Susan Kaszas

This book was created from my deceased mother's diary she wrote after being liberated by the American Army in Germany in 1945.

Her maiden name was Susan Varadi. She was born in 1920, in Györ, Hungary, the largest city in the western part of the country, only half an hour from Vienna, Austria. She came from the Böhm line of our family.

She married by father, Alex Kaszas in 1942 and moved to Tapolca, a small town north of Lake Balaton. By that time anti-Jewish laws were in full force in Hungary too. My father was taken away to a forced labor camp and my mother to Auschwitz in 1944, along with their families. The small general store and everything else they had were also stolen away from them. Only they returned.

My parents never spoke about this period of their lives. I found my mother's diary letter book amongst her belongings upon her death in 1990. Reading it made me cringe. It still does.

We translated it since and had our children, Judy and Mark, her beloved grandchildren, edit and proofread it.

We publish it here in honor of her memory.