Holocaust Survivor Speaks Out: "Everything Was Taken From Me"

Even well into in her 80s, Lillian Judd can read the faded black numbers tattooed into her left arm: A-10946. That's what soldiers serving under Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany drilled into her at the age of 19, when she was forcibly taken to Auschwitz from her home in what was then known as Czechoslovakia. 

Judd, speaking at Sonoma State University Tuesday night, trembled as she told her story to Myrna Goodman's lecture class on the Holocaust and Genocide. Her petite frame, just a few inches taller than the podium she stood behind, swayed back in forth during her retelling.

"We are being loaded into boxcars, thousands of people around me. Get in — fast, fast — get in!" she says, scanning the audience of about 100, recalling her first memory of being transported by Nazi soldiers to the death camps in Germany. 

On the boxcars, Judd remembers dead calm. Not even the children were crying. No food, no water, no light, no bathrooms, packed in like sardines for four days, she says. 

"We didn't know where we were going or why. They only told us that we were being relocated," she said. "The SS was shouting, calling us all kinds of horrible names."

Judd was transported to Auschwitz in 1944. In total, she spent a year in Hitler's death camps, being freed in 1945 when Word War II ended. She was just a teenager. Her poignant retelling calls attention to the stuff of history books. 

Beatings. Days without food or water. When there was sustenance, it was tasteless hot black liquid and moldy bread. Regularly being forced to do seemingly meaningless work for the Nazis. Family members, killed before her eyes. Sleeping in barracks, 25 people to a bed. Always cold, always hungry. The constant fear of sudden death. Utter depression and sadness. 

But Judd was lucky, she remembers. She had her sister at her side, and her brother was already living in California. He was among the last of the Germans allowed to leave before the Nazis took over. And it was the end of the war. 

Hitler once vowed, if he were to lose the war, to bring Jews down with them in "a world of flames," according to "War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust." And, according to the authors, he kept that promise.

"The last stage of the war in Europe, from 1944 until May 1945, brought German retreat, defeat, collapse — but the Nazi Empire remained bloody and destructive until its very end," they wrote.

Judd escaped. Walking miles in the cold, without stockings or a coat on her "death march," she was told to flee. 

"The war is over," she recalls being told. "You can go home."

Judd emigrated to the United States shortly after her return to Czechoslovakia. It wasn't home anymore. After arriving first in New York and Detroit, she settled and started family in Southern California. Her brother was already living in Los Angeles.

After 30 years in California, Judd found some peace. She began to write her story in the 1980s — and outcame anger, depression, confusion. The product is her newly-released book titled "From Nightmare to Freedom: Surviving the Holocaust."

"I was an adult on the outside, but a child on the inside," she says.

Now in Santa Rosa, Judd tells her story often to area high schools and colleges.

Sonoma County, and in particular Petaluma, became a refuge for Holocaust survivors following World War II, when previously-settled immigrants from Eastern Europe opened their homes to other Jews who needed help. 

The Holocaust and Genocide lecture series at Sonoma State was launched nearly 30 years ago, and is now run by Goodman. The program has gained momentum over the decades, first starting with one class and about one speaker a semester. Now, the program boasts three classes per semester and about a dozen speakers. 

According to program organizers, the idea for establishing the Center for the Study of the Holocaust "was that it would become the vehicle for an ambitious educational program leading to a deeper understanding of citizens’ responsibility in the prevention of genocide."

The plight of Jewish people in the past, and education about the Holocaust, was not reaching enough people, Goodman said.

For more information and to attend a lecture, visit the center online. View excerpts from Judd's talk in the video to the right.

For more excerpts from the hourlong presentation, contact angela.hart@patch.com.