Tag #155364 - Interview #103735 (Nikolay Schwartz Biography)

Yelisaveta told me the good news that our brother Earnest was alive. It turned out that Yelisaveta kept in touch with Earnest for a long time. When World War II began, Earnest studied in a vocational school in Budapest. The Hungarian fascists were more loyal to Hungarian Jews than to Subcarpathian Jews. Many Jews could stay in their houses in Hungary and were not taken to concentration camps. The only mandatory thing that fascists did was painting yellow hexagonal stars on Jewish houses [Yellow star houses] [21], though I guess, I know little about it, or what I know is what I heard from others. [He refers to the fact that deportations from Budapest were not finished as opposed to the Hungarian countryside.] When Germans invaded Budapest [March 19th 1944], Earnest and 50 other students of their vocational school found refuge in the Swiss Embassy. They were hiding there until the end of the war.