I, Kathleen Horowitz, nee Katalin Naomi Steinherz, was born in Budapest, Hungary a year and a half after the end of WWII. I am the child of holocaust survivors. When I was one year old, and developed meningitis. Those were days before antibiotic treatments, and even though I survived, I became deaf as a result of the infection.
During the 1930s the Hungarian government gradually reduced the rights of the Jewish population. They could not attend the Universities, practice professions, own property or jewelry. After the outbreak of WWII in 1939 the Hungarians, who were allies of the Germans, and forced all able bodied Jewish males into forced labor brigades to aid the war effort. Most of them died on the Russian front. By March 1944 it was clear that the Germans were losing the war and the Hungarians wanted to get out. To prevent this, German troops occupied Hungary, March 19 1944, replaced the government with a puppet Nazi regime and instituted even more harsh anti-Jewish laws. To insure that the Jewish population complied, they took prominent members of the community away as
