Melitta Garbuny, who turns 100 years old Monday, Nov. 13, has lived a rich and rewarding life filled with learning and love.

But her happy childhood in Austria as the daughter of physicians Moritz and Fanny Lowy descended into chaos in March 1938, when her beloved country became part of Nazi Germany.

Now a resident at Sunnyview Nursing and Rehabilitation Center, Garbuny is in no shape to discuss her harrowing years as a young teenager.

But her daughter, Vivian Prunier, of Putney, Vt., said her mother’s story and thousands of others must be told as humanity moves into the future.

“It’s important, to make sure everyone knows how terrible people can be so they don’t do it again,” Prunier said. “People have the choice of doing good or evil, and in the Holocaust, a lot of people chose to do evil.”

Prunier said when Hitler’s forces took over Vienna, Garbuny’s parents went into hiding and her younger siblings were sent to live with her grandmother in the countryside, while Garbuny lived with her aunt.

“Her school was closed and she and the other Jewish students were forced to attend a ‘Jew school,’” Prunier said. “One day, she and the other Jews in her neighborhood were rounded up and forced — at gunpoint — to scrub paving stones in the street with toothbrushes.”

Three months later, the entire family fled to France, where they remained for a year while trying to get the necessary documents to flee to England or the United States., Prunier said.

Garbuny’s beloved grandmother remained behind, and eventually perished in the Therezenstadt Ghetto concentration camp.

The family spent a short time in England before receiving the documents that would allow them to emigrate to the U.S.

Prunier said her mother’s teachers in New York quickly realized Garbuny possessed incredible intelligence and insisted she enroll in an academic program.

Garbuny, who attended Hunter College to major in mathematics, saw her program accelerated when the U.S. entered World War II so women could graduate early and help in the war effort.

“At age 20, she went to Washington, D.C., where she worked at the Pentagon as a statistician, calculating the trajectory of artillery shells,” Prunier said.

After the war, Garbuny returned to New York to attend Columbia University, where she studied statistics.

“It was during that time that the family learned of the fate of the relatives and friends left behind in Austria,” Prunier said. “It was unspeakable. So they never spoke of it.”

In 1947, Melitta and Max Garbuny, a physicist who escaped Berlin in 1939, were married.

They settled in Pittsburgh and raised three daughters, and Garbuny worked as a math teacher, because firms in the city were not interested in hiring women for professional statistician and computer programming jobs.

Prunier said that during her childhood her parents never discussed their experiences at the hands of the Nazis or the horror her mother’s family reported from Vienna once the war ended.

Prunier likens the situation to the Four Children of the Seder story told at Passover.

The four children are the wise, the wicked, the simple and the one who doesn’t know how to ask.

“In our family, there is the fifth child,” Prunier said. “The child who doesn’t dare ask.”

She and her sisters knew something terrible had happened and were very curious about it, but somehow understood that asking for information was taboo.

Prunier surmises that painful memories, survivor’s guilt and shame caused the Garbunys to bury their experiences and move on with life.

Prunier said when her father’s health began to fail in 1997, the Garbunys moved to Butler to be near one of their daughters and her husband.

Garbuny helped found the Learning in Retirement program at Slippery Rock University, where she taught computer literacy to other retirees.

She also translated letters and documents for the descendants of German-speaking Butler residents, in addition to teaching German gothic script at the Butler Area Public Library in 2011.

In 2008, the chancellor of Garbuny’s school in Vienna wrote to invite her to a ceremony at the school where the government would apologize for the atrocities that occurred beginning in 1938.

“She got the letter and said ‘Hmph, they want to apologize. It’s about 70 years too late,’” Prunier said. “Then, a couple hours later, she said ‘Hmph, I think I’ll go.’”

The whole family traveled to Vienna, where Garbuny and the school chancellor were the only speakers.

Prunier said the speech opened the tightly locked gates in Garbuny’s mind that prevented her from telling her story.

“She’s lived an interesting and admirable life with a lot of achievements,” Prunier said.

She said most Jewish Europeans who fled to the U.S. to escape Hitler’s genocide wanted to move forward in life, and not dwell in a dark place of pain and injustice.

“There were people in the family who didn’t want to move forward and they really suffered,” Prunier said. “It was a choice people made, whether to move forward or not.”