Yellow Star

During the War in 1944 the Hungarian Nazis ruled that Jews in Budapest could only live in certain apartment houses. In order to make their job of persecution easier those buildings had to be marked with the yellow Star of David. Anybody unlucky enough whose building was not determined to be a Jewish building had to move.

"Luckily" our building was a Jewish building so we stayed until they took us into the Ghetto.

Well, this year on June 21 they had a city wide (in Budapest) remembrance about those yellow star buildings.

I don't really know why June 21, maybe that was when the ruling in 1944 came out. So it was 70 years ago. That would explain it.

Anyway, my wife had a niece in Budapest whom I guess I adopted and she is my niece now. She was born long time after all those horrors, but she knows a lot about them. Like every Jewish family in Hungary she also lost family members even she never ever met them.

She told me that she was organizing the remembrance in the building she is living now. This is a very remarkable thing from a young woman.

The other day she wrote me that the affair went very smoothly. She made a speech, there was video presentation, there were other speeches and what's the most important there were two living survivors who still live in the building and they also made some speeches.

It had to be very moving, I wish I were there. The sad thing about this is that as time goes by there are less and less of us who still remember.

I am really proud of her to pull something like this off in such an unfriendly atmosphere.