Magdalena Horvath was married to Erny Szendrody, a Jewish man with a large family. When Magdalena’s mother-in-law received her notice for deportation, Magdalena asked her own mother for her papers. Fearing the consequences, her mother refused, but Magdalena took her mother’s papers anyway, and gave them to her mother-in-law and brought her to an apartment in the mountains where she lived as a gentile until the end of the war.
When her youngest brother-in-law was taken for deportation to Auschwitz, Magdalena rushed to the station and managed to get him off the train. She took him to her apartment where 2 of his brothers and a baby were already hiding. In the last months of the war, 28 Jews were hiding in Magdalena’s apartment.
Magdalena and her husband came to the United States in 1956 after the Hungarian Revolution. She is in her 90s and lives in California.
