Hedy's Journey: The True Story of a Hungarian Girl Fleeing the Holocaust
no She wanted to be with her parents and brother no matter what happened When she got on the train in September of 1941 she said I am only sorry I didn’t get more out of life while I could Marika understood that she was going to die I could not stop crying
Even though we were Hungarian we knew we were no longer safe in our own country If the Nazis were coming for one Jew it was only a matter of time before they came for us all The need to leave became even more urgent after the Nazi newspaper printed a story about my father calling him the king of the Jewish diamond jewelers Nazis believed the Jews had stolen all the world’s wealth They were calling my father a thief When my little brother Robert went to the newsstand to pick up a copy the vendor patted him on the head He called Robert a good little Nazi He had no idea Robert was Jewish My
brother held his tongue and turned away That summer the Hungarian Nazis had forced my 49-year-old father to spend three months in a labor camp as a water boy They let him out because of his service in World War I in which Hungarians fought alongside Germans But now
it was different Jews were considered the enemy We knew that the next time he was taken to a camp he might not come out alive Our Aunt Margaret in America helped us fill out the paperwork needed to enter the United States where it was safer for Jews Our visas came through giving us permission to travel We were going to leave We had to get to Portugal to board a ship But how to get there Every train was packed and every flight was booked The only train we could find went through Germany Worse the travel agency could find only three tickets together One of us would have to wait
