Read reflections and testimonies written by Holocaust survivors in their own words.
The name of the street was Rottenbiller in Budapest, Hungary. It was named after a mayor of Budapest who served in the 19th century. We got an apartment there after our original flat was bombed out. I was about three years old. My mother, my grandmother, my uncle Herman with his wife and later two daughters, my uncle Sanyi, and I all lived there. I mostly remember certain pictures in my mind.
Steven Spielberg’s movie Saving Private Ryan paid tribute to a famous, if not the most famous, battle in history: D-Day in France on June 6, 1944. The movie depicts the landing of the Allied forces at the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. The movie shows the landing, soldiers jumping into the water, the battle, and soldiers dying from German machine-gun fire. This is the most impressive and even shocking scene. I fully understand the scene, because one summer I stood on those hills where the German machine-gun bunkers were located. I looked down to the sea and saw the steep rock walls. I concluded that to climb up to the hills from the sea was a mission impossible, even without the machine-gun fire.
