Hubert, Judith

Judith Hubert was born in a small town in the eastern part of Poland.  Her father was an artist and her mother helped to maintain the family store.  As a young girl she lived a charmed life, going to a Hebrew school and learning ballet.  All of that ended abruptly in 1939:  the war started when she was around nine years old.  However, because Judith was young, she wasn’t fully aware of the conflicts going on around her.  Her family did make the difficult decision to leave Poland in this period, as they were in the Soviet zone.  Once in the USSR, they were deported to a labour camp in Siberia, and then on to Uzbekistan.  With the commencement of Operation Barbarossa, Judith’s family, along the many other interned Poles, were offered the chance to be a part of the fight against Germany.  Their unlikely odyssey took them to Tehran, and then to Palestine, where Judith grew up, becoming a teacher in the new state of Israel.  Soon after she married, and she and her new husband Andrew made the decision to emigrate to Canada in the early 1950s, where they reside today.