Here in Budapest we found relative safety, but our lives hung on the thread of maintaining our gentile facade

As told to Rayzel Reich by her grandmother, Mrs. Jenia Reich

Hunger devours us from the inside out, shriveling our intestines. Cold brutalizes our weak bones, attacking us like the Russians swarming into the city.

Russians are better than Germans and Hungarian Nazis, aren’t they? This is what we’ve been dreaming of for so long, waiting and waiting for the Russians to come. But they vent their fury on resistant Nazi Budapest by preventing any food or coal from entering the city.

The windows have blown out from the aerial bombing.

It is January.

We cover the windows with bedsheets and nail them down. The sheets billow as the wind screams. We wear all we can and huddle together for warmth. We cannot cook the meager food we have, for there is no fire.

There are nine of us squeezed into one small room. Mammu, my nine-year-old brother Leibish, and me. Mr. Saphir, who has lost his daughter Etta to a bomb as she ran to deliver food to others. Little Marik, my second cousin whom we had taken in our escape. The three Lederberger siblings we’ve become close to during this terrible war. Yes, we are terribly crowded, but Mammu did not want her children to be alone, lost in the confusion of our assumed identities and suppressed Jewishness.

We women share one bed. We wake up covered in bedbugs bites, and there’s little we can do to find respite.

Marya Opatovska. That is my name now, the gentile identity I have hung onto for so long. In the past six years we have fled so many towns, crossed so many borders, faced death so many times. Here in Budapest we found relative safety, but our lives hung on the thread of maintaining our gentile facade.