08/27/2026
Anne Mary Fenerty
Anne Fenerty, March 8, 1932-August 15, 2026
Anne Fenerty died peacefully on August, 15. 2026, after a long and fulfilling life spent mostly in Boulder, Colorado. Anne was born in Budapest, Hungary, and grew up on her parents’ estate in Pénzeskut, a small town in Western Hungary. Anne’s parents were Magda and Lajos (Lewis) Fischer. She had one younger brother, György (George).
Anne’s idyllic life changed in 1942, when the Hungarian government confiscated her father’s estate — a result of laws which allowed the seizure of the assets of Jewish citizens. In 1944, Hitler’s army invaded Hungary. At that time, Anne and George were living with their grandmother in Szombathely while their mother was in Budapest. Because of a sudden premonition — or maybe a tip?— Anne’s mother summoned her children to Budapest. This probably saved their lives, since soon thereafter all Jews not living in Budapest were sent to a central staging area, and from there straight to Auschwitz. That is how most of Anne’s relatives were killed.
Anne’s father was sent first to a slave-labor detachment, and then to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. Anne, George and Magda spent the rest of WWII in Budapest’s Jewish Ghetto. Magda’s tenacity kept the family from starving or freezing to death until the Red Army liberated Budapest in April 1945. When her father returned home later in 1945, having somehow survived Mauthausen and the long march home, he was so filthy and emaciated that Anne and George at first thought him a beggar.
The family’s circumstances did not improve under the new communist regime: as a former landowner, Anne’s father was considered “an enemy of the people.” In 1949, he paid smugglers to take the family to Austria. Once safely across the iron curtain, the family was helped by Magda’s surviving brother. George enrolled in a vocational school to learn the textile business, and Anne was able to finish her senior year at a Hungarian high school in Innsbruck, Austria. In 1951, the World Student Relief organization awarded Anne a scholarship to the University of Western Ontario in Canada. The scholarship also paid for Anne’s passage on the SS Nelly, an old WWII freighter.
After graduating in 1955 with a BS in Chemistry, Anne got a job with the Aluminum Company of Canada in Arvida (now Jonquière) in northern Quebec. Arvida was a cold but convivial place, full of European immigrants. One of them was Michael Fenerty, who had emigrated from Liverpool in 1952. Anne and Mike married in 1955, their son David was born in 1956, and Anne was able to bring her parents out in 1958. In 1959, the family moved to Flint, Michigan, where Mike began work at AC Spark Plug. In 1961, Anne gave birth to her second son Robert. During the ten years she lived in Michigan, Anne worked as a science teacher at a high school and at a community college, and got her MS in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Michigan. From 1969 to 1971, the family lived in the UK, where Mike worked for General Motors and Anne did post-graduate studies at the Rothamstead Research Laboratory.
Anne would probably say that she really came into her own once the family moved to Colorado in 1971, so that Mike could work in Golden as the head production engineer of Coors Porcelain (currently CoorsTek). Anne wisely insisted that the family move to Boulder, and when she saw the Flatirons, she soon recognized that chemistry was not her real vocation.
Although she got her real-estate license and became a real-estate investor, her real passion remained the outdoors, so she joined the Colorado Mountain Club and other outdoor hiking and skiing groups. Anne loved the Colorado backcountry and planned many cross-country skiing and hiking trips for friends and family, with a particular interest in finding wildflowers and birds. Until the last year of her life, she lived to hike, frequently outpacing her caregivers as she raced along trails in Boulder’s open space parks. Mike and Anne enjoyed travelling internationally, including to the Galapagos, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Costa Rica, Europe and the UK. In addition, she developed an interest in duplicate bridge, eventually becoming a Life Master.
As a dedicated social activist, Anne soon got involved with local politics, becoming a force in the Boulder Democratic Party. Beyond that, she was a member of the Gray Panthers and the Colorado Social Legislation Committee, the latter of which fought for the rights of farm workers and renters. Anne was unsuccessful in her bid to win a seat on the Boulder City Council, losing by less than one percent of the vote, and also couldn’t prevent construction of the “Great Wall of NOAA” on the NIST property. Still, she never stopped fighting for the causes she believed in. Her last great cause was Rocky Flats, where the cover-up of an incomplete remediation of radioactive waste put many workers and local residents at risk.
Anne was a lively, generous and good-hearted person, who remained loyal to her friends. She gladly invited many of those friends to stay at her South Boulder home, along with relatives and foreign exchange students, so that they too could share her enthusiasm for Colorado. She regularly hosted musicians who came here to play in the Colorado Music Festival – although she would be the first to say that music was not her strong suit.
Anne’s husband, Mike, preceded her in death on January 23, 2023 at the age of 91. Anne’s only sibling, her younger brother Georg (György) Fischer of Hohenems, Austria, predeceased her in 2020. Anne is survived by David Fenerty and daughter-in-law Dr. Aniko Toth of Miskolc, Hungary and Boulder, Colorado, son and daughter-in-law Robert and Judy Fenerty of San Jose, California, and nieces and nephews in Austria and Germany.
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