Format: Download Slides with Synchronized Audio - MP4 Video File $9

Presenter: Peter Tarjan

In 1988, 32 years after I left Hungary, while visiting Ágnes (z"l), my mother's sister in Budapest, who cared for me, an orphan, after the war, I asked her about the family correspondence that somehow survived. "I gave those to you long ago," she said, but an envelope marked "Last Letters" emerged from a secret drawer with a few war-time postcards from my grandparents and my parents. Agnes did not remember how those survived. After her death, her friend found a valise in another nook with letters, photos and memorabilia. I translated and chronologically organized my grandparents' reports following the German occupation on 3/19/1944 until correspondence from the ghetto was forbidden. I juxtaposed these with concurrent articles dealing with the persecution of Jews in Dunántúl (Transdanubia), the sole newspaper allowed by the Nazis in Pécs,. The last header was on 7/6/1944: "The Ghetto in Pécs is vacant" without further explanation. (AH, Shoah)