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Vivien is alive today because her great-grandfather evaded capture and deportation during the Holocaust. scroll down for more

His name was József Kozák and he was born in 1897 in Budapest. He lived there with his family until the outbreak of the war, when they were forced to flee the city to evade capture by the Arrow Cross.

Budapest: Deportations to Auschwitz 1944
My grandmother was a child when it happened. Her father owned an apartment in Budapest which he had bought in the 1920s-30s. They were considered kind of 'middle class Roma' because he had inherited money from a rich aunt. He was known as a man who counted lawyers, writers and poets amongst his friends; a socialite, who spent his time in fancy clubs and cafés in the capital. He was not at all the stereotype most people imagine of Roma in pre-war Hungary.
Budapest (1940)
When the war broke out, they decided that they would leave Budapest and go to the southern part of Hungary. They first went to Solt and then to Kalocsa, the town where I was later born.
They successfully hid from the Nazis and the Arrow Cross. After the war they were left with nothing but their lives. Their apartment had been taken away from them, and because they didn't have all of the papers necessary to prove that it used to belong to them, they were unable to reclaim it
Kalocsa
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The ERRC
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