Lisa Reisman file photo
Isidore "Izzy" Juda with 1938 passport issued after escaping to Switzerland.
Midway through a discussion at Congress Avenue’s John C. Daniels School, fifth-grader Lucas Rivera posed a question to Holocaust survivor Isidor “Izzy” Juda that caused Rivera’s roughly 50 classmates to inch even further forward in their seats.
Lucas Rivera.
“What do you think would have happened if you didn’t get off the train that day?” he asked.
Fifth graders at Daniels School.
The visit by Juda, who is 101 years old, was the culmination of a month-long study on the Holocaust by Jodi Perrilli’s fifth-grade class that included “Hana’s Suitcase,” which retells the true story of a 13-year-old Czech girl who was killed in the Holocaust.
“This is the first time any of these students has met a Holocaust survivor,” said pre‑K teacher Kathy Barkin, who arranged the visit. “They’re hearing a story first-hand of the history they read about. They’re hearing what it took to survive.”
Juda was on that train because he had left his family in Vienna to escape the tightening restrictions on Jews and, increasingly, the deportation to concentration camps and likely death by the Nazis. It was August 1938. He was 16 years old.
“My family was applying for visas to come to the U.S. but I didn’t want to wait for visas that might never arrive,” he told the fifth-grade students.
Student asking question.
Asked about his feelings on Adolf Hitler, his answer was plain.
“In order for a dictator to be successful, he has to have a scapegoat,” said Juda, who now lives in The Towers apartment complex in the Hill. “Hitler used the Jews as scapegoats to make him powerful.”
At the train station, with “only the clothes on my back … I bought a ticket to Salzburg,” he said. “As I was about to board the train, two SS officers asked me where I was going. I told them I was going to visit my grandmother in Salzburg. I never had a grandmother in Salzburg.”
He got off the train at a town on the Swiss border and made his way toward it when he heard a shout. “I heard the word ‘halt,’ which means stop,” he told the rapt audience. “I did not stop. I continued to walk. And now I heard ‘halt’ again, and this time I stopped, and two SS officers came up to me holding guns.”
After spending a night in jail, they walked him to the train station. “When I got on, I looked at the other passengers, and I realized they were all Jews being deported to a camp,” he said.
Izzy recounting a fateful moment in his journey to freedom.
The train pulled out of the station. And then, “for some reason, it suddenly slowed down,” Juda said. “To this day I don’t know why.” He looked for the SS men. They were gone. He got out and lay on the ground until the train chugged away, then stood up and looked around.
“From there, I knew I had to get over the mountain, and as I was walking up the mountain, I came upon a farmer who was herding cows,” he said.
Asked about his fortuitous meeting with that farmer who took him in and helped him find a safe place to cross into Switzerland, he shrugged.
“First of all you try to stay alive,” he said. “I had to find a way to stay alive, and when you’re young like you guys are, anything goes, but you also need a little pluck and a little luck.”
Passport issued to Juda in Switzerland in late 1938.
At the border, he encountered a Swiss gendarme. “He asked me what I was doing,” he said. “I told him I wanted to stay in Switzerland, so he took me to the station and told me that I was now a political immigrant. I looked at him and said ‘I don’t know anything about politics, I’m just trying to stay alive.’”
He spent two years at an immigration camp in Switzerland before getting a U.S. Visa. “I went to Genoa, Italy, and boarded the USS Manhattan,” he said.
German passport issued to Juda in 1940 red-stamped with letter "J."
On May 13, 1940, he arrived in the United States, using a German passport from a German consulate red-stamped with the letter “J.”
“They made sure everybody knew you were Jews, you can see that,” he said, as Barkin shared the passport with the students.
In Manhattan, he was greeted by his parents, who had arrived six months earlier, with a job at a grocery store waiting for him in Vineland, New Jersey.
“I had to learn English because I only knew three words, yes, no, and thank you,” he said. “I started reading the newspaper and going to night school.”
Juda showing where he was shelled in the leg.
Two years later, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, seeing combat in the Pacific theater. In the Philippines, he was shot in the right leg.
“The Japanese were using anti-personnel shells [which are designed to fragment into many pieces] when we were taking Clark Field to control the whole Solomon Islands,” he said.
Juda went on to have four separate surgeries before being discharged in November 1945, earning the Bronze Star and Purple Heart for his service.
Fifth grader posing question.
Asked how he felt when the Holocaust was ending, in 1945, he shrugged again.
“Well, we were glad it finished,” he said. “Unfortunately, we lost six million people of which one million were children, and also many of my aunts, uncles, and cousins.”
He then returned to Rivera’s question.
“If I hadn’t gotten off the train, I wouldn’t be here today,” he said. “That’s it.”
Izzy sharing his story.
That’s why he’ll keep sharing his story.
“Never let anyone tell you it didn’t happen,” said Juda, who went on to marry, have two children, one of whom is 75, and three grandchildren. “And never ever lose hope.”