Claims Conference shares story of holocaust survivor Eva Fahidi

Claims Conference, Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, a non-profit organisation seeking justice for the Holocaust victims, has recently come forward to share the story of Eva Fahidi, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary.

As per the update From the Buchenwald Memorial, Holocaust survivor Éva Fahidi was born on October 22, 1925, in Debrecen, Hungary, as the daughter of the affluent middle-class timber merchant Desiderius Fahidi and his wife Irma Fahidi. In 1936, this Jewish family converted to Catholicism, and Éva and her sister attended the convent school.

In the late 1930s, stricter anti-Semitic laws were introduced and increasingly excluded the Jewish population from society.
When the German Wehrmacht occupied Hungary in the spring of 1944, the Fahidi family was forced to move to the ghetto.

In late June, the city’s Jewish population was herded into a brick factory and deported to Auschwitz in several transports. The Fahidi family was on the last transport on June 27, 1944, which took them to Auschwitz/Birkenau. On arrival, Éva Fahidi was separated from her mother and sister, who were both murdered in the gas chambers. Her father died soon afterwards from exhaustion.

In mid-August 1944, Fahidi and 999 other Hungarian Jewish women were transported to a subcamp of Buchenwald Concentration Camp to carry out forced labour. At Münchmühle, near Allendorf, she was set to work producing shells.

While on a death march in March 1945, Fahidi was liberated by American troops; she returned to Hungary and worked in the export trade. She was a member of the Advisory Board of Former Inmates of Buchenwald Concentration Camp of the Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and the International Committee of Buchenwald-Dora and Subcamps.

In 2012 she was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in 2014 was made an honorary citizen of Stadtallendorf.
Éva Pusztai worked, in part together with the Buchenwald Memorial, to ensure that the fate of the Jewish women was not forgotten.

Current social and political developments in Hungary give added impetus to her efforts to oppose any reinterpretation of the destruction of the Hungarian Jews and to bring about the conviction and sentencing of the last surviving criminals from the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.