new process: bonding silver and copper to porcelain.

She used it to make bowls.

Pevsner and Darrow end the story here.

"She used this technology to make bowls," they write, "bowls without any function but to be beautiful."

The reporter can be reached at eschultz@fresnobee.com or (916) 326-5541.

Holocaust survivor Anna Levin-Ware, left, and husband Robert Ware, center, are greeted by Assembly Member Juan Arambula at the start of the noon session Monday at the Capitol in Sacramento. High-schoolers Rachel Pevsner and Darrow Pierce wrote down Levin's story.

Jose Luis Villega / The Sacramento Bee