My father was a physician in the military. He was also a doctor for the Czechoslovakian government; he cared government officials, like the Secretary of Foreign affairs. He was from a small place in the eastern part of Slovakia near Jasina.
My father was from a religious family with seven children; his mother decided that only two of the seven would be able to go school. My father was lucky. One brother, Lajos, became a pharmacist; one brother, Tibor, became a doctor, my father. The five others stayed at home and worked.
My father finished studying in Prague and in 1934, he married a wealthy woman. They stayed in Bratislava where they had two children, me and my sister Anita. He ended up in Germany after the war and stayed there until he died in 1975.
There were two reasons for my father to leave Czechoslovakia, because he was Jewish and because he was in the military. In 1940, he packed us up and we went to Budapest, Hungary where we stayed until the end of the war.
It was a different childhood. My father thought that it would was safer for us in Jasina. We went to catch the last train for Jasina but we missed it by half an hour. But it turned out that everyone that was on the train ended up in Auschwitz.
We were living in Budapest and were later taken to the Budapest ghetto; my grandmother, my mother, father, sister, and I were all there together.
I had to wear a yellow Star of David. The first three years weren’t too bad, but after that I was hungry. I was only 8 or 9, so it didn’t always bother me that I was persecuted. I saw a lot of people shot and killed in the streets. Many women were shot and left to freeze on the streets from 1943 or 44 to 1945.
In 1945, we were hiding in the ghetto in a furnace, which was the size of a room, obviously it was not used, and there were benches there. I was told that I didn’t look Jewish, so they sent me out to find some food. I was the youngest out of twenty kids there.
In 1945, the Russians entered the city. They gave us guns, but I couldn’t hold the gun because I was only nine. I shot into the air, it was fun.
We killed a horse, but we didn’t know it was a long way between killing a horse and getting meat. We found a butcher who took half of the horse in exchange for cleaning it.
I saw Germans hanging from street lamps. After the Russian soldiers left, people came and beat the bodies; they still bled as it was only ten minutes since they had been killed. I couldn’t forget seeing them hanging from the lampposts.
I remember wearing a Yellow Star, I remember there was no food, and I remember the dead bodies on the sides of the street. We were lucky that our immediate family survived.
To learn more about this survivor, please visit the Holocaust Memorial Center Oral History Collection.