Hermann Juras

Hermann Judas was born in 1885 in Vandsburg, near Posen in what was then East Prussia. Selma, his wife, née Joseph, was born in 1888 in Labishin, also near Posen.
The Judas and Joseph families, like many at that time, were drawn to Berlin. The move of Jews and non-Jews to Berlin, about 150 miles away, was typical at that time. Berlin was the Prussian hub of a great in-migration as industry, business and commerce expanded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Just before the turn of the 20th century, the population of Berlin was almost 1.9 million, of whom about 92,000 were Jews, making up almost five percent of the total population. The Judas and Joseph families, while still living in Posen, belonged to the German-speaking population of the province, living with ethnic Poles who retained the Polish language and culture. During this period, many of Berlin's Jews came from the province of Posen, looking not only for better economic opportunities but also for personal freedom (both religious and cultural), greater social acceptance, and better opportunities for advancement for themselves and their descendants. While the Jewish population of Posen was 62,000 in 1871, by 1905 it had dropped to 30,000.

Hermann and Selma met in Berlin and married in 1914. Their first child, Edith, was born in 1915. However, she perished in the influenza epidemic of 1918. With Ruth's birth on December 4, 1920, a period of happiness and modest prosperity began for the family, despite the critical economic situation of the post-war period in the Weimar Republic. Ruth's maternal grandparents were relatively prosperous. They ran a successful dry goods manufacturing and distribution business, supplying men's and boys' clothing and having it cut in their large Berlin apartment and sending the garments to the sewing shop for finishing and shipping. The company's sales activities were also carried out in the apartment. The venture was so successful that the Joseph family saw fit to involve their son-in-law Hermann (Ruth's father) in a similar venture.

The period after World War I was marked by violent political turmoil, which included numerous anti-Semitic incidents. In 1922, the prominent Jewish industrialist Walter Rathenau was assassinated while he was the Foreign Minister in the Weimar Cabinet. As a result, in 1923, Hermann legally changed the family's surname from Judas to Juras. (His brothers did the same.) This decision arose from a desire to avoid any anti-Semitism that might be directed against the overtly Jewish name, Judas.

The Juras family lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in Berlin near Alexanderplatz. They first lived at Wadzeckstrasse 9 until 1931 or 1932, after which they moved to a larger apartment at Hirtenstrasse 21.

During the Weimar period, the family managed to maintain a comfortable middle-class status. One indication of this was that they could afford to hire someone to look after Ruth. Elsa Dobrunz, a young non-Jewish woman about 18 years old, was taken into the family’s home to help with household chores and look after Ruth, who was about ten years her junior.
Ruth's mother Selma was a modern woman who had become very active in the family business, so some help with the household and also for supervision of Ruth was needed. Elsa slept in the apartment's study, which was used for cutting fabrics during the day but had a day bed that could be opened at night. Ruth developed a close relationship with Elsa, who was in some ways the surrogate for the older sister Ruth never had. Elsa took her to school and picked her up again, took her to play in Friedrichshain Park and they did other activities together. This emotional bond with Elsa (on the part of the whole family) was also due to the fact that Elsa's sister, Lotte, was hired in a similar way by Ruth's Uncle Benno and Aunt Herta.

After Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, life for Jews in Germany became miserable as anti-Jewish policies and legislation intensified. One of the first acts of the Nazis in 1933 was to promote an economic boycott against Jewish businesses. Although the German population did not initially overwhelmingly agree, the repeated propaganda and social pressures soon took their toll, with even Germans without much sympathy for Nazism coming under intense pressure to avoid Jewish businesses. This policy had a disastrous effect on the family's clothing business, forcing Hermann to give it up by 1935. The loss of income and the complete loss of livelihood was a severe blow to the family, whose material well-being continued to decline in the years that followed. After Ruth's father Hermann closed the shop, he later worked in a local Jewish hospital at Iranische Strasse 1 (today Heinz-Galinski-Strasse 1). Although the work didn't pay very well, Hermann was able to take home groceries from the commissariat, which helped the family.

The economic boycott was not the only discriminatory and punitive measure taken by the Nazis. In total, the 1933-1945 regime enacted over 400. Their aim and effect was to eliminate the civil rights of Jews (their citizenship was de facto stripped), preventing them from participating in German society, to exclude them from the economy and from social life, to humiliate them and make them objects of ridicule for the German population, and, ultimately, to destroy them completely.

However, Hermann believed that his status as a World War I German Army veteran would protect him and his family from the regime's worst excesses. Emigrating at their ages (Hermann and Selma were 51 and 48 in 1936) was unimaginable to them given their economic situation and their inability to speak any language other than German.

During the summer of 1938, however, as the international and domestic political situation continued to deteriorate, Hermann and Selma realized that they should prepare for possible emigration. They commissioned a distant relative in Indianapolis, Indiana to provide the necessary papers for emigrating to the USA. However, after Selma and Hermann received the affidavits, they set the paperwork aside for possible later use and did not immediately apply for a visa from the US government.

After the terrible events of Kristallnacht in November, 1938, Hermann and Selma finally decided to apply for a visa to the USA. By this time, however, the US Consular offices were being inundated with such requests, so threatening had the situation suddenly become. Although they had suitable affidavits, they had to compete for available places based on the restrictive US immigration quotas in force at the time. These quotas were based on the applicants' country of origin, where the country of origin was defined by the place of birth and the current national affiliation of that place. Hermann and Selma, who were born near Poznań (which was part of Poland in 1938), were given a place on the waiting list based on the Polish quota, which at the time featured a hopelessly long waiting period, much longer than what would apply if they would have been assigned under the German quota. When the war began in September, 1939, the Juras’ were still in Berlin without departure visas and were thereafter unable to leave.

After the end of the war, those who, like Ruth, had managed to escape, hopefully tried to find their relatives. Each of Ruth's inquiries received no positive response until she finally learned through the Red Cross that they had perished. Not having the heart to investigate further, she let the matter rest. Decades later, the Memorial Book showed that Selma and Hermann were deported to Theresienstadt in October 1942, only to be deported to Auschwitz three months later in January 1943 where they were murdered.