Éva Fahidi, a Holocaust survivor who late in life began speaking out and writing about her experiences, as well as expressing them in dance, becoming a familiar presence at memorial observances and in classrooms in Germany and other European countries, died on Monday in Budapest. She was 97.
The International Auschwitz Committee, an association of Auschwitz survivors, announced her death.
Ms. Fahidi, part of a Hungarian Jewish family that had converted to Catholicism, was rounded up in 1944 along with the rest of her family and taken to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination complex in occupied Poland. She was 18.
She was apparently saved from the gas chamber by being of an age and fitness level to qualify for a forced-labor camp. Her other family members were sent to their deaths. Josef Mengele, the Nazi death camp doctor, presided over the selection process.
“My youth came to an abrupt end on the 1st of July, 1944, on the ramp of Birkenau,” she wrote in “The Soul of Things: Memoir of a Youth Interrupted” (2005) after detailing a carefree youth. “The life I have described above was gone in the split second it takes to wave a hand — Mengele’s motion that ordered me into one line and the rest of my family into the other.” » | Neil Genzlinger | Thursday, September 14, 2023
