Dr. Judy Gondos Jacobs, a survivor of the Holocaust, visited Barstow on Tuesday, March 28, to talk to upper school students.The freshmen recently read Elie Wiesel’s poignant Holocaust memoir, Night.
Dr. Jacobs, born Judit Gondos in Budapest, Hungary in 1937, was the only child of Béla and Anna Ilona Gondos and was “spoiled rotten” by doting family members. Just one year after her birth, however, Hungary passed their first Anti-Jewish laws.
“As a little child I didn’t know. Somehow, I was not exposed to Anti-Semitism. I think we lived very separately. We just didn’t mix with the non-Jews,” said Dr. Jacobs. “I became aware of it in Békés [a town where her grandparents lived]. In Békés they just had a few hundred Jews, so you had no choice [to mix with non-Jews or not]. And so, to be called a dirty Jew was just a matter of course.”
The Nazis officially occupied Hungary in March of 1944. A few months later, Dr. Jacobs began first-grade at a Jewish Day School. The school shut down after winter break though because of air raids. Every night, Dr. Jacobs and her parents would go to sleep fully-clothed with a packed bag beside them. The Nazis instituted many restrictions, including the time that they were allowed outside and the places the Jews could be. Dr. Jacobs, at the time, had a beautiful blue coat, which she thought looked wonderful with the yellow stars the Nazis forced them to wear.
Around this time, the Nazis were losing the war and were largely in debt; they approached an influential Jewish communal leader named Rezső Kasztner and offered him a deal. The deal stated that, in exchange for a large amount of money and ten thousand trucks, the Nazis would allow one thousand Jews to go to Palestine. The Gondos family were among the chosen Jews, and so they arrived at the railway station, Dr. Jacobs with a suitcase and her favorite doll in the crook of her arm. The plan, indeed, was to stop in Spain or Portugal (both neutral countries in the war) en route to Palestine.
The Gondos family, along with a number of other Hungarian Jews, were herded into a closed cattle car like animals, the Nazis spitting insults at them. At the time, the Jews still believed they would be going to Spain or Portugal. Eventually, they stopped in a beautifully forested area, known as the Bergen-Belson concentration camp.
They were greeted by Nazis with machine guns and snarling dogs. Dr. Jacobs and her parents lived in Bergen-Belson for around five and a half months. Dr. Jacobs said, “I think hell would be a welcome change from Bergen-Belson.” The barracks were crammed with more than a hundred people, and the bunks comprised filthy bits of straw infested with vermin and rats and cockroaches. As a competition, the young children, including Dr. Jacobs would compare the bites on their body in the morning and attempt to identify them.
There were no activities during the day, nor forced labor, just a roll call in which they would stand in the biting cold until the Nazi in charge (usually a fellow with a long scar across his cheek), made his appearance, which happened whenever he felt like it. Dr. Jacobs’ parents traded some of their food rations for a blanket that they safety-pinned around her and a pair of high-heeled sandals that were at least three times her size, which her parents would secure to her feet by wrapping them with twine. Béla Gondos later calculated that their daily intake was around 350 calories a day.
During the day, the Jews attempted to keep themselves busy. Ilona, Dr. Jacobs’ mother, was an artist by profession, and was, at one particular time, empty of all hope and feeling. She decided to teach art classes to the children, and spread the word throughout the camp. With sticks in the dirt, she taught them how to draw flowers and butterflies and other happy things.
Everybody was getting sicker and sicker, the weather crueller and crueller, and the food scarcer and scarcer when there was an announcement, in Mid- December 1944, that all of the camp should ready themselves to vacate the camp. Eventually, the three Gondoses boarded a heated train (known as the Kastner train), were given sardines and chocolate, and rode to the border of Switzerland. There, a man in Nazi clothing called Kurt Becker (who carried an empty suitcase), and a man in civilian clothing called Sali Meyer (who carried a full suitcase) met briefly, swapped suitcases, and the train rode into Switzerland.
After they were settled, Dr. Jacobs’ parents had just enough food and money for two people, and so they sent her to a Swiss boarding school in the French part of Switzerland. Dr. Jacobs’ grandparents, cousins, and extended family had all been killed in Auschwitz. The Gondos family decided to move to America, where Béla‘s brother, Zolton, lived with his family. Dr. Jacobs arrived in America at the age of nine.
Their boat arrived in Mississippi. There, the Gondos family went to a small cafe to eat. They asked directions to the bathroom, and saw that there were four of them: one for colored men, one for white men, one for white women, and one for colored women. Ilona Gondos began to cry, and they were so disgusted that they got up and left. They moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and then Maryland, where Béla resumed his radiology practice. Dr. Jacobs graduated from high school and attended the University of Michigan, where she met a man called David Jacobs, whom she married and eventually settled in Kansas City with. There, she earned a graduate degree and PhD from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and had four children. Now, she has eight grandchildren (two of which attend Barstow) and one (almost three) great-grandchildren. She is also currently writing a book.
Reflecting, Dr. Jacobs said, “As long as there are people in the world, there’s going to be hate. I don’t think you can do away with it but I do think that what you can do is that you can try and teach the children and hope that they then teach their children.”
