Natalie Semmel Photo
Isidor Juda Wednesday with pre-K teacher Kathy Barkin (who arranged the visit) and the fifth-graders.
One train was a stop away from freedom. Another was a stop away from a death camp.
Teenager Isidor “Izzy” Juda needed a miracle to get on the right route.
Juda, who is now 97 years old and lives in New Haven, told the story of how that miracle arrived, and how he survived the Holocaust, during a visit Wednesday to Jody Perilli’s fifth-grade class at John C. Daniels School.
Since December the students have been studying the Holocaust, in which the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews along with Romani, gays and lesbians, leftists, Muslims, and members of other targeted groups. The students have read historical fiction about it like Hanna’s Suitcase. Wednesday’s visit was the first time they had met a Holocaust survivor and heard the story in person.
Juda said he also jumps at the chance to tell his story whenever asked.
“Less and less survivors are alive,” he said. “If we don’t tell the story, it’s going to be forgotten.”
Juda told the story of how he left Vienna, Austria at the age of 16, on his own, without parents or friends.
It was 1938, the year Adolf Hitler had arrived in Austria. Juda’s family and the 175,000 other Jews in Vienna faced exportation to concentration camps and likely death if they didn’t find a way to escape.
Visas to leave the country first came for Juda’s father’s sister and her family. As the Nazis continued to dominate Europe, Juda and his family knew that they too would have to leave Vienna, if they could.
Juda decided to try to escape on his own as his family waited for visas that might not ever arrive.
A small injury — a cut on his hand — allowed Juda to excuse himself from his family home, on the guise of a doctor’s appointment. Once on his own, he took a train to town on the Swiss border; he planned to cross the border on foot.
“Did you regret leaving your parents?” student Ila Conner asked Juda.
“No,” Juda replied. But, he added, “of course you feel horrible.”
Near the border, Juda was stopped when Nazi soldiers spotted him and threatened to shoot. They detained him, and took him back to the train station. They told him that they were sending him to a town further from the border.
They put him on a different train —- not a passenger train, but one filled with Jews being deported to camps.
Juda boarded the train, hoping for a miracle.
The train suddenly slowed down just after leaving the station. He was able to jump off.
Juda.
He recognized his surroundings: a small town where he and his family had previously vacationed. There, a farmer took him in. The next day, he crossed the border on foot.
He spent two years in Switzerland. He left when he received his visa to the United States. On May 13, 1940, Juda arrived in the U.S. using a German passport stamped with a “J.” He had learned that his parents had succeeded in obtaining visas and made it to the U.S. as well, the previous December. He was reunited with them upon his arrival, and they built a new life here. But first he was drafted into the army, and served in the Pacific during the war. He was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, and a presidential citation.
Although he now is eager to share his story, that took a while.“I didn’t talk about it for 45 years,” he said. “I just couldn’t.” His attitude changed when his oldest grandson was in high school and had an assignment about the Holocaust; Juda helped, and the story came out.
A member of a final generation of survivors, Juda said he plans on continuing to share his story, especially with children, because, he said, “the young people are supposed to continue it.”
Natalie Semmel is a junior at New Haven Academy.
God bless Mr. Juda. I wish him a long life to continue to tell his story. He is living history of the most important kind.
My mother started teaching me about the Holocaust at home while I was about 10. For years my parents talked about the war, Churchill, FDR, war heroes and heroines. Later I read book after book about the first half of the 20th century. I still read about the Holocaust and also the Gulag in Russia and African American history.