I was crying, so he pulled me out. The transport continued, probably to Auschwitz.
Download image
Judis Urbanová, née Baerová, was born on 2 October 1940 in Berlin into a Jewish family. Her mother, Mimi Baerová, died less than a week after giving birth. Her father, Alfred Baer, was a journalist who was arrested by the Gestapo shortly after her birth and spent the next few years in prison, where he also died shortly before the end of the war. After her father’s imprisonment, she was taken in by her mother’s sister, Regina Heitmann, who lived in a mixed marriage with an Aryan. She soon took little Judis to a home for the elderly from where she left by transport to Bohušovice nad Ohří near Terezín in early 1943 or perhaps a little earlier. There, she was discovered by František Leiner, who rescued her from the transport, and together with his wife Ely, they took her in. In the autumn of 1944, the Germans deported František Leiner from Terezín to Auschwitz. Ely Leiner soon followed her husband voluntarily. Meanwhile, Judis Urbanová was liberated in Terezín and then taken to one of the orphanages run by the Protestant preacher Přemysl Pitter. After the war, Ely Leiner sought out Judis Urbanová and adopted her as her own. František Leiner did not survive the war. Judis Urbanová went to school in Prague and then worked in a textile shop until her retirement. In 2023, she was living in Prague.
