By Vesna Domany-Hardy
I come from a progressive Jewish family who at the time of my birth in 1941 lived in Croatia. My mother and her parents had moved to Zagreb from Sarajevo in 1938. My family had to move due to my mother’s anti-fascist activities which she undertook whilst still being at secondary school. She also had a boyfriend who had volunteered to fight for the Spanish Republic and who had joined the International Brigades.
By Tomi Komoly
Ottó Komoly (Kohn) was my father’s older brother. He played a remarkable role in Hungarian Jewry before and during the Holocaust, but never received the international recognition his activities deserved. I would like to fill the gap with this testimony.
He was born in Budapest in 1892. His father David Kohn attended the first Zionist conference and founded the movement’s Hungarian branch.
Ottó fought in the Austro-Hungarian army reaching the rank of captain, wounded in action, and awarded military honours. He subsequently graduated at the Technical University of Budapest, while active in the youth Zionist movement.
Just over a year ago I stood in Parliament Square with thousands of others from the Jewish community and all decent people and we said “enough is enough”. We were challenging what felt like a relentless tide of incidents where Jew hatred was not being taken seriously by a mainstream political party. One year on and what has changed? Nothing. If anything, it’s worse.
Regional Ambassadors from the Holocaust Educational Trust travelled to Budapest from the 27th to the 31st of March to analyse the Holocaust in Hungary. During our time in the country we visited multiple Holocaust remembrance sites, spoke to a Hungarian-Jewish survivor and engaged with the Jewish and non-Jewish community in Budapest to understand contemporary remembrance of the Holocaust.
Last week, I joined fellow Regional Ambassadors for the Holocaust Educational Trust on an educational visit to Budapest, Hungary. Our time in the city provided a unique opportunity to learn about Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust, to engage with diverse local communities’ remembrance of the past, and to understand Hungary’s distinctive and complex relationship with the Holocaust.
What to do when you discover your grandfather saved nearly 700 Jewish refugees from the Holocaust?
To the Holocaust Educational Trust, Harry Bibring BEM was an unstoppable combination of a tzaddik and a rockstar, by Karen Pollock MBE
