I was born Gábor Róbert Weisz (the Weisz surname was changed, i.e., Magyarized or Hungarianized, to Váradi in 1945 and then to Varady, and I later reversed the order of my first and middle names) in Budapest, Hungary, in August 1943, about a year-and-a-half before World War II ended. I survived that phase of the war, which in Hungary was its worst part. Until the late spring of 1944, while Jews certainly suffered, conditions in Hungary were not as dire as in most other countries of Eastern Europe. Since I was only a toddler when Soviet soldiers liberated Hungary, I’m speaking not from memory but from first-hand accounts by my parents, other close relatives, and family friends.

      Fortunately for me, my parents did talk quite a bit about the upheaval to their lives and to conditions in Budapest. My father, László Weisz, the eldest of seven children, was the acknowledged family historian and he and I had long sessions while he was still alive. He knew everyone in his extended family and was willing and in fact eager to talk about what he went through. Between 1977 and 1992 we mapped out the family tree as he recounted colorful anecdotes and spoke emotionally about the lost years of 1938 to 1945. With coaxing, I even managed to get him to write several personal essays. In addition to this invaluable source, I spoke to many uncles, aunts, and others, who added depth and filled some of the lacunae. As a final supplement, in 2014 I interviewed a second cousin, now 91, who was a teenager at the time in Budapest, worked for my parents during the war, and was present when I was born. Needless to say, surviving Survivors are rapidly leaving and taking their memories with them.

      My father grew up in an Orthodox home whose scion – my grandfather, Salomon Weisz – was a struggling Kosher grocer with a small store on Dob utca in the Jewish neighborhood. In Budapest at the time, there were only two kinds of Jewish types: Orthodox, as were most Jews, and so-called Neológ (Reformed). Pre-World War II Hungary was one of the countries where Jews assimilated most easily thanks largely to the relatively liberal – and from an anti-Semitic perspective – benign policies of the last Hapsburg emperor, Franz Jozef.

      My mother, Magda Feldmann, by contrast, came from an assimilated, bourgeois family. Her mother, Vilma Guthard, was born to an unobservant family in Veszprem in western Hungary, while her father, Izidor Feldmann, was from a town called Zimony, at the opposite end of Austro-Hungary, just outside Belgrade on the Hungarian (as opposed to Serbian) side of the Danube. Izidor had served as a Huszar in the Hungarian army prior to WWI and after the war became a film importer, just around the time that cinema was becoming popular in the early 1920s. He became one of Hungary’s leading film importers. By the mid-1920s he was producing his own films (I have newspaper records of at least seven of them, though I’ve been unsuccessful in obtaining actual copies of the reels).

      Both of my parents were born during Franz Jozef’s reign – my father in Bratislava, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and known in Hungarian as Pozsony (and now in Slovakia), in 1908; and my mother in Budapest in 1910. My father’s family moved to Budapest in 1912, before World War I, and my father unlike his five younger brothers completed high school and continued his studies, obtaining a diploma in cost-accounting at a professional school. Through the efforts of a successful (and converted) maternal cousin who had become general manager of the Hungarian branch of the large Central European construction contractor Palatinus, my father obtained a very good position. He eventually rose to become comptroller, and in 1936, at the height of his career, married my mother. It was the second marriage for my mother, Feldmann Magda. Her first marriage was very brief, lasting just a few months. She didn’t talk about it other than to say that it turned out to be a poor match, but she did acknowledge that I knew it and that my father knew it. In the early 1930s, a second marriage – especially a woman’s – was uncommon and certainly frowned upon.

      Through the mid-to-late 1930s, in spite of the anti-Jewish Numerus Clausus laws, my father was permitted to keep his position. But with fascist pressure mounting, on the last day of 1938, he was called into the office of his cousin, who was the last remaining high-ranking executive of Jewish origin. He told my father that he couldn’t keep his job beyond that day. I have the actual poison letter, dated 31 December 1938.

      Coming from meager background, László had become fairly successful. But at age 30, he had to find a new occupation. The natural thing for him was to go to a well-to-do cousin of his father’s, a Weisz who had changed the family name to Csángó (a quirky choice since it’s the name of a pastoral non-Jewish clan living in what is now Romania and Moldavia). The cousin operated a flourishing leather goods manufacturing and retail shop in a fashionable part of Budapest. Under the cousin’s tutelage, my father learned to make handbags, belts, and wallets and within the year, he started his own small leather goods shop. My mother worked in the shop as the supervisor. Most of the business was on consignment to the larger family leather business.

      When the war broke out in September 1939, my parents were running the new shop. But already well before my father had lost his job, he had already sensed that the future looked very foreboding in Hungary. In early 1939 he contacted the most successful of his three brothers, Tibor, who had moved to France a dozen years before and asked him about immigrating to France. Tibor had done what he could – gone through the official network, contacted (bribed?) people he knew, and obtained and submitted a visa application, which was pending. My parents were waiting for the application to be approved, when on September 1, 1939, war broke out in Danzig. That ended any hope of emigrating and my parents were stuck in Budapest through the entire period of the war.

      Although my parents managed to keep the shop functioning through the first year-and-a-half of the war, things got much worse in 1941. My father, along with almost all adult, non-elderly Jewish males, was called up as part of the Hungarian forced labor service, the munkaszolgálat, of which there were two kinds. Depending on your age, you either were assigned to a forced military labor battalion or to a civilian one. By 1941, Lászlo was already 33 and he was detailed to a civilian forced labor brigade. These units, housed in camps in the areas outside Budapest, typically comprised gangs of 20 to 35 people who broke rocks, dug holes and trenches to prevent tanks from coming in, and fixed roads.

      Two of my father’s brothers, Zoltán and György, were placed in military forced labor battalions, and in December 1941 they wound up as cannon fodder for the Hungarian army which accompanied the German Wehrmacht on Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Ukraine. Luckily for my two uncles they were captured. Many people died from the cold or they were shot. My mother’s young brother, József, who was just 24, also was in one of those battalions, and he perished in Ukraine.

      Zoltán and György were taken prisoner – the Soviets did not distinguish between Jewish forced laborers and Hungarian army regulars – and they wound up spending the entire rest of the war as prisoners of war in captivity in Siberia. Their leather-working skills earned them privileges, as they made saddles and other items for the Soviet officers and guards. But those privileges did not hasten their release; they spent nearly six years in desolate POW camps. They were finally released in late fall of 1947, almost three years after the war had ended. Zoltán had already been married, and his son was born six months after his departure; he didn’t meet him until my cousin was five-and-a-half years old.

      While my uncles were languishing in Siberia, my parents ran their little shop as best they could, with my father in and out of labor camps – five such camps. László, being an accountant and a record keeper, actually kept detailed records of his whereabouts and I have a handwritten sheet of paper on which he listed the camps he was in along with the exact dates he was confined in each. Why five, and not one?  Because sensing the intentions of the captors and destiny of the inmates, he determined to escape from each of them. He would be conscripted into one and then – at an opportune moment – disappear, probably using purchased false papers. Soon after, he would be stopped on the street and rounded up again, and then run away once more.

      In early 1941-1942, when his internments began, the situation was not yet dire in Hungary. Hungary, had its own fascist government from 1919. Admiral Miklós Horthy, the longtime head of state, had been Europe’s first fascist. In 1919, just two years after the Soviet revolution, Hungary underwent its own communist coup and a Hungarian Jew, Béla Kun (born Kohn), became leader of the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Like the Bolsheviks, Kun and his fellow revolutionaries were socially liberal and professed equality for all workers. But also like their Soviet counterparts, they were ruthless and willing to kill dissidents. The resulting regime instituted what became known as the “Red Terror,” whose extremity was such that the regime collapsed after just 133 days, overthrown by a countercoup led by Horthy.

      In 1943, with Horthy still in charge – and by then, he was ironically considered less stridently anti-Semitic than the Nazi analogue, nativist Hungarian Nyilas (Arrow Cross) partisans – the forced labor battalions continued to exist, sweeping in more and more of the able-bodied Jewish males. Yet according to my father, there were seams in the system that were exploitable. With well-placed bribes and favors, my father periodically was permitted to go home for days at a time. He was able to get such a leave when I was born that summer.

      But as the tide of war turned against Germany in 1944, the drive to exterminate the Jews intensified. As Horthy calculated that Germany would likely be defeated, he began making secret contacts with allies to see if he could work out an arrangement moving Hungary out of the Axis alignment. Word of this was leaked and in March, Germany invaded and occupied Hungary – a step that had been unnecessary previously since Hungary had been a faithful ally. The Germans pushed Horthy aside – though they allowed him to keep his nominal title – and placed their own people in place. The day of the invasion – March 21 – the German government sent Adolf Eichmann and a large staff to Budapest to execute the Hungarian phase of the Final solution.

      Eichmann began to round up Jews in late March, starting with eastern provinces, which included formerly Hungarian regions of Romania and western Ukraine (lost to Hungary through the Trianon Treaty after World War I) that had been returned to Hungary by Hitler. Those areas – where the most Orthodox Jews were living – were the ones that Eichmann and his minions started sweeping up earliest. By the summer of 1944, as the eastern precincts were emptied of Jews, the wave of deportations was moving further and further west, reaching Budapest by fall.

      At that same time, the Red Army was also moving further west. By the fall of 1944, the Red Army was less than 100 kilometers from Budapest, ready to take it and expel the Germans. But the closer that defeat seemed to be, the more intense became the deportation of the Jews; until it reached Budapest. In October 1944, the government that had been put in place to replace Horthy, was considered too lenient by the Germans. That month, the extremist Nyilas party directly took over the government and the situation became far worse than it had been, even in Budapest, which had been spared the most extreme measures.

      The Nyilas government decreed that by early November all the Jews in Budapest had to move to the ghetto. They had to leave where they were, abandon their possessions, and relocate within the newly-erected walls of the Budapest Ghetto—an already-densely-inhabited six-block by three-block area in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood of Budapest. My parents and I; my father’s parents (who were still alive); and my mother’s mother, her sister, and niece were all living in Budapest. My mother’s father and brother-in-law had been deported to Dachau, where they perished. Along with my aunts and cousins, we were all rounded up and squeezed into the Ghetto. Close to a quarter-million Jews were forced to live within this small confine, under abominable conditions. Winter was approaching, temperatures were getting colder, the area was vermin-infested, and worst of all, there was not nearly enough food. Germans guarded all of the entrances, which were locked, and no one was allowed in or out. The guards shot anyone who tried to leave.

      By December, everyone in the Ghetto was thinking that the Germans and the Nyilas would either let them die in place or take them to Auschwitz or Dachau. But by then, the Russians were less than 50 kilometers away. Every day the residents could hear the gunshots, cannons, and Allied aerial bombs. The Germans were basically completely beaten, but they continued to put people on trains, even as they knew that there was no hope. The Allies were coming from the west (British, French, Americans), and the Russian were coming from the east.

      I was not even eighteen months old so I have no memory of those days, but from tidbits my mother told me, I can only imagine that she had to do unspeakable things to get food for the two of us. At the time my father was not in the Ghetto—and of course, he would not have been permitted to go in and out of it. He was in a forced labor camp. At one point, he and his cohorts were marched westward and my father knew that the Germans’ intention was to put them on trains. He disappeared. It would be his final forced labor experience.

      According to all surviving sources, December was a horrible month in the Ghetto. Conditions were terrible: people were starving and dying of typhus. And they were the fortunate ones who managed to avoid being deported.

      The Russians came in January, and on the 17th Budapest was liberated.

      When my mother and I and our relatives were liberated and rejoined by my father, we tried to go back to our old luxurious apartment on the banks of Danube. But our building and nearly all the ones nearby had been bombed. We found another apartment that spring and lived there until we left for France in October 1947 – new visa applications and new interventions by the brothers in Paris (all three of whom also survived, miraculously) had succeeded.

      Between the end of the war and our move to France, my father and mother both resumed the work they were doing in their little shop. After 1942, when it was no longer possible for Jews to own property, they gave the title of the shop to a non-Jewish employee, a Mr. Marosi (the functional equivalent of a shabbes goy, I suppose). That person dutifully returned the property to my parents after liberation.

      In 1945, right after the war ended, my father went to the local authorities and said we wanted to change our name. This had always been very common among Jews in Hungary, since it was easier to assimilate having a Hungarian name.

      Although mocked by his friends and relatives for wanting to leave Hungary after liberation, with an anti-Nazi socialist government in place, my father determined to emigrate. He told me that he couldn’t bear to stay and look at the faces of people who had been Nyilas and who had suddenly emerged as communists. As he saw it, they had been and remained fiercely anti-Semitic. Accordingly, fresh visa in hand, he left for Paris in July 1947 to scout the situation – that is, to find work and an apartment. My mother and I followed three months later, via a train journey that took us through Yugoslavia, Trieste, Turin, and onto Paris, where we lived until we came to the States in 1952.

      In the spring of 1952, news reached the Hungarian Jewish community in Paris that the United States had changed its immigration policy. Hungarians—losers in World War II – were excluded. But persons born in Czechoslovakia were permitted entry, even when – as in my father’s case – they were born in a part of Hungary that only later was in newly-created Czechoslovakia. For that quirky geographic reason, we were able to immigrate to the United States.

      We came by boat when I was almost nine. We landed in Hoboken, New Jersey, and some old friends of my father’s greeted us. We were also met by the Joint Distribution Committee. Contrary to my parents’ expectations of their anticipated generosity toward Jewish immigrants, they received only one night’s free lodging at a hotel in lower Manhattan.

      After settling in a Bronx apartment, both my father and my mother went back to the handbag trade. My father saw that in New York the trade was dominated by Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews (my father spoke with them in German) and that unlike in Europe, workers specialized (designers, cutters, sewing-machine operators, framers, and so on). Learning that cutters were the highest paid, when the union asked his specialization, he said he was a cutter. And that’s what he did for the next five years. My mother became a sewing-machine operator and worked for high-end handbag manufacturing shops until she retired more than 20 years later.

      Five years after our arrival in Hoboken, we became U.S. citizens. Until that time, my father never had spoken a word English in public. But every day, he read the New York Times with a dictionary. In 1957, confident enough in his fourth language, he got a job as an entry-level accountant, and by the time he retired in 1973, he had become the comptroller of that company.

      I started school that September, at nine years old. I was put into third grade (which I had completed in Paris) because I didn’t speak English. But by December I spoke fluent English and the next fall I was able to skip fourth grade. By fifth grade I considered myself American. In 1954 we moved from the Bronx to Queens, where I lived the rest of my time in New York, until 1972.

      When I turned 12, in spite of my parents’ profound secularity, I requested and was permitted a bar mitzvah – not out of religious motives, but because all my peers were having them. In preparation, I went to a Hebrew school for just one year. When it came time to make arrangements for the big event, the storefront Jewish center asked my father to pay $125. He was outraged. In his Orthodox upbringing, hosting a bar mitzvah had been considered a mitzvah, a good deed. Furious at what he considered crassness, he asked around and found out about an ultra-Orthodox synagogue in the Bronx with caftan-wearing, fur-hatted congregants who didn’t care that I couldn’t read and they didn’t ask us for money.

      After graduating from Van Wyck Junior High School in Queens, I decided to go to a science and math high school called Stuyvesant in lower Manhattan, which I attended for three years. About 90 percent of the students at Stuyvesant were Jewish, mostly second-generation Americans. I did very well and like many of my fellow students, I decided to major in engineering. I went to City College of New York, which was free. When I finished – as a math major – I went to graduate school at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and got a master’s degree in mathematics. Then I worked for five years as an applied mathematician, until my wife Evie and I got married in 1970. Then we took a trip around the world for a year.

      When we returned to New York, I taught math at a Dowling College in Long Island and Evie went back to teaching at a Long Island high school. But our travels convinced us to return to graduate school to get PhDs. We came to Tucson in 1973, to get PhDs. I got mine in 1981, in modern history. I’ve been working at the University of Arizona since 1981, and at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy since 1989, where I conduct research on international water governance and am a research professor and past director.