Holocaust Testimony: Trude Levi

April 23 is my birthday. Every year it reminds me of my 20th and 21st birthdays.

I was born and brought up in Szombathely, a provincial town on the Austrian border in Hungary. My mother came from Vienna and was a language teacher. My father was Hungarian, a gynaecologist, but he also worked as a general practitioner. We had many books, made music and altogether I grew up in a highly interesting and cultured environment. We had little money because my father was a left-wing socialist and he treated many of his patients without asking them for payment.

From 1938 onwards, when Hitler annexed Austria, and throughout the war when he occupied European countries, refugees came to Hungary. They told us stories about Jews being beaten up and dragged away, never to be heard of again. In those days there was no TV, and without seeing starving children, emaciated and murdered people for ourselves, we simply could not imagine that man’s inhumanity to his fellow man could be so great. We didn’t believe the stories we were told.

In 1944 I was nearly 20 years old and worked as a nursery school teacher in Budapest. Though we did have restrictions imposed by the antisemitic Hungarian Government, the Jews of Hungary were at that time the only ones who had not been deported. It seemed that we had escaped the fate all the Jews of Europe. It was obvious that Germany was losing the war and we hoped that soon all would be over.

But on 19 March 1944 we found that German tanks, soldiers and machine-guns lined the banks of the Danube. When no one expected it any more, we were occupied.

First we had to buy a yellow star and sew it on our garments. Courageous Christian friends offered to hide me in Budapest. However, I decided to go home and join my parents. I had to apply for a special permit to travel. The journey was long and on arrival after the curfew for Jews of 6 p.m., I was subjected to extremely unpleasant treatment while walking home from the station. It ensured that I was never homesick again.

At home I found my 49-year-old mother had collapsed into a confused, old woman. Our flat had been searched for subversive literature and my father dragged away as a political prisoner on 22 April. My parents had intended to celebrate my twentieth birthday a day late as I arrived on the 24th.

A ghetto for Jews was created in the centre of our city. On 7 May my mother and I were moved – with one piece of luggage each – into a small room with four other women. Before that, we had to hand in our bicycles, jewels, savings bank books and cash except a few pennies. We stayed there for seven and a half weeks, with little food, until the end of June when we were marched into our first concentration camp.

• Trude_Levi (PDF document)