Truth in an Age of Deceit: Eva Fahidi Warns Against Resurgence of Hate in Hungary

They were lucky to even survive the brutal train ride, with 80 people crowded into a single wagon with only a small window and bucket of water. But any luck ended at the ramp in Auschwitz. Questions of life and death were decided in an instant: upon arrival, she was separated from her mother and sister, who - as she learnt later - were murdered in the gas chambers right next door to her.

"We were told over the loudspeaker that we should not worry, we will soon be reunited with our families. When I asked two days later the 'kapos' where my mother was and when she would finally come, a Slovak girl almost my age just pointed into the air. There she is, she said. I did not understand what she meant…," Fahidi trails off, the painful memories still vivid more than eight decades later.

Eva Fahidi in 2020, at the Roma Holocaust Remembrance Day in Budapest. Photo: Facebook Work to live

The Auschwitz complex was a concentration and labour camp with an extermination camp of large gas chambers and crematoria built by the Nazis in occupied Poland. Over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were transported and killed there, among them 49 members of Fahidi's extended family. Her sister, only 11 years old, was deemed too young to work and, therefore, had no value to the Nazis. To avoid complications, child and mother were both gassed.

Fahidi survived. After six weeks spent at Auschwitz, she was sent to a forced labour camp called Munchmuhle in Allendorf, Hessen to work in an ammunitions factory. "I knew that as long I as can work, I would live," she recalls.

It was hard, physical work carrying and lifting grenades that weighed 50 kilograms. This marked the end of her dreams of becoming a piano player, as her back was destroyed for good. But she made some...