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Oral history interview with Elizabeth Reti

Oral History | Accession Number: 2006.70.99 | RG Number: RG-50.583.0099


Elizabeth Reti, born May 27, 1912 in Dombegyhaza, Hungary, discusses her childhood; attending school until age 15; marrying in 1934 and having a son in 1936; learning photography, and working in a photography shop until the start of the German occupation; her husband being called up to work as a forced laborer, and dying at the Don river in Russia in 1943; contracting tuberculosis, and remaining sick for years; her whole family being forced to move into a Jewish house in 1944 after the start of the German occupation of Hungary; a prominent Hungarian Nazi couple who lived in the same house who helped Elizabeth and her father from being taken away by other Nazis; testifying as a witness for this couple after the war, which spared them from being hanged; having to move to a different room in the ghetto; seeing Hungarian troops herding hundreds of Jews onto the ghetto streets and shooting them dead before the Russians’ arrival; sanitation in the ghetto; the lack of news about the progress of the war while she was in the ghetto; being liberated by the Russians, who opened up the ghetto; returning back to their original home, where a Christian family was living; going to a sanitarium until 1946 when she was allowed to go back home and start working again; living in Budapest for the remainder of her life; and having a son, Robert Reti, who is a child survivor living in Australia.

Elizabeth Reti
Irene Stanbrook
1991 March 13  (interview)
1 sound cassette.
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Record last modified: 2018-01-22 10:59:34
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