Éva Fahidi

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Éva Pusztai-Fahidi, Bünde, November 9, 2019

Éva Pusztai-Fahidi (born October 22, 1925 in Debrecen ) is a Hungarian contemporary witness of the Shoa (the Holocaust ). Her family was in the 1944 Auschwitz-Birkenau deported and murdered. As the only family member she was selected for forced labor in a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in what is now Stadtallendorf in Hesse and survived.

Since 1990 she has been visiting Germany regularly for lectures and testimony in Nazi trials . In 2004 she wrote a report about the experience.

Nazi era

Éva Fahidi grew up in an upper-class Hungarian Jewish family in Debrecen. In 1936 her family converted to Catholicism .

On April 29, 1944, the Hungarian gendarmerie, which worked with the Eichmann Command , arrested the then 18-year-old with her parents Irma and Dezső Fahidi and her ten-year-old sister Gilike and locked the family with the other Jews in the city in a newly built one Ghetto . On May 14, 1944, they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Her mother and sister were selected for the gas chamber by the SS doctor Josef Mengele immediately after arriving on the ramp and murdered there. Her father died of the inhumane prison conditions. After six weeks she was transferred to the subcamp Münchmühle belonging to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where she had to do forced labor for 12 hours a day for the explosives plants in Allendorf and Herrenwald . At the end of the war in 1945 she escaped on a death march .

post war period

After a month-long odyssey as a displaced person , Éva Fahidi returned to Debrecen on November 4, 1945. Other people confiscated her parents' home and refused her entry. She was on her own.

In the People's Republic of Hungary , Fahidi conformed to the expectations of 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. However, the regime had their inherited property expropriated because of their bourgeois origin. She worked as an industrial worker and, thanks to her knowledge of French, rose to the position of external representative of the Hungarian steel combine. She married and since then has lived in Budapest under the family name Pusztai-Fahidi . In doing so, she avoided meeting Germans. She never wanted to speak the language of the perpetrators again, but continued to read works by German authors.

Witness to the Shoah

In 1989 the Stadtallendorf administration published an advertisement for former inmates of the Münchmühle satellite camp in Hungarian newspapers. Fahidi allowed herself to be persuaded to come to Germany as a translator. In October 1990 she took part in a meeting week in Stadtallendorf, during which municipal 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 by her and her sister from her prisoner days are on display there.

In July 2003, on the exact anniversary of her arrival in 1944, she also visited the memorials of the Auschwitz extermination camp. Since then she has been speaking regularly to groups in the youth meeting place in Oswiecim. According to her, telling the horrors she experienced there and about which she had remained silent until 2003 became a form of trauma processing: “For me it is really a relief that I can now talk about it as much as I can want ... Otherwise I would go crazy. ”Since then she has been writing down her memories. The book Anima rerum was first published in a German translation in 2004 and reprinted in 2011.

In 2011, Fahidi agreed to testify as a witness in the secondary prosecution in the criminal proceedings against former concentration camp guards Hans Lipschis and Johann Breyer . As members of the SS-Totenkopfverband Sturmbann in 1944 in Auschwitz-Birkenau, both were involved in the murder of the Hungarian Jews, possibly also in the selection of the Fahidi family. According to her, it was not about punishing the perpetrators, but about publicly witnessing their story.

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.

In 2019, the German Resistance Memorial Center dedicated an exhibition to Fahidi, at the opening of which it appeared. As one of the last survivors of the Shoah, she expressed the hope that the commemoration would be kept alive through books, documents and places of remembrance even after her death: "This must not and cannot happen again." The Holocaust is a terrible one Been shock to humanity. Perhaps I will only become fully aware of this after the death of the last witnesses. The time after that could herald a new kind of culture of remembrance . She hopes that then all people will recognize “that they have to participate”.

On April 11, 2020, the City of Weimar made Éva Fahidi-Pusztai an honorary citizen.

Fonts

literature

  • "The secret of reconciliation is called memory". Documentation of the International Days of Encounter in Stadtallendorf, Münchmühle subcamp, Nobel; from October 21 to 26, 1990 . City magistrate, Stadtallendorf 1991.
  • Thomas Gonschior, Christa Spannbauer : Courage to live. The message of the survivors from Auschwitz. Europa Verlag, Berlin 2014. ISBN 978-3-944305-57-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Philipp Neumann-Thein: Sea-Lavender or The Euphoria of Being. meinanzeiger.de, March 15, 2019
  2. ↑ a b c d Kerstin Krupp: Auschwitz Trial: Giving the unspeakable a voice. In: Berliner Zeitung , September 19, 2013
  3. ↑ a b Holocaust: When there are no more contemporary witnesses. Deutsche Welle, January 30, 2019
  4. ↑ Ingrid Heinisch: Eichmann wasn't alone , Neues Deutschland , June 24, 2011
  5. ↑ Eva Fahidi in the Gröning process on focus.de
  6. ↑ Rebekka Dieckmann: Holocaust survivor dances at the age of 93 in Stadtallendorf: “I dance in the name of 1,000 female forced laborers”. hessenschau.de , May 7, 2019
  7. ↑ Éva Pusztai and Ivan Ivanji are now Weimar honorary citizens Thüringer Allgemeine , April 13, 2020
  8. ^ Review by Günther B. Ginzel , November 9, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Fahidi, Éva
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fahidi, Eva; Fahidi-Pusztai, Éva
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian Holocaust survivors
DATE OF BIRTH October 22, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Debrecen