Just 13 years old, she escaped war-torn Hungary
As told to Riki Goldstein by Suzie Graus
I was a native of Budapest, and my parents had grown up there too. My childhood hadn’t been idyllic; my mother died when I was three, my father remarried when I was five, and World War II broke out when I was eight.
The Nazis only invaded Hungary in 1944, but when they did, the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry was carried out with great efficiency. My family had survived by going into hiding, moving around from place to place in the large city. During the final three months of the war, I was taken in by a non-Jewish family in the Buda section of the city. I try not to think about those awful years.
After a prolonged siege, our city was liberated from the Nazi grip by the Soviet army. Budapest was free of the Germans, but our liberators, the Russians, were a violent mob who ran amok in the city.
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