19 March 1944: Zsuzsanna Kalmar was just two years old when Nazi tanks rumbled into Budapest and began what Winston Churchill described as “the greatest, most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world.”
For the following five years, Suzi and her family escaped death several times at the hands of both the Germans and the Russians who ‘liberated’ Hungary in early 1945 before imposing their own form of brutal oppression.
Finally safe in Australia in 1949, Suzi struggled to adjust to her new life as a ‘reffo’, before enduring two failed marriages and the death of an infant son. Then, aged forty, she met the man who would change her life.
Now in her eighties, she is still teaching future generations about the lessons of the Holocaust. Suzi Smeed has written her inspiring life story to keep a light shining on anti-Semitism because... history shows that it can easily escalate from bigotry to genocide if good people ignore bad things.
