I was born in Budapest, Hungary, where I lived until the war ended in January 1945. There’d been growing anti-Semitism over the years in Hungary, and we were very restricted – even though I was a child – as to what we could and couldn’t do. I went to school there for eight years. The eighth grade was the most difficult because that was when we started wearing the stars. I managed to get through it because my parents were with me, although my father was mostly being used in forced labor. He came home every now and then, but my mother had to take care of me and my two sisters alone.

Things started getting really bad in about April 1943, when the Nazis took power in Hungary. That’s when Jews were enemy number one. We were persecuted and couldn’t go to school, so after eight years of school I tried to get a job as an apprentice. When the Germans finally occupied Budapest, all hell broke loose.

The Hungarian Nazis were worse than the Germans. We spent the end of 1943 into 1944 mostly in hiding, moving from one building to another to try to save ourselves. Our building had a big yellow star on it, and we weren’t allowed to leave during curfew. But a friend and I decided to go to a Swedish-owned house near the Danube River. Sweden was a neutral country which made this house a safe place to go. When it was still foggy early one morning, we took our stars off and left our apartments to get to that Swedish house. But once we got there they told us to come back with our families, so we returned home to do that.

I wish I’d had my family with me when I’d first gone, because near our building a Nazi SS soldier caught us and asked us to identify ourselves. Naturally we couldn’t, so he examined us. He had his bayonet against my back, but my friend took off running. He ran as fast as he could into our building, while the soldier stayed with me. The soldier yelled that if he didn’t come out they would take everyone in the building away.

He took us to German headquarters, not far from where we lived. An SS guard made us go upstairs, where another German officer lectured us as to what we weren’t allowed to do. He told another guard to take us to the Hungarian Nazi headquarters, known as the “Arrow Cross” in English. My friend was one year older than me and was taken downstairs, where people went and never returned. I was told to go upstairs, to an empty room, where a man came in and beat me severely. My mouth and nose were bleeding and my teeth hurt. I was fifteen years old and crying. He left without saying a word. Then a tall blond man came in who said to me, “Why are you here?” I told him I had broken curfew, and he told me to leave and to tell the people at the gate that it had been a mistake, which I did. Then I ran home.

20 years later I was working in Los Angeles and met a Hungarian Jew who knew that blond man’s name. It turns out he was Jewish and had infiltrated the Nazi operation. Someone must have been watching over me, because I got out of that building. It was a miracle. Once you got caught like that there was no such thing as making it home.

About a week later they took my mother to a concentration camp. They raided our building and said that anyone over 15 had to go. At first it was 25 to 30 people, but every day after they’d take more. Within four or five weeks everybody had to go: men, women, and children. My friend and I went into hiding, and my mother was taken away. My sisters were twelve and eight years old, so at first they didn’t have to go, though later they did. They’d been put into a ghetto in the central part of Budapest, closed off except for one gate and guarded by the Nazis. My sisters stayed with my father’s sister, who was already there. They found a place in a basement, which was also used as a bomb shelter.

While my family was in the ghetto, my friend and I hid in the various bombed out apartment buildings in the city and took food from abandoned apartments. We were smart enough to think no one would search for us. We snuck from building to building at night and took food from pantries, but after about a month we ran out of places to go. I decided to go into the ghetto to be with my family.

People were dead or dying in the streets. I remember there was a pharmacy near us where a pile of dead bodies was stacked up like wood, yellow in color. People started burying their relatives in parks, but the graves were shallow and sometimes you could see a hand sticking out of the ground. That’s what it was like to live in the ghetto: stepping over dead people and not being able to do anything about it.

Starvation and contaminated water plagued the ghetto, and people there died from lack of food or disease. We slept on dirty floors with just a few blankets and occasionally had small amounts of food, like tomato soup and barley. To this day I won’t eat tomato soup. When someone died we’d go through their pockets, searching for food. Sometimes they had sugar cubes or cookies. We’d take whatever they had.

The Russians arrived on January 17, 1945, and broke through a wall in our basement. They entered the basement and went straight up the stairs to fight the Germans. They were actually Ukrainians, and they weren’t very nice to us even though we were wearing stars. They just shoved us aside and kept going. But we were free.

The next day we were in the streets looting, which everyone did. For me, this was the end of the war. Many feared that the Germans would return, and many of the Hungarian army guys suddenly became “nice people.” Some were hung from telephone and light poles, because there were Jews who took revenge. We found a lot of food in one house, so we took it and ate until we were sick.

My father, who’d been taken to a labor camp, had been a Hungarian soldier for years, but when these things started happening they converted him to use as forced labor. Around 1943 they took the uniforms away from the Jewish soldiers, who then had to wear yellow bands and work as laborers. Many of them died, and many were taken to Russia. That’s where my uncle died. My father happened to be a carriage driver as well, so he drove Hungarian soldiers various places. He was aware of where we were and how we were doing, but he could do nothing when my mother was taken away. He tried to find us, but we were in the ghetto and he couldn’t come in or out so we lost touch with him until after the war. My father and his entire labor group were put into a camp.

Both of my parents survived but came home separately. I was liberated in January 1945, but I didn’t see my parents until around the end of May that year. My father came home first, followed shortly after that by my mother. The important thing is that we survived.

My grandparents died in concentration camps. My uncle and cousins from the villages all died in Auschwitz. The laborers were taken to the front lines without adequate clothing, and when winter came they froze to death. That was the story of the Hungarian solders.

We couldn’t all come to America together because the authorities only allowed a certain number of people from each country to enter each year. The Hungarian quota was filled, but my mother was born in an area that had belonged to Slovakia, so we came to America with Czechoslovakian visas. My mother and I finally arrived in September 1947, but my father had to wait until November 1948, since he’d been born in the middle of Hungary. We spent two years prior to that in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany, a camp for refugees. We lived there in a huge stable partitioned off with wax paper for families.

There was no point in staying in Hungary. It was no better than before. Besides, the Russians were there, and they were ruthless. They’d picked up my father many times to go to their labor camps, but he kept escaping. I was picked up several times as well.

In America we lived in poverty in the worst part of downtown New York, but our rent was paid by a Jewish agency. I had some training in making handbags as an apprentice in Hungary, so we made purses to sell. These were hard times, but we made it to America, and though we didn’t prosper over the years, we made it. I served in the intelligence field in the U.S. Army because I spoke several languages. After the Army I started over in California, where my parents came to live with me.