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Sacramento, CA – In the Annual Holocaust Remembrance Ceremony in Sacramento, Assemblymember Chris Holden recognized Holocaust survivor Isabelle Teresa Huber of Claremont on the Assembly Floor. This year marks the 73rd Anniversary of the Holocaust – the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.
“I am honored to share Isabelle Teresa Huber’s incredible story,” said Assemblymember Chris Holden. “As a child of the Holocaust, her story is a reminder of the power of survival in the face of atrocity. We must continue to share her story and those of survivors to remember the past and help prevent future genocides.”
Isabelle Teresa Huber was born on March 19, 1939 in Czortkow, Poland. At the age of three, Huber and her family were taken from their home in Czortkow, Poland and forced into a ghetto. One night, 14-year-old Meva Dobrucki snuck up to the ghetto borders wearing a fake Jewish star and caught Huber as her father slid her down an air chute.
From age 3 to 6, she lived hidden in the Dobrucki family’s attic. It became known that the family was hiding a Jewish child, so they decided Huber would be taken to a convent that kept Jewish children safe. As they began that journey, they were shot at by a sniper and turned back to their house. The next morning they found out the convent was bombed and no one survived.
Huber’s second escape from death came when she was four and half years old. The Nazi Germans announced everyone in the neighborhood had to go to the city square on a specific day, and that anyone found in a house would be shot. On the day, the Dobrucki family had her hide in a day bed, telling her not to move or make a sound. Two soldiers came in, breaking furniture and shaking the bed she was hiding in, but she was never discovered.
Following the war, Huber spent two years in Rome with her mother waiting for a visa, before arriving in the United States in May 1948. Eventually, Huber married her husband who became an orthopedic surgeon and had three children. She and her family ultimately settled in Claremont and now have five granddaughters all of whom live in Southern California.
