Representative George Hruza Contact information

Dr. George Hruza was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia April 26, 1956. Both his maternal grandparents and four great grandparents were gassed at Auschwitz, and his mother, Judita Ilkovics Hruza, was part of a forced march to a labor camp in Koszeg, a Hungarian town on the Austrian border and ultimately to Mauthausen and Günskirchen concentration camps in Austria. She gives accounts that she witnessed German soldiers massacre the five hundred fellow prisoners with whom she was marching. Judita was one of 200 who survived. Eventually, Judita would reunite with her brother, Denes Ilkovics, and discover that they had lost nine of their beloved family members. When George’s father Zdenek was 17, he joined the underground resistance and fought in the Prague uprising against the Germans in May 1945. After meeting in medical school, Judita and Zdenek married in 1951. While in Prague Judita had two children, George and Eva.

In 1948, the Soviet Union imposed communism in Czechoslovakia and Judita and Zdenek feared for their children and the impact of living under a communist totalitarian dictatorship with government organized terror, fear, indoctrination, discrimination, censorship and privation. Judita and Zdenek were considering defection, but authorities would not issue permits allowing all members of a family to leave together. An opportunity arose when Zdenek received a one-year visiting professorship at New York University School of Medicine. While he was in the United States, they planned an escape for the entire family through coded messages with the codeword “Arapaho” for the planned escape after the Arapaho National Forest in Colorado. Judita took their children on the long journey from Czechoslovakia through Hungary, Yugoslavia, Austria, West Germany, Denmark and, finally, to Sweden. George and the rest of his family arrived in Stockholm on December 31, 1966.

Stockholm was another adjustment for the Hruza family. They learned Swedish and began acclimating to life in Sweden. Judita worked at a pediatric hospital and Eva and George attended school in Stockholm. Meanwhile, George’s father, Zdenek, worked in New York awaiting his family’s immigration to the United States.

The Hruzas were finally reunited in New York City, NY in 1970 when George was 14 years old. Within 6 months of arriving while learning his third language, English, George was accepted into Stuyvesant High School, a highly selective math and science public school in Manhattan.

Subsequently, George and Eva graduated from New York University and pursued careers in medicine. Ultimately, Drs. Judita and Zdenek Hruza settled in St. Louis, MO. Judita spoke throughout the St. Louis area at schools, churches and at the Saint Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum and Learning Center up to one day before succumbing to a stroke.