When the Danube Ran Red

Epilogue

169 Epilogue Iván Abonyi studied medicine after the war. He practiced radiology in Budapest until he retired in March 2010. He married Mária Farkas; the couple has a daughter, Krisztina, and two grandchildren, Bogi and Áron. László Abonyi reclaimed his pharmacy and created a rapidly growing serum institute after the war. Both were expropriated by the Communist government that nationalized all private property in Hungary in 1948. His applications for permission to visit his daughter, Zsuzsi , who fled from Hungary with her husband in 1957, were repeatedly refused by the Hungarian government. In fact, he and his wife waited seven years for their passports before receiving them. These passports were valid for several months. The Abonyis arrived in the United States in 1964. After spending barely three weeks with their daughter, sonin -law, and grandchild, baby Kathleen, László Abonyi died of a heart attack in Dallas, Texas. Margit Abonyi continued to live under the pressure of the enormous hardships that characterized Jewish life in Hungary before and after the war. She returned to Hungary in 1965, ten months after the death of her husband in Dallas. She lived in Budapest until her death in 1971. Zsuzsanna (Zsuzsi) Abonyi married István Ozsváth in Hungary. She left the country illegally, after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution by the Soviet army in 1957. The couple moved first to Germany, then in 1962 to the United States. They have two children, Kathleen and Peter, and two granddaughters: Elizabeth (who is named after Erzsi) and Eliana. Zsuzsi holds the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies When the Danube R an Red 170 in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas , and István is a professor of mathematics at the same institution. Julia (Lulu) Abonyi-Fenyő was removed from her apartment and driven by two Hungarian gendarmes to the tobacco-drying sheds of Tornalja, where the Jews were concentrated. On the way, the gendarmes shot her husband for “moving too slowly.” In the middle of June 1944, she was entrained and transported to Auschwitz. Surviving in the camp during the summer, she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen in the late fall of that year. She died, probably of typhus or malnutrition, in the late spring of 1945. Dr. Pál Abonyi was drafted into the labor service and dispatched to the Russian front in October 1942. As a Jew, he was not involved in military action but rather in the maintenance of road work. He either froze or starved to death, died of the torture the servicemen were subjected to, or of disease—as did 43,000 out of 50,000 Hungarian Jewish labor servicemen drafted to the slave labor camps of the Ukraine. But it is also possible that at the end of the road, after liberation, devastated by hunger, he was shot by the Russians for breaking into a grocery store and stealing sugar. He had two children, Magda and Margit, and three grandchildren, Viktor, Ildiko, and Edit. Erzsébet (Erzsi) Fajó was adopted by László and Margit Abonyi in 1946. She studied biology and became a laboratory technician, working in a serum institute in Budapest. She died in 1995. György (Gyuri) Faragó, the world-renowned young pianist, saved the lives of several of his friends after the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944. He became sick during the summer, but he still hid people in his apartment throughout the fall of that year. Taken to the hospital in late November, he died of cancer on December 3. Ila (Nagy) Frank and Sándor Frank were taken from Kiskunfélegyh áza to the brick plant at Kecskemét. Entrained to Auschwitz, they were killed, probably on arrival. Erzsébet (Nagy) Kornél and Dr. József Kornél lived in Magyarkanizsa . Ghettoized in the pig farm of the salami plant at Szeged, they Epilogue 171 were taken to Baja and deported to Auschwitz, where they were killed, probably on arrival. They had one son, László, who survived the Holocaust and moved to Israel, where he married and had a child. Anna (Anni) Nagy was sent first to the ghetto near the rail station at Szabadka. After being transferred to the entrainment center at Bácsalm ás, she was deported to Auschwitz and killed. Imre Nagy, from Szabadka, was transferred with his thirteenyear -old...