Former dean writes book of her Holocaust survival > Scholar comes to terms with her tragic past through writing

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For many years, Judith Magyar Isaacson had been a wife, a mother, a mathematician, a grandmother and a college official, but one night in 1976 brought back another role for the Auburn woman: Holocaust survivor.

Isaacson, then the dean of students at Bates College, had been invited to speak at Bowdoin College following the French Holocaust documentary, “Night and Fog.”

That film, and the questions from the audience, brought back memories Isaacson had repressed for 30 years, as she told them about her experiences at the Auchwitz, Lichtenau and Leipzig concentration camps.

At the door, a young man stopped Isaacson and asked, “After all you’ve been through, how can you smile? So freely? So often?”

“Sorry, I don’t know why … I don’t know how … I must think about it,” Isaacson replied.

That night, she dreamed of Lichtenau, woke at 5 a.m., walked to the typewriter and began to write.

The result of that catalytic experience is her book, “The Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor,” now in its third printing from the University of Illinois Press. A German-language edition will be published in Germany this winter, and publishers in other mid-European countries and Japan are interested as well.

The book tells the tale of how a fanciful, intellectual schoolgirl was forged into a strong, resilient woman in the crucible that was the Nazi concentration camps.

Isaacson grew up the only child in a close-knit Jewish family, surrounded by doting uncles, aunts and grandparents. She also had a wide circle of friends at the girls’ Gimnazium. She lived in the small southwest Hungarian village of Kaposvar, which she described as “a speck on some maps, a void on most.”

After World War I, her father, Jani, had changed the family surname from Klein to Magyar, which means Hungarian. Although she never asked him why, Isaacson speculated that her father did this out of a sense of patriotism, rather than in an effort to assimilate into the Christian society.

The young Judka Magyar was attractive, energetic, intelligent and devoted to great Hungarian poets such as Endre Ady, whose line “All who live, rejoice, rejoice” would help to sustain her through the dark days ahead. She also would live by Socrates’ “It is better to suffer an injustice than to commit one.”

Hitler’s doctrine of hatred, then spreading throughout Europe, reached Kaposvar by 1938. While the 13-year-old Magyar was reciting a poem at a holiday festival, voices in the audience shouted out, “Dirty Jew!” and “Away with the Kike!”

“There was bigotry in a minority of Hungarians,” Isaacson said. “Most Christians were accepting of Jews, in my part of Hungary anyway.”

Hungarian leaders tried to appease Hitler with a series of repressive laws, which caused economic hardships for Jews. Textbooks changed overnight, making Jews the villians throughout history.

Isaacson’s father wasn’t as naive as some in Hungary, and tried to make plans to immigrate to the United States through his brother, Feri, a college professor in Wisconsin. But he was inducted back into the army before they could leave.

“It wasn’t that clear to us what was happening elsewhere,” said Isaacson. “We thought there was only one concentration camp. By the time we realized the danger, it was too late to escape.”

Hitler invaded Hungary in 1944.

“Early on that fateful morning of March 19, 1944, I woke to thunder crashing over our roof,” wrote Isaacson. “Thunder in spring? Impossible! Hands over my ears, I leaped to the window. The sky over Kapsovar was armored in steel. `The Americans!’ I rejoiced, running to my parents’ room. `They’ve come!’ ”

Her mother then pointed to the swastikas on the planes.

From there, things went continually downhill for Hungarian Jews. They were forced to wear a yellow Star of David. They lost their property and often their homes. Barbed wire fences turned one part of town into the Jewish ghetto.

One day in July, 1944, following her maternal grandfather’s death, 18-year-old Jutka Magyar sat under his apricot tree.

“A luminous sky lent its glow to the courtyard,” she wrote. “As the last rays of the sun flooded the apricot tree, my eyes leapt to a golden apricot over my shoulder, and back to my shoulder, curving under the apricot. The same rounded design. The same golden fuzz. We were the same stuff, humans and apricots.

“The sun slipped away. The curtain was down. My foot nudged a fallen fruit, lying in the grass. It oozed apart. In the dim light I lifted my cotton skirt. My eyes skipped from thighs to fruit, from fruit to thighs. `We’ll rot and die,’ I murmured.

“The next morning we got our orders for deportation.”

She spent her 19th birthday in the municipal stables, waiting for the cattle car to Auchwitz. The car soon was crammed with 75 people. Two tin pails stood in the middle of the wagon; one for water and one for a toilet.

“When we were first ordered to wear the yellow star, our normal life ended,” said Isaacson. “Being taken to the cattle car, arriving at Auchwitz, it just got worse and worse.”

Isaacson, her mother, Rose, and her young aunt, Magda, fought to stay together throughout the next year. During the culling process at Auchwitz, when those under 16 and over 40 were sent to the gas chambers, Rose, then 43, lied about her age to stay with the other two as slave laborers. The trio went everywhere together, holding hands.

Later, Isaacson defied Dr. Joseph Mengele to stay with her mother and aunt. Mengele was sorting through a line of thousands of naked women, sending some left to their deaths, some right to a girls’ transport to service German soldiers at the Russian front. Most were sent straight to a freight train for slave labor.

“Mengele swung his staff, randomly but rhythmically, as he let the majority of the mob stream ahead, toward the freight train,” she wrote. “But he shoved every fourth of fifth woman left or right … Mengele’s gaze fell on my nude torso, while his cane whisked mother routinely ahead. I did not have a moment to rejoice. `Rechts!’ snapped Mengele, his cane at my breasts. `Rechts!’

“Was it the terror of rape that emboldened me, or was it the hope of staying with my mother? Perhaps it was only a surge of adrenalin. I forgot I was naked. I forgot Mengele’s gun. Ignoring his command, I started after mother.”

Yet, that was not the moment when Isaacson felt closest to death. That came later, in Leipzig, her final stop before liberation. American planes were demolishing the area with bombs.

“The bombers kept getting closer and closer,” Isaacson recalled. “We saw the bombs fall, and the fires getting closer.”

The prisoners flattened themselves on the grounds. But the American pilots passed overhead without dropping any bombs.

Isaacson said the small victories in the camps helped keep her sane. These included such things as finding a rotten potato in the garbage, creating a kerchief (which she still has) out of an old wiping rag to cover her shorn hair and celebrating the New Year in her barracks with songs and a meal of hoarded bread.

It was only after liberation that Isaacson discovered what had happened.

“We had no newspapers, no radios,” she said. “It was all word of mouth. We were sure the old people and children had perished. But only later did I find out the enormity of the destruction.”

It was after liberation, in Leipzig, that she met her future husband. Irving Isaacson of Lewiston had just gotten out of law school, and had been assigned to army intelligence. The pair were engaged to be married less than two months after they had met.

Isaacson’s experiences had dimmed her love of poetry.

“I noticed I no longer thought much about poetry,” she said. “I seemed to repress all that, with its connection to the tragic experiences.”

She started Bates College at age 35, and became a mathematician.

“In my first year, I excelled in English much more than math,” she said. “I was put into second-year math, but senior English. I chose math for two reasons. Math allowed me to repress the past. Second, I competed on equal terms with young people.”

A mother of three and grandmother of eight, Isaacson went on to teach math at Lewiston High School and Bates, before becoming dean of women, associate dean and eventually dean of students at the college.

All of that happened before she came to terms with her tragic past. Through word of mouth, she knows that her two grandmothers and one aunt died in the gas chambers, as did some classmates who came down with scarlet fever. A fellow laborer told her of her father’s death. She never found out what happened to her uncles and many of her classmates. Her mother and aunt, however, did survive and now live in Florida.

Millions of Jews died during World War II, yet Isaacson, her mother and aunt all managed to survive.

“I’m a mathematician,” she said. “I think it was probability. I happened to fit into the 5 percent. We happened to make the lucky choices.”

“Seed of Sarah: Memoirs of a Survivor,” by Judith Magyar Isaacson, is available by calling 1-800-666-2211 or sending $18.95 to University of Illinois Press, 54 E. Gregory Drive, Champaign, Ill., 61820.