I was born on April 17, 1918, in Budapest, Hungary. My father was Elgin Rod, a lawyer, and my mother’s name was Gabriella. I was raised by my grandparents, very intelligent people who were doctors. I went to an orthodox school for eight years in Budapest, then to a boarding school in Vienna, Austria. When I was twenty I received my teaching certificate, then taught in a Montessori school for children.

I married on February 1, 1939, and on February 23 the grandmother who raised me from the age of four died. After my husband and I married we lived on his land, 400 hectares that we farmed. We had 16 Lipizzaner horses, one male and 15 female, which we bred. We would sell a horse once it turned four, and my husband taught people how to ride them properly. These horses could lose their self-confidence if someone struck them. We lived on the farm until June 1, 1944, when I had to go into hiding.

Prior to that, when the Jewish rule came out, people who knew me began to walk on the other side of the street so they wouldn’t have to say hello. This was what life became. My grandparents were such good people, and helped everybody, and they couldn’t believe what was happening. My grandfather was an important person, but after Passover that year he was taken away. He arrived at Auschwitz on June 22, 1944, and he left us a letter that said, “I’m going to Germany, where they’re not going to love me or feed me. I will die there.” He was eighty-three years old, and they killed him right away.

My father was very headstrong. When Czechoslovakia took Košice, he  was only 20 miles away, but he refused to speak Slovak. He spoke many languages, and this is why he refused. One November night they took him to Košice and punished him for this reason. There was a Hungarian group of Slovak gangsters, led by Jarosh Andras, who became a minister during the Nazi times. Jarosh Andras gave my father a paper stating that he was a well-respected Jew, not an ordinary Jew (because my father was the secretary of the Hungarian group). I kept the paper with me at all times, because as long as no one took it I’d be alright. My father died anyways.

I went into hiding in 1944. My husband couldn’t hide, because he had to wear the Jewish star. I didn’t have to wear the star because I had that paper from my father. I wanted to go to a town where the people didn’t know me, then go to Budapest where my mother was living with my uncle and other family. When I got on the train, the Hungarian gendarmes were there looking for Jews. The Hungarian gendarmes were horrible people, worse than the police. I was nine months pregnant and turned white with fear because of them. There were also two German SS men on the train, and I spoke perfect German, so I fell down on the bench, on purpose, and the SS men started talking to me. I told them I was expecting a baby and they put their jackets around me, and tried to nurse me. The Hungarian gendarmes gave them the Nazi salute and left.

When we arrived in Budapest there were gendarmes everywhere, but I had these two German Nazis with me, carrying my bag. I looked Jewish, but who would dare ask the SS about it? I said I had to go to the hospital, which they knew. Only Germans could use the taxis so they got one for me. I got in the taxi, but went to see my mother instead.

My mother took me to the university hospital instead of the Jewish hospital. The doctor there was a Nazi, but the doctors swore not to give anyone up as long as they were ill. I had to have a Caesarean section, because the birth went very badly. I was in the hospital for three weeks and was between life and death.

By that time the Jewish star was already on all the houses. The troubles began when I moved to my mother’s house. I asked my governess, a Lutheran, what I should do with my child, and she told me not to worry, that she knew a place where we could stay. She had a guest house, and though they knew I was Jewish they hid me there. Someone was living in the room next to mine, Mr. Rózsavölgy, who had the largest office complex in Budapest. He was living there with his wife and two children. He worked for the Swedish Red Cross and took me to see Wallenberg, who gave me money each week to live on while I hid. After Hungarian President Mikos Horthy stepped down, on October 15, 1944, my father was taken away. Jarosh Andras was now a nobody, and I still had no idea where my husband was, or even if he was alive.

On July 10, 1944, they caught my mother at my aunt’s house, where she was staying. My grandmother was in the ghetto, and they beat her so badly that she told them where her daughter was, so they caught my mother. They took my mother to Auschwitz on August 4, 1944, which was Tisha B’Av. She was forty-eight years old, but her hair was gray so she was killed. Other women that same age – her girlfriend and my school teacher – survived. It was because her hair was gray. They didn’t even put her into a work camp, she was killed right away.

The Swedish Red Cross had given me a place to hide with the nuns. There were another 10 or 12 people with babies hiding there, and maybe 150 babies without parents. They told me they’d keep me safe and let me live in the house that they lived in. I didn’t have any winter clothing, and had to put newspaper pages on the bottoms of my shoes because the soles were gone.

On November 27, 1944, they caught me. They took the paper that my father had given me, along with everything I had, and prepared to take me to G-d knows where. An elderly woman in the group I was in fell down, and the Nazis began to beat her. When I saw this I thought, “I don’t care, I’m not dying. I will survive Hitler.” I was twenty-six years old with a six-month-old baby. There was a Hungarian policeman there, so I stood next to him. I put down baby food that I’d gotten, then slowly and calmly walked away. I had no money, but I had a daily use transportation card that I used to get the baby food. I got to the subway station and left.

When I got home the nuns told me I could no longer stay with them. The Germans, they said, were coming for everyone. So I hid on the roof, where it was windy and snowy, and where the rain came down. I didn’t even have a coat. I hid there until February 3, 1945.

Each day I had to go for two pails of water, and I did this with a girlfriend who had an eight-year-old boy and a ten-year-old girl. My girlfriend’s name was Agnes. On January 13, we went to the Danube River for water, where Agnes said she’d step down to the river and hand the pails of water up to me. We had on white sheets to hide, because there was snow, but we saw some kind of movement in the area, which turned out to be a soldier. He didn’t know who we were, and he shot at us. Agnes was killed with a bullet.

I wasn’t always afraid of going out. I had another friend there, a woman with two little girls whose father was a Nazi SS soldier. Every night I had to go to him to get food for his children, and he would give me extra food for my daughter. I was never frightened; if you became frightened you could get killed. When something started going wrong I’d stop and go back. I’m a fatalist.

The convent was falling to pieces, its windows and doors gone. They freed the people from the ghetto on January 18, 1945, and on February 12 the Russians took Budapest. That first night, three young Russians came in, tossed my baby to the side, and all three of them raped me. I thought I might not live another day after that, I was just crazy. I couldn’t live in the convent another day, so I went to my uncle and his Christian wife, but they told me I couldn’t stay with them.

I had very little food, and what food I could get I gave to my baby. I would toast bits of food and put it in a handkerchief, then give it to my baby, who would suck on the handkerchief. So I was very hungry. I went to stores looking for food, and even stole a jar of mustard just so I could lick it when I was hungry. That February I went to a home in Budapest and told them I was Jewish and in hiding. I said I needed a home for my child. They found space for me.

My husband returned to our home and sent someone to Budapest to look for me. A friend of my sister-in-law’s was in that home with me, and they found us there. The first day the bridge was available was March 24, 1945, and I crossed it that day. I went to Chepel, a twenty-two-kilometer trip, with a baby around my neck and no food.[6] My baby is 65-years old now. She was born June 24, 1944. It took three days to get home, because the train was an old-fashioned locomotive, and when it traveled uphill everyone had to get out and push.

My husband cried and people ran up to us when we arrived home. It was the first time he’d seen his child, who was by then eight months old. I didn’t have shoes or clothes, and the baby only had two diapers. I waited a whole year for my mother to come home, because I thought she was young enough to survive. I sat Shiva for the whole family after that.

The people in our town were very friendly, they loved my husband. We had always lived there. The intelligent people were the ones who didn’t like us, because they’d been Nazis. The peasants were never Nazis. My husband kept bees, so we had honey. We had no sugar or salt, but we did have potatoes and corn. So we did have some food. My second daughter was born in 1946.

The Russians eventually put my husband in jail because he owned land, calling him a “stinking Jewish kulak.” He was released in the 1950s, but he’d been given injections in prison. He was poisoned there. He died in a Hungarian hospital in 1956, where he spent 11 months.

On December 8, 1956, I left Budapest with my daughters, a nine-year old and an eleven-year old, for Győr, Hungary. We walked to Austria from there along with hundreds of other refugees, and though the Russians caught people in front of us and behind us, they never caught us. After a month in Eisenstadt, Austria, we found out we were too late to go to America, but heard that the Portuguese might be able to help, so we went to Portugal. We were there nine months before we returned to Austria.

In December 1958, we finally came to America. I had relatives here who rented an apartment for us in Grand Concourse, in the Bronx. My daughters went to school in America even though they didn’t know English yet, and I got a job as a nurse’s aide in New York. I remarried in 1964, and we lived in Yorktown Heights, New York.

I thought I was not a lucky person, but I am lucky to have had my grandparents, two great people. My oldest daughter has two masters’ degrees and is a Special Education teacher in Tucson. She came to Arizona with her husband, who was in the military and stationed at Fort Huachuca. They moved to Tucson after that. I came to Tucson in 2005. My second daughter is an office manager in New York. My grandson is a teacher with two masters degrees, and my other grandson works for the Lockheed Martin Corporation. A few years ago he put something into orbit. He graduated from Stanford.