Childhood

I was born on 14 July 1938 in the Alice Weiss Maternity Hospital of the Jewish Women’s Association. My birth certificate states my name as Anna Mária Veronika Balázs. My religion is not indicated.

My parents (Margit and Tibor Balázs) brought me to our family home: a three-room apartment on the third floor of 17 Kossuth Lajos Street, in central Budapest, where they lived with my aunt Lily and my grandmother Regina. Except for the period of the German occupation, the five of us lived at this address until we left Hungary in December 1948.

An old, well-worn photo album tracks my first years: playing on the shore of the Danube in the summer, playing in the snow in the winter, in the zoo, and on walks with my mother. There are photos with my grandmothers, relatives, and friends of the family. I see an almost idyllic young life that came to a screeching halt on 19 March 1944. I was three months, three weeks, and four days shy of my sixth birthday.

My family’s experiences during the German Nazi occupation of Hungary are (for the time being) the story I am sharing on this site.

After “the war,” in 1945, I was enrolled in a Roman Catholic school run by nuns of the Congregation of Jesus (Angolkisasszonyok intézete). It was located at 47 Váci Street, within walking distance of my home. I only lasted one semester.

In the second semester, I attended a Catholic public school, registered as Roman Catholic. In this first academic year, 1945/46, the German language was still on the curriculum. There was probably a smattering of Hungarian history in the few years I attended, not enough to be memorable.

You might have gathered that I was not raised in Judaism, although the high holidays were observed by the women. Neither was I raised with any knowledge of Jewish history, nor Jewish Hungarian history. It’s as though our past, as Jews, didn’t exist.

Emigration

In December 1948, we left Budapest and Hungary for Geneva, where we encountered unforeseen difficulties: the funds we had sent out with a colleague of my father’s had disappeared. Both the colleague and the funds have apparently migrated to South America.

My mother’s and my aunt’s sewing skills provided our only source of income. My father, unemployed, spent much of his time with me and started to teach me self-sufficiency and independence. On one of our walks, he insisted that I go into an elegant hotel and ask the person at the front desk for directions to where we lived (a much less elegant hotel). He wanted to ensure I would never feel lost in an unknown place, that I knew there were safe places, and that I had the confidence to find a safe place by myself.

In early 1949, we left Geneva for Paris, where we lived at the Hotel Royal Bèrgère. This small hotel, at 8 rue Geoffroy Marie, was down the street from the famous Folies Bergère. Each room had a sink and a bidet, with a shared bathroom and toilet down the hall. We rented two rooms: one for my parents and the other for my aunt, my grandmother, and me. The three of us slept in one bed.

My mother and my aunt were again our only source of income. My parents’ room was the sewing workshop; our room was the fitting room. My grandmother took care of daily grocery shopping, cooking our meals in our room, and helping with the sewing.

Soon after our arrival, I was enrolled in the first grade of the local elementary school. My gangly 10-year-old self was taken under the wings of the six-year-olds. During most of the summer holidays, I was bedridden. To keep me occupied and help me learn French, my father gifted me with a copy of Les Trois Mousquetaires by Alexandre Dumas. This is when I fell in love with historical novels. When I was on my feet again, my father (still unemployed) taught me the intricacies of the Paris Metro system as we explored Paris.

Over the next few years, my French improved, and I kept being promoted to higher classes until I was ready for the Lycée. A letter dated 27 June 1951 informed us that I had passed the entrance examination and was admitted to the Lycée Jules Ferry. I did not attend.

We left Paris when we immigrated to Canada.

Immigration - Montreal, Canada

The family had plans for Montreal: my father was to arrive a few months before us, find employment and an apartment. Aunt Lily was going to live separately with her husband.

We (my mother, Aunt Lily, grandmother, and I) left in October. The crossing was stormy and relatively unpleasant on the old ship Canberra.

My father awaited us in Quebec City. The night train took us to Montreal, where two taxis drove us through the snowy, sparkling night to a lovely rooming house on the North side of Sherbrooke Street, between Peel and McTavish Streets. My mother, grandmother, and I were booked in the front room, with its own bathroom and a kitchenette. My father left us there, promising to return in the morning.

The next morning, the family’s plans fell apart: my father announced that he was leaving my mother. No apartment, no financial security, no time to “settle.” We were on our own in a new city, in a new country, without any connections, extended family, or friends.

I don’t know how quickly my mother made new plans, but with borrowed funds (from Aunt Lily’s brother-in-law), she rented a store on Peel Street that accommodated both the business and our housing. It was located across the street from a “famous” dressmaking salon, just up the street from the elegant Mount-Royal Hotel. She thought this would be an excellent location to attract clients to their new haute couture dressmaking salon named Marguerite and Lily. For me, this place was luxury: the only time I had a room to myself before getting married.

I was rapidly enrolled in grade 9 at the Montreal High School for Girls, an English-language institution (at the time I didn’t speak any English) on University Street, across the street from McGill University. Girls and boys were taught in separate wings of the building. Later, in grades 10 and 11, those few of us who were enrolled in Science I, had to go to the boys’ side for physics and chemistry.

After graduating in 1954, I crossed the street as a 1st-year student in the 6-year Architecture program in the Faculty of Engineering of McGill University. I didn’t expect to be one of the first women to graduate from Architecture in 1960.

The years following graduation were interesting. After about a year of working, my partner and I took a one-year life-changing road trip to  Central and South America.

Just a quick side-note: starting in Hungary, followed by France and then Canada, I had about 5-6 years of formal schooling in three countries, in three languages and multiple cultures.

Flashback

Near the end of the trip to South America, we were on a Brazilian governmental flight from Lima, Peru, to São Paulo, Brazil. The plane landed to refuel in northern Chile, where we were to spend the night.

As we stepped into the Chilean immigration verification area, I had a major, unprecedented flashback to the period under the German Nazi occupation:

I froze. Panic-stricken and almost hysterical, I grabbed my partner’s arm and whispered, “Get me out of here!”

He looked at me (I was probably white as a sheet), didn’t ask questions, and hustled me out. He then returned to the verification area and cleared us for entry. Only later, after we were settled in our hotel room and I had calmed down, did he ask what had happened.

“They are wearing German uniforms,” I answered.

I could not have then, nor could I today, describe the 1944-45 German uniforms I saw in  Budapest. But somewhere, somehow, I remembered, and with that memory came panic.

We landed the next day in São Paulo.

Professional Career

I worked for several architecture firms and had two babies. With a new interest in the potential effect of the physical environment on children, I enrolled in a new Master’s degree program at the Université de Montréal, and became involved in the budding field of Environmental Psychology.

Following graduation from that program, I became a part-time faculty member. Additional research on my chosen topic resulted in the publication of my book The Urban Nest in 1977. This book was later translated into Japanese.

In 1975, while still on the faculty of the Faculté de l'Aménagement at the Université de Montréal, I was granted an academic leave to pursue doctoral studies. With financial assistance from the Quebec Association of Architects and the federal Central Housing and Mortgage Corporation, I enrolled in the Union Graduate School. This program was designed for mature students whose area of study did not fit into a traditional academic discipline. Additionally, it only had a brief three-week residency that suited my family commitments.

In the Ph.D. program, I started my work in General Systems Theory and Cybernetics. At the time, it seemed like a small deviation since I was used to the concept of systems in both architecture and my work exploring the relationship between the child (system A) and their physical environment (system B).

In my dissertation, I explored the System-Cybernetic model of societal control with application to Women in Urban America [USA] between 1900 and 1930. I received my Ph.D. on July 14, 1979.

I was 41 years old when my life took an unexpected turn.

If you are interested in my resume

This Project

None of my work in Academia addressed my early experiences in Budapest, nor any aspect of the Holocaust. I avoided all related issues for over 50 years — I could not look at documentaries of concentration camps, could not read memoires, could not even hear German spoken.

In my immediate family we didn’t speak of “the war,” we didn’t speak of the missing family. We passed as Roman Catholic and acknowledged being Jews only among “safe” others with similar experiences.

In 1995, I was finally ready to face the past. After visiting the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., I had questions: why did it happen? What was the condition of Hungarian Jews within the political, social, and economic context of Hungary? More fundamentally, what is the source of the intense hatred that led to mass murder?

Read more about this project