I was born in Hungary in June 1944, the month after the Germans entered the country to deport the Jews. They’d already taken certain people to work for them – like my father – to use as human shields and slave labor. When the Germans attacked the Soviet Union, the Hungarians went in first and the Germans followed after. Hungarian Jews were the first to be killed when there were skirmishes.

Jews were also used as forced labor by the Germans. They would be taken away for months, return for a few months, then be sent away again. My father was used in this way, along with many other Jews. But the actual camp deportations didn’t begin until sometime around April or May 1944, when the Germans began picking up Jews and taking them away on trains.

My father was a farmer and had quite a bit of land. The Germans would arrive at the farm when he wasn’t at home and destroy various things in the house. Whatever couldn’t be taken was destroyed. They even urinated in my mother’s piano.

My father’s prized possessions were the beautiful white show horses he trained, but when the Germans came they overworked the horses. They would hitch them to carts and ride them hard, which killed the horses. They weren’t bred to do these things.

My mother was very pregnant and decided to go to Budapest, where her mother was. The Germans knew people were moving around and watched the stations carefully. You couldn’t travel by train without someone checking your papers to see if you were Jewish. But as Hungarian guards approached to check her out, my mother pretended to be in labor. German SS officers on the train took care of her, so the Hungarians couldn’t do anything. When the train reached Budapest, the SS officers helped her off and flagged down a taxi for her so she could get to a hospital. As soon as the station was out of sight, my mother went to her sister’s house instead, where my grandmother was. My mother was lucky that day: she boarded a train with sympathetic Germans onboard.

She went into labor and went to a hospital where a friend of hers worked. There was an air raid in the middle of her labor, so they held her back from having me and took her to the hospital’s shelter. She couldn’t continue with the labor, so they performed a C-Section to save me.

My mother’s father was a lawyer who’d apparently done a special thing during World War I that allowed him certain privileges. He didn’t have to wear the yellow star, while my mother did. This was a very rare thing, and the hopes were that these privileges extended to my mother as well. She soon found that they did not; the Germans came after her.

They took my grandmother away a few weeks after I was born. Budapest wasn’t a safe place to be because the Jews had to live in certain areas, in ghettos. My paternal grandmother lived in a ghetto, as did my father’s sister.

My maternal grandmother lived in another ghetto, and my mother begged her one day not to return there. My mother was just twenty-six years old and had a new baby, her first child. But my grandmother said she had to care for her own sister, who was blind. That same night the Germans took her from the ghetto. My mother always had this terrible feeling she didn’t do everything she could for her mother.

After that, my mother had nowhere to go. She couldn’t stay with her parents, and although she knew my father’s parents were in the ghetto, she wasn’t sure where. So she went into hiding.

At one point the Germans actually picked my mother up, but she was able to escape. She and I had been put with a group of Jews and were on our way to a train station when a ruckus of some sort occurred. My mother slipped out of the group with me in her arms and hid beneath a bridge. She stood knee-high in water until they’d taken everyone else away. Again she was so lucky; no one in line said anything, and my mother was able to keep her baby (me) quiet as she hid.

Hours later, very late at night, she came out from under the bridge. It was sometime in September, and she was soaking wet. She went to a place that we’d now call a safe house, where she met with Rauol Wallenberg. He was going to get her papers to keep her safe, though that would take some time to do. In the meantime, she had to find food for her and her baby.

Eventually, she couldn’t return to the safe house any longer, but she knew there was a Catholic convent nearby and went there to ask the nuns for help. They told her that if she promised to have her child baptized and raised as a Catholic, they would let her stay there. My mother agreed. I was baptized, and the nuns allowed us to stay in the convent’s attic, which had a large window. At first this worked out, but in the winter it became a big problem. There was no heat in the attic, and the window was open with snow and the wind coming in.

The nuns were hiding another Jewish woman with two children up there as well. My mother and the woman would walk to the Danube river each day to fetch water for us. One would scoop up the water and hand it up the bank to the other. While they were at the river one day, a soldier shot and killed the other woman while she scooped water. My mother ran back to the convent, where the children were. After that she didn’t like leaving me at the convent when she went for water. She said that if she died, so would I. From then on, when she went for water, she wrapped me in a sheet and hung the sheet around her neck. She never left me alone after that incident.

She soaked beans in water to eat, cooked them, then put the beans in a cloth diaper for me to suck on. She cooked potato peels and put them in the diaper as well. By the time the war was over I’d lost weight and had a huge belly. I was constantly hungry. I have bone issues because of malnutrition and no milk. After the war, my mother would take me from the convent to a nearby Russian camp, where one of the soldiers loved to see me. He would save his lunch for my mother, and told her he’d always have a slice of bread and some soup for the baby. My mother returned to the Russian camp each day. It saved my life.

My father returned from the front after Hungary was under the control of the Russians. They considered my parents to be kulaks, because they still owned half of their land. When my father returned, he tried to get the farm back but was unsuccessful. We lived in town for a short time, then went to stay at my father’s vineyard until it was taken away. My father was taken to jail in 1950 for being a so-called kulak, so my mother decided to go to Budapest, where my paternal grandmother lived, to see if she could make a better life there. It was also closer to the prison where my father was being held. My sister was born in 1946, so my mother had two daughters with her, six and four years old. My father got out of jail at some point that year.

When the Hungarian Revolution took place in 1956, my father was in the hospital with a skin disease. He entered the hospital in February, and died in November that year. I always say is was the Hungarian uprising that killed him.

My mother realized there was nothing left for us in Hungary and decide that we should go to America. We told people we were going to visit the farm, then caught a train going elsewhere after saying goodbye to my grandmother.

The Russians stopped all trains to check papers and to ask people where they were going. We had nothing to show them, so we got off the train at a village and stayed there overnight. The villagers told us what direction to take to the border, and after a few days walking we made it to a farmhouse we’d been told about.

There were a lot of people gathered at the farm, all headed for the border. They split us in two groups, ours with 16 and the other with 15 people. I had an old watch, and my sister carried a bottle of vodka in her bag. Our mother told her that if we were caught to give the vodka to the Russian soldiers. We had to pay a lot of money to get across the border, but my mother had sold our apartment – and everything we had – to ensure we had enough.

We left at night, walking from one haystack to another, until someone pointed at a small light in the distance. They said that was the other side of the border. The long walk was very difficult for my mother and me. Someone had gone ahead of us and given the Russians alcohol, and by the time we got there they were very happy. They even told their barking dogs to be quiet because they didn’t see anything.

Austrians picked us up at about four in the morning. We found out from them that we’d traveled the longest possible way to get there, and that a crying baby in the other group had alerted the Russians to them. They were all caught. The Austrians took us to a small town, and each night after, we moved closer and closer to Vienna. Other people were arriving every night. By the time we got to Austria, my feet were so swelled up that I couldn’t remove my shoes. I still have the one bag I carried on my back into Austria.

We left Hungary on December 6, 1956, and didn’t arrive in America until December 16, 1958, due to all the refugees trying to do the same thing. We tried going to Portugal to get out, but we didn’t realize there was a quota system for visas and couldn’t leave from there either.

In Austria, I was at an age when I should have been in the eighth grade, so I had to catch up. By the time we arrived in America, I’d missed so much school that I had to return to the eighth grade. I didn’t speak English yet, so I was always a year behind.