As a young girl attending school in Budapest, Judita Hruza found her post-education options limited. The political climate in Eastern Europe was heavily influenced by Nazi Germany. Discrimination against Jews like herself meant higher education held slim possibilities.
Then, a new alliance between Hungary and Germany in 1942 prompted a mass purge of the Jewish population in her homeland. In that time Hruza says, she made a major career decision — she decided to live.
This spring, at her seasonal home on the shores of Coral Bay, Dr. Hruza put to writing her memories of the horrific experiences she endured between October 1944 and May 1945. Those reminiscence will be included in a forthcoming book titled "Doctors In Peril," a compilation of 13 true-life stories of physicians around the world.
Hruza says she was approached by the book editor, Dr. George Micklin, after her happened across a paper on culture shock that she had written during her psychiatric training. "He wanted me to write my experience in the Holocaust — how I survived and how it went," she says.
In 34 pages, the pediatrician-turned-psychiatrist details her instinct for survival and her descent from the child of a "decent, loving, cultured family" into a raggedy figure marching on frostbitten feet, eating grass and fending off the cold with blankets taken from the dead.
When she returned home after the Allies liberated Hungary's forced labor camps, Hruza recalls, classmates told her they had thought she would be the first to succumb to the hardship.Yet the story she recounts for "Doctors in Peril" contains memories of gratitude, determination and even admiration. It was her admiration of a courageous doctor, a fellow prisoner who was shot for treating a patient instead of making the daily roll call, that led her into the medical profession, she notes.
At one of her most desperate moments, she still remembers vividly, she experienced a hallucination. The voice of her mother, whom she describes as a woman gifted at finding a bright spot in the darkest situation, came and said, "My poor little heart, don't give up. You'll survive. And when you will be talking about it to your children and friends, this horrible ordeal will be just an episode in your life when you were 20."
She found out later that her mother had been dead for six months at the time she had her hallucination. But Hruza clung to the message and used it to lift her spirits at times when it seemed all hope had run out.
Now, in fulfillment of those words, the Coral Bay snowbird shares her survival experience each year with students at the Julius Sprauve School.
"You have to set up a spot where it is quiet enough for her to be heard," says eighth-grade teacher Nancy Elmquist, who has heard Hruza's story of survival. "She has fascinating tales. She's great with kids and she loves life."
Hruza says her young listeners have endless questions for her every time she comes to speak. "I get a fantastic response," she says. "I usually don't have time to respond to all the questions."
This year, Elmquist says, in recognition of the doctor's advancing years and the chance that those visits may soon come to an end, the class tried to videotape Hruza's Holocaust presentation. But they ran into problems with a faulty recorder.
Elmquist says one anecdote from Hruza's survival stories always has special meaning for her St. John audiences. As the young woman and hundreds of other prisoners marched for 12 days at gunpoint through cold driving rain to dig anti-tank trenches against the Russian army, she kept in her mind an image of living in a warm place by the blue sea.
