My sister is really my first cousin, not a born sister to us. Because her parents were taken away in 1944. Very tragic circumstances. After the war she was adopted by my parents. This is how it came about. She was born in 1943. Her parents went to the funeral of her grandfather in the big cemetery in Budapest. On their way back the tram was stopped & all Jews were ordered off the tram & taken away. We never saw her mother, my aunt [mother’s sister Duci], again. We think she died in Ravensbrück. Her father, the doctor, was brought home by a soldier to collect medical instruments. He was allowed to take those & work as a doctor in Auschwitz. We understand he survived & was liberated by the Russians but subsequently died of typhoid. So we do have a bit of tragedy to tell.

I still remember sitting on the windowsill & looking for the tram stop, waiting for them to come home. They just didn’t come & they just didn’t come & one tram went after the other one & they still didn’t come. So one immediately thought of bad news, eventually confirmed. [The baby] was safeguarded during the worst part of our war experience. Was given when she was less than a year old, to an old patient of her father, who was a Christian person & looked after her throughout the war period. And returned her once we were liberated. We wouldn’t have been able to cope—in our way of surviving—with a baby. Her father, Doctor Weisz Andor was a much-loved GP in the area. People were really upset & horrified when news got around he was taken away. I’m not sure how it came about, but this was a former patient who obviously had some… a gesture of thanksgiving as well as appreciation of the help she received from a medical point of view, that came to the rescue. There were some people who were very decent. Not too many.