‘Then it got too scary. The underground tipped me off that I was going to be placed under house arrest.’

Lorna Swartz could be like any other child psychiatrist. Outside her practice in Escondido, she plays a major role in Mesa Vista Hospital’s Partnership in Education program, where she helps school counselors deal with difficult student cases. But what isn’t as apparent is that Swartz, a native of Johannesburg, South Africa, was active for many years in operating a multiracial anti-apartheid school for children with special learning problems. She started the school in 1969--using principles she learned from psychologists at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.--because there was nowhere else to educate her mentally retarded daughter. But in 1979, Swartz fled South Africa for Chicago, leaving her family and her homeland out of fear of being arrested for subversive activities. Her family eventually followed, and they moved to Escondido five years ago. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed Swartz, and Stan Honda photographed her.

My father emigrated from Russia, and at the time he emigrated there was a closed quota in the United States so he couldn’t get in. He said, “Well, just take me where it’s hot.”

We had an extremely luxurious life compared to how Americans live. We were just an average middle-class family, but a middle-class family in Johannesburg has servants, and we were raised with our own nanny. My nanny raised me, and then she raised my own children. She was just part of our family. And because of that situation, because I was very close to her, I had a really hard time with the apartheid laws.

When my daughter was 2 years old, she hadn’t learned to speak yet so my husband and I really began to panic, and we took her to the doctors. We took her to one of the foremost pediatricians, and he said my husband and I should pray because if she was deaf, we might have a chance, but if she wasn’t deaf, there was no hope for her and we should as soon as possible put her away in a home before we got too attached to her.

She wasn’t deaf. And after writing to doctors all over the world, we finally took her to Purdue University. She was 5 1/2 years old, and she wasn’t toilet trained yet. All she ate was scrambled eggs and Jell-O, and I didn’t even know if Americans knew what scrambled eggs were or if they even had chickens.

We were at Purdue a week. When we got home, I worked with my daughter every single day for eight hours a day, using all the principles I learned at Purdue. And every eight weeks my husband would make a video and we’d send a report to the States.

What happened was it got to the stage where we had to have a school for her and there wasn’t one. I wrote to the doctors at Purdue, and they made a videotape for me to educate psychologists and teachers and doctors in South Africa. We mortgaged our house and brought one of the Purdue people to South Africa and took her on a lecture circuit.

After a lot of stuff, I was granted a classroom and a teacher at a school I could have. They (the government) allowed me to train an English-speaking teacher and a Dutch-speaking teacher. But they didn’t allow me to train any black teachers, and I had black teachers and black mothers knocking at my door saying they have a child just like mine and could I help them.

Eventually, I pulled out of the school system and started a school in one of the bedrooms in our house, and I started teaching myself. We had two children, then three children, then we had another bedroom we made into a classroom, then we built on, then we converted the garage, and just gradually expanded. The house became so overcrowded that we found a Catholic school and rented the building.

The government did lots of scare tactics. They had inspectors who would come into the school. On an average, one inspector would come every three years, but with us they came frequently during the year and there wouldn’t be one inspector, they would have five to seven men coming into the school. They threatened my teachers and told them to leave and would offer to pay them a higher salary if they left. They threatened my secretary and the parents. They would take all my filing cabinets and take all the kids’ files and throw them on the floor. They would intimidate the children.

Then it got too scary. The underground tipped me off that I was going to be placed under house arrest. If that happened, it would affect my whole family.

So I left my family and came to the United States almost immediately. I was petrified. I was alone for almost a year. I knew nobody. I stayed at the “Y” because at least at the “Y” people greeted me at the front desk, and if I died, somebody would notice that I hadn’t been around a couple of days. I thought if I stayed at a hotel, nobody would notice if I was there or not.

I often talk with other foreigners, and we just keep shaking our heads and say, “Americans just don’t appreciate how much they have. How can you go and tell them, ‘Can’t you just appreciate it?’ ” It’s just taken so much for granted that you are supposed to have this freedom.