Prominent Hungarian Holocaust survivor, dancer Eva Fahidi dies at 97
Active in speaking about the Shoah, Fahidi wrote a memoir of her experiences and was also well-known for dance performances at the age of 90
BUDAPEST, Hungary — Hungarian Auschwitz survivor Eva Fahidi — active in speaking out against the Holocaust, and known for her dance performances at the age of 90 — died on Monday, aged 97, according to the Buchenwald memorial foundation.
“It is with great sadness that we learned this morning that Eva Fahidi-Pusztai, survivor of the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps and committed fighter for democracy and human rights, died in Budapest,” the Memorial Foundation Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora said in a statement.
“We will sorely miss her wisdom and warmth.”
Fahidi was an 18-year-old schoolgirl when she was put on a train and deported from Debrecen in eastern Hungary to Auschwitz — one of nearly 440,000 Hungarian Jews sent to death camps between May and July in 1944.
Forty-nine of her relatives perished in the Holocaust, including her parents and 11-year-old sister. She last saw her mother and younger sibling at a sorting ramp. after arriving at Birkenau.
After the camp’s liberation, it took Fahidi nearly six decades before she was ready to open up about her trauma.
A 2003 visit to the camp exactly 59 years after her first journey there prompted her to write her memoir.
“It dawned on me that this was my vocation, to tell as many people as I could about Auschwitz. It’s the least I can do,” she told AFP in a 2016 interview.
Her book — “The Soul of Things” — was published in German in 2004 and later translated by Fahidi into Hungarian.
Later, Fahidi also expressed herself through dance.
“It’s never too late,” she told AFP when, at the age of 90, she starred in a sold-out duet production in Budapest with 36-year-old dancer Emese Cuhorka.
Fahidi also came face to face with her past, when she appeared as a plaintiff at the closely covered trial of Oskar Groening, known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz.”
Groening was sentenced to four years in jail as an accessory to murder in 300,000 cases.
The pain does not fade but you learn to live with it, Fahidi said, adding she thought of Auschwitz every day.
“But I discovered that hatred is just a burden. What happened happened,” she said.