Before the war, Hungary was home to 742,800 Jews. Nearly 400,000 were murdered by the German army. RTVE.es speaks with a Hungarian Holocaust survivor.
It was 1944, and war had engulfed Europe. News of Nazi atrocities spread faster than bombs, and fear spread like a plague through Hungary’s Jewish community. “Although the adults tried to shield us children from the grim news, when the bombings began, the danger was clear—even to a child,” recalls Marion Eppinger, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor.
In the early years of the conflict, most Jews in Hungary faced increasingly harsh legal discrimination. As Nazi influence expanded across Europe, Budapest adhered to Berlin’s anti-Jewish laws. By the late 1930s, Hungary had restricted Jewish participation in law, medicine, business, press, and culture. Marion, then a child, remembers it well. She came from a non-religious Jewish family in central Budapest. “The Nuremberg anti-Jewish laws barred us from eating nutritious foods like meat, sweets, or butter. My father had to hand over his company to a frontman because Jews couldn’t hold professional degrees or lead businesses. Being treated as non-citizens and stripped of basic rights simply for being Jewish was the first shock that hit us,” she tells RTVE.es.
**“Treated as Non-Citizens”**
In 1941, Hungary, following the Nazi model, banned marriages and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews. That same year, the first deportations began. However, hatred had already taken root. “There’s always a warning sign first—an attempt to exclude people from society. When that fails, they are directly eliminated. But there are many steps in between, starting with targeting the community and stripping them of their social roles,” explains Luis Ferreiro, director of the Auschwitz Exhibition.
Hitler’s distrust of his Hungarian allies led to plans for occupation. The decision to annihilate the Jewish population was made in 1942, but it wasn’t until March 1944, when Germany occupied Hungary, that mass deportations to concentration camps began. “World War II unfolded in two phases. The first was a traditional war, with professional armies fighting for geopolitical goals. From 1941 onward, new tactics emerged—direct attacks on Jewish populations, stigmatization, segregation, and the establishment of ghettos. These were the precursors to deportation and the industrial-scale extermination that began in 1942,” says Enrique de Villamor, president of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Institute in Spain and director of the Human Rights Department at the University of Burgos.
Marion Eppinger was 11 when the Holocaust abruptly upended her life. According to Eichmann’s list, Hungary had approximately 742,800 Jews, the largest Jewish population in Europe not yet conquered by the Führer. “My parents had learned about the Nazis’ plans to exterminate Jews in Europe and, without telling us children, began planning our survival. We obtained fake passports and crossed into Slovakia, where a Hungarian family hid us at great risk to their own lives and those of their five children,” she recounts.
**The Holocaust’s Most Iconic Symbol**
Most members of her community were not as fortunate. First, they were excluded from society, then confined to ghettos, and finally, between May 15 and June 9, Hungarian authorities deported nearly 400,000 Jews to concentration and death camps. The majority arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau. One in three Jews killed at that camp was a Hungarian citizen. However, the Nazi machinery also murdered Romani people, Polish Christians, politicians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, sex workers, and anyone who deviated from the Third Reich’s ideals. Auschwitz became the most infamous symbol of Adolf Hitler’ anti-Jewish policies. “In 1942, the Wannsee Conference decided on the Final Solution—the systematic extermination of Jews. Auschwitz became the first large-scale model of this industrial death factory,” explains de Villamor. Forced labor was the only way to delay an inevitable death, a grim reality captured in haunting images.
The Holocaust remains a stark reminder of humanity’s capacity for cruelty—and resilience. Marion Eppinger’s story is one of survival, but it also underscores the millions of childhoods stolen by hatred and violence. As the world remembers the victims, her testimony serves as a call to ensure such atrocities are never repeated.
