Tuesday, February 28, 2023
3:30 – 4:45pm (MT)
via Zoom – Register here.

Born into a Hungarian-Jewish family in 1935, Judith Winkel (né Judith Ratkai) spent her early childhood in Debrecen, Hungary. After the start of the large-scale deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944, she, along with other family members, was forced on a cattle car from her hometown to Vienna. In 1945, Allied bombing attacks prevented her deportation to Auschwitz and Nazi authorities coerced her, her mother and elderly grandfather, a well-known opera singer, on a death march to Mauthausen. Winkel kept her grandfather going, while many prisoners on the march who broke down were immediately shot by the guards. At Mauthausen, they survived unspeakable conditions in an overcrowded make-shift tent camp behind the main camp. They were liberated by the US Army’s 11th Armored Division in May 1945. Emaciated and sick, her grandfather died shortly after liberation. Judith Winkel and her mother survived. After the war, she managed to immigrate to the U.S.

Co-organized by CU Boulder’s Program in Jewish Studies and the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History, the program is co-sponsored by CU Boulder’s History Department. For more information, please contact Prof. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History, at thomas.pegelow-kaplan@colorado.edu