“We were standing there with our rifles and making sure that the boarding was proceeding in an orderly way. [So you weren’t carrying the cargo yourself?] No, but two weeks before the departure of the Mauretania, I slept in Port Tewfik – I believe that’s the name of the place. There I slept in a tent with some other soldiers. [And what were you supposed to do there?] We were designated as the boarding platoon. I was a soldier and I appreciated very much to have the honor to serve in the army.”
“It was trench warfare. We shelled them permanently with our English heavy artillery. We pounded the Germans constantly, day and night. And during those attacks – both in the first one that I experienced and also in the second one – we had the support of the English Air Force, namely typhoons that bombard their first line, and then there followed combat action. I myself had captured two Germans. Well, they were Austrians in fact. They raised their hands and said: ‘Bitte, Herr Soldat, nicht schießen’.”
„On September the first, they took me to the barracks where I had to put on a Slovak uniform. [Without conscription?] Without conscription – they simply led us away under bayonets. Our weapon was a shovel and a pickaxe. They more or less tormented us as we were crowded into the railway cattle cars and taken to eastern Slovakia in Prešov, from where we then had to walk to the border with Poland in the direction of Sanok.”
“Until that May 9, we served at the front and [then] we learned that the war was over. Of course, it was a great relief for us to find out that the war had ended because the firefights with the Germans were fierce up to the last moments. The Germans fired at us with so-called ‘šifonéry’. When it detonated, it made a terrible loud bang and it was very dangerous to be around the place of the impact. I myself still have a stored shrapnel that hit me at the company headquarters. We had to do our laundry ourselves and as I was doing it in the yard, a splinter came through right between my legs.”
“We came back from the front lines via Belgium, Luxembourg and Western Germany. On the way, I remember how the Germans were postings white flags everywhere and I also remember that one night I slept in Nuremberg under our armored vehicle. Then we went from Nuremberg to the Czechoslovak border and for some time I served near Nepomuk in a village by the name Myslív.”
Juraj Strauss, a retired Major, was born on 18 January, 1917, in Košice, in a Slovak Jewish family. After he had completed primary school and grammar school in Liptovský Mikuláš, he went on to study medicine in Prague. In 1939, the universities were closed and so Juraj Strauss went back to Slovakia. On 1 September, 1939, he was forcibly conscripted into an auxiliary working troop of the Slovak Army that was tasked with repairing bridges and roads for the advancing German army in Poland. After his release from the working troop, he went back to Liptovský Mikuláš and worked as a manual worker. Finally, he found the resolve to travel to Palestine. Through Hungary and Yugoslavia, the so-called “Balkan route”, he got to his new homeland, where he first worked in agriculture and then at the port of Haifa. Juraj Strauss had, however, already completed ten semesters of medicine studies and so he decided to continue in his studies. He enrolled at the University of Jerusalem and was admitted to study in the field of bacteriology and hygiene. After he successfully completed his studies and earned the degree of Master of Science, he signed up for the Czechoslovak military units in the Middle East and on 27 April, 1943, he was accepted into the army. He served in a training troop and in a boarding platoon. In 1943, he went on the ship Mauretania from the Middle East to England. In the years 1944-1945, he served in Dunkirk as a medic in an ambulance. He was also wounded by a shrapnel, but the injury wasn’t severe. After the war, he first worked in the hospital and then went back to Prague and worked in the National Public Health Institute, where he devoted himself to research. In the years 1975-1976, he worked in Kenya, where he treated local children under the auspices of the World Health Organization. He treated them with measles vaccination. In 1983, he received the State Award for the elimination of measles in Czechoslovakia. He is an important scientist in the field of applied bacteriology and virology. Juraj Strauss passed away on March, the 11th, 2017
