08/26/2026
Tibor Foldvari was 8 years old when he became one of eight students in his class of 20 required to wear a yellow star. He recently shared the story of his childhood in wartime Budapest with fellow residents at Orchard Cove.
Foldvari's parents, Samuel and Ethel, met while working at a large dairy products distributor in Budapest. Samuel was from an Orthodox Jewish family, while Ethel was Christian.
"Jews were pretty much accepted [in Budapest], but there was a big change in 1920, after the war. Hungary lost a lot of its territory, and a very conservative, right-wing government took over," Foldvari said. The government passed the Numerus Clausus (Closed Numbers) law, which restricted the number of Jewish students who could study at a university.
Foldvari said the Hungarian government believed that, with the assistance of N**i Germany, it could regain some of the territory lost following World War I, so it passed a series of so-called Jewish laws. These laws set quotas on the number of Jews in various professions and in government, defined anyone with one Jewish grandparent as Jewish, forbade intermarriage, and barred Jews from armed service.
This was the environment in which Foldvari's parents met and fell in love. Samuel's two older brothers visited Ethel's father to ask him not to let his daughter marry their younger brother.
"He said, 'My daughter is 24 years old, she can marry whoever she wants. I'm sorry, I'm not going to tell her not to marry your brother,'" Foldvari said. His mother converted to Judaism, his parents married in 1935, he was born the following year, and his sister arrived three years later.
Soon after, one of his father's associates encouraged the family to convert to Christianity.
"After my sister was born, some guy in a long, black frock would visit us in the evening. He would have this chit-chat with my father. I think he was getting my father ready to be baptized: he was teaching him catechism," Foldvari said.
On a Sunday in 1939, the whole family went to church. His mother returned to Catholicism, his parents had a Catholic marriage, and Foldvari, his father, and his sister were all baptized.
"This Jewish family, on one Sunday afternoon, became a Catholic family," Foldvari said. "I remember going to church on Sunday and demonstrating to all the neighbors that this is a good Catholic family. I was sent to a private school run by the Marist Brothers, which is a French teaching order." He later learned the Marist Brothers saved Jewish families, hiding them in the school's attic to help them escape persecution.
Though he had converted, Foldvari's father was still considered Jewish by the government, and in 1942, he was taken into a labor battalion — a forced labor unit the Hungarian government created as an alternative for Jewish men and others deemed untrustworthy or unfit for regular military service.
It was another Sunday morning, this time in 1944, when the N**is invaded and occupied Hungary.
"There was a nice resort hotel on one of the hills of Budapest, the Majestic Hotel," Foldvari said. "[Adolf] Eichmann and his henchmen picked the place to use as their headquarters. The Gestapo moved in there and arranged for the collection and deportation of Jews from that hotel."
His mother was ordered to "see some goon up in the Majestic Hotel."
"Many years later, she told me about the experience. They asked her why she became Jewish and why she married a Jew, and were spitting on her. This was in 1944, during the civilized 20th century," Foldvari said.
The N**is passed additional laws, forcing Jews to wear a yellow star identifying them as Jewish.
"For an 8-year-old kid, it is not a good experience to be singled out like that, even when there are a few others with you," he said.
As soon as the school year finished, Ethel moved with the children to her mother's house on the edge of Budapest. His grandfather had built an apple-storage cellar into the hill in the backyard, approximately 20 by 40 feet. Foldvari stayed in that cellar with his mother and sister from June 1944 to January 1945.
In late 1944, Russian troops liberated that section of Budapest and used the house as a field communications center until March. It was around this time that his father returned.
After the war, many Jews living in Hungary changed their surnames to more Hungarian-sounding ones, and the same was true of his family. Foldvari's father and two uncles all applied for a name change, and despite efforts to coordinate, each was granted a different last name.
For the past several months, members of the Shalom Club at Orchard Cove have shared their stories of growing up Jewish outside the United States, including several who fled N**i Germany in their childhood. They believe sharing these stories helps everyone learn from history together.
