If you are asking what the single worst thing that has happened to me is, I can answer with one sentence: The moment I was separated from my parents.
But I want to give a longer answer; I will tell you about the road that led there.
The Germans’ planned extermination of the Jews was a very slow process, very cleverly calculated.
Just as the eye cannot observe the gradual metamorphosis of a flower from bud to rose in full bloom, we too did not notice the small, almost imperceptible steps that would lead, eventually, to the full execution of their plan – to that which you could not imagine, even in your wildest dreams.
All of a sudden, a change for the worse was introduced, but you could live with it. It would pass, we thought. It did not pass. Instead, there was another change.
Once again, we reacted by hoping that it too would soon pass. We never knew what the next change would be or when it would come.
Despite everything I have been through, I was lucky.
The worst thing that could happen to a person did not happen to me. To begin with, I was not caught in the Germans’ net until the eleventh hour of the war, the spring of 1944, when the majority of Europe’s Jews had already been taken prisoner.
I was born in Sighet, a small town in Romania, in the northern part of Transylvania, an area that Hungarians and Romanians have been fighting over for many centuries.
Read the article by Hedi Fried in The Advertiser.