Éva Fahidi

Éva grew up in an upper-class Hungarian-Jewish family in Debrecen. In 1936, her family converted to Catholicism. On 29 April 1944, the Hungarian gendarmerie, who worked together with the Eichmann commando, arrested her, her parents Irma and Dezső Fahidi and sister Gilike and locked the family with the other Jews in the city in a newly built prison Ghetto.[2]

On 14 May 1944, they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where her mother and sister were selected for the gas chambers by SS doctor Josef Mengele. They died there and her father died from inhuman prison conditions. After six weeks, she was transferred to the Münchmühle satellite camp belonging to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she had to work for 12 hours a day for the Allendorf and Herrenwald explosives plants. At the end of the war, she was able to escape on a death march.[3][4]

After months of wandering as a displaced person, Fahidi returned to Debrecen on November 4, 1945. Other people had taken over her parent's house and refused her entry.[5] In the People's Republic of Hungary, Fahidi conformed to the expectations to the regime and did not speak publicly about her experiences during the Nazi era. She joined the Hungarian communists and hoped for a better society. She worked as an industrial employee and thanks to her knowledge of French, rose to become the external representative of the Hungarian steel combine.[6] She avoided encounters with Germans and never wanted to speak the language of the perpetrators again, but continued to read works by German authors.[7]

In 1989, the administration of Stadtallendorf published an advertisement in Hungarian newspapers for former prisoners of the Münchmühle satellite camp. Fahidi allowed herself to be persuaded to go to Germany as a translator. In October 1990 she took part in a meeting week in Stadtallendorf, where local representatives asked the former prisoners for forgiveness. Since then she has been visiting the site regularly, giving lectures, giving interviews, questioning other contemporary witnesses and guiding school classes through the memorial. Among other things, items of clothing she and her sister owned from their time in prison are exhibited there.[8][9]

In July 2003, on the exact anniversary of her arrival in 1944, she also visited the memorials of the Auschwitz death camp. Since then she has been speaking regularly to groups in the youth meeting center in Oswiecim. According to her statement, telling the horrors she experienced there and which she had kept silent about until 2003 became a form of trauma processing: "It's really a release for me that I can now talk about it as much as I can want… Otherwise I would go insane.”[10][11] Since then she has been writing down her memories. The book Anima rerum was first published in 2004 in a German translation and reprinted in 2011.[12][13]

In 2011, Fahidi agreed to testify as a co-plaintiff in the criminal trials against the former concentration camp guards Hans Lipschis and Johann Breyer. In 1944, both were involved in the murder of the Hungarian Jews in a storm ban by the SS Totenkopf units in Auschwitz-Birkenau, possibly also in the selection of the Fahidi family. According to her own statement, it was not about punishing the perpetrators, but about publicly witnessing their story.[14]

In 2015, Fahidi was a joint plaintiff in the trial against Oskar Gröning and took part in the trial. Since 2015 she has appeared in a dance theater play Sea Lavender about her life.[15][16]

In 2019, the German Resistance Memorial Center dedicated an exhibition to Fahidi, at the opening of which she performed. As one of the last survivors of the Shoah, she expressed the hope that the memory of it would be effectively kept alive after her death through books, documents and places of remembrance: "It must not and cannot happen again." The Holocaust was a terrible one been a shock to humanity. This may only become fully clear after the death of the last witness. The time after that could usher in a new kind of culture of remembrance. She hopes that everyone will then realize "that they have to get involved".[17][18]

On April 11, 2020, the city of Weimar made Éva Fahidi-Pusztai an honorary citizen.[19][20]