My teddy bear is a painful but important reminder of my past
My teddy bear is a painful but important reminder of my past
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Sitting in a dark cupboard with my aunt beside me, all I could hear was my heavy heartbeat. Just moments earlier, my aunt, named Iby, saw a group of far-right Hungarian Arrow Cross Party members – who were working with the Nazi Germans – assembling in our apartment block’s courtyard getting ready to storm the building we were in.
![[John Hajdu: Holocaust survivor]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_235436665-951d-e1736419116548.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=154)
Thinking quickly, she grabbed me and knocked on a Christian neighbour’s door, who miraculously agreed to hide us. We could’ve been there for around an hour, but all I really remember from this moment is feeling terrified. So I clung on to the small teddy bear – which I call Teddy – in my pocket.
![[John Hajdu: Holocaust survivor]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_235436667-121c.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
Remarkably, the officers didn’t search the flat we were hiding in, so we were saved. My mother wasn’t so lucky, as she was captured that day and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. I was just seven years old and I credit my aunt and her quick thinking for still being alive today – 80 years later.
![[John Hajdu: Holocaust survivor]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_235436669-4573.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
I was born in the Hungarian capital of Budapest on April 29, 1937, and was an only child. My mother was a bookkeeper and my father was a director of an insurance company, so we were quite well off. We had a very nice flat in a predominantly Jewish well-to-do area and had an overall happy, comfortable life.
![[John Hajdu: Holocaust survivor]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/SEI_235436689-10dd.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
