Holocaust Survivor Earns College Degree, Top Award : Education: Half a century after risking her life to study in Nazi-occupied Poland, Rysia Edelman wins Cal State Northridge’s highest academic honor.

As a 13-year-old in Poland during the Nazi occupation, Rysia Edelman literally risked her life to get an education.

The Nazis allowed no schools in the Jewish ghetto of her hometown. So with a group of friends, she decided to attend a private dressmaking and design school outside the ghetto.

“You risked your life because it was across the street and you could get shot,” she recalled. “As a Jew, you were not supposed to leave the ghetto.”

For Edelman, it was worth the risk--even as a youngster, she had what she calls “a great need for learning.” More than 50 years later, the Sherman Oaks woman is celebrating a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Cal State Northridge. Not only that, she is graduating later this month with a 3.99 grade point average and, at a ceremony last Friday, received the Wolfson Scholarship Award, the highest academic honor given by the university.

The only reason she did not score a perfect 4.0 was that, disabled by Parkinson’s disease, she was unable to complete a written test.

Through all the years and all the pain, the 67-year-old Holocaust survivor’s passion for learning has remained undimmed.

“I had such a ball doing it,” she said of her studies. “I enjoyed it so very much. . . . Here I am getting an award. It doesn’t seem fair.”

The only child of a textile manufacturer, Edelman grew up in the central Polish town of Tomaszow Mazowiecka, south of Warsaw. One of her early memories is of “carrying books back from the library like that,” she said, holding out her arms.

After living in the Jewish ghetto came an even more harrowing period as the Nazis shuttled her between various munitions factories in Germany and concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Her eyes welled with tears during an interview as she recalled the odor that emanated from the gas ovens at Auschwitz. In one camp, Edelman supervised a sewing center, a job that provided her and her mother with food. She also believes that her learning gave her something more intangible. “As time goes on, I think to myself that . . . you needed a special drive to survive all that misery,” she said.

Edelman was liberated in 1945 while sitting at a railroad station in an “animal train.” While waiting for permission to emigrate, she again used her sewing skills, teaching classes at a displaced persons’ camp in Germany. In 1949, she finally made it to the United States, first settling in Buffalo, N.Y., and then moving to Los Angeles in 1959.

Raising two sons and helping out in her husband’s office supply business, Edelman had little opportunity to continue her education. But she was undaunted.

“I knew it was waiting,” she explained. “It was just a matter of time. . . . I felt unfinished without an education, like half of me was someplace waiting to be united with the rest of me.”

Once her children left home for college, she was ready. First, she had to overcome the obstacle of having no secondary school qualifications. But after taking a battery of tests at UCLA, she enrolled at Los Angeles Valley College in Van Nuys. She left there with a perfect 4.0 average.

At Cal State Northridge, she would sometimes get a mixed reception from her much younger classmates. “The first two weeks (of a class), it would be, ‘This old lady, she’s going to give us trouble, she’s going to hold up the program,’ ” she recalled. But soon enough she was indispensable to them. “By the first test, they were asking me for help. By the last test, they were following me into the parking lot.”

Edelman put in long hours to meet her course requirements, sometimes working 18 hours a day. She took psychology as her major, with gerontology as a minor. Her major course of study was more than just an academic pursuit.

“I have learned much about myself and it has helped me in dealing with my past. . . . To be able to live with that black period, psychology is helping. It tells me who I am.”

It has also brought her into a very unexpected limelight. Edelman was chosen from the 4,500-member graduating class to receive the Wolfson Award, given for exceptional academic achievement and service to the university and community. Among her extra-curricular activities, Edelman has recently been working as a volunteer at the city’s Wilkinson Multi-Purpose Senior Center in Northridge.

The Wolfson Award is traditionally kept secret until the honors convocation ceremony, so Edelman was taken completely by surprise on Friday. “I didn’t even know the award existed until I received it,” she said.

Edelman has no intention of letting up. She is working on a grant proposal for the Wilkinson Center and planning to study for a master’s degree in clinical psychology at Cal State Northridge.

“I want to give my husband some time so we can go on a vacation, go to the movies,” she said. “But after a semester at home, I think both of us will be ready for a master’s program. I’m counting on it.”

Most of all, Edelman wants to continue helping other people any way she can. Her rationale again brings tears to her eyes.

“Every day I wake up in the morning and I’m alive, and I can do something for someone else, I feel a victory over Hitler because I was not supposed to be here.”