The Youngest Holocaust Survivor

Erika Nissanoff wasn’t yet born when World War II broke out. Her father’s parents, Ferenc and Aranka, were well-to-do Hungarians. They owned a mill where the entire community brought their grains to be processed. They also owned the local tavern at the corner. The townspeople would come to process their grain by day and enjoy drinks at night.

When World War II broke out, Erika's father, Imre, was deported to Ukraine. At the time of his departure, her mother, Gizella, was pregnant but didn’t know it. Things became bleak as she already had a five-year old child to look after, and now one on the way with no hope of her husband ever returning. She leaned heavily on her in-laws for support. Together, they lived in a large town called Debrecen in Hungary.

Shortly after Imre was deported, the Nazis transported all Jews out of Debrecen and put them on trains to Auschwitz. Erika’s mother and sister were placed on one such train. In a twist of fate, the train Erika’s mother and sister were on was confused with a train that had been bribed to be redirected to Austria, where the two of them were sent to a hospital.

“My mother, who was pregnant with me, was taken into this hospital to work. It was then taken over by Germans, but it was originally a Jewish hospital in a Jewish neighborhood. Interestingly enough, today the building is a yeshiva. The hospital was turned into a working camp.”

Although pregnant, Erika’s mother worked diligently in the hospital. Her husband was still detained in Ukraine, and her older daughter was placed in a kindergarten. Once in a while she would sneak out in the middle of the night to check that her daughter was still alive, risking her own life in the process.

Gizella gave birth to Erika on October 17, 1944. The doctor who delivered Erika was a Nazi.

“That’s why I am called a miracle baby. I don’t know why he let me live. The only thing I do know is that I was saved. My cousin lost both her father and mother. Her mother had been with us on the same train.”

Erika’s mother took care of her in the hospital. “She carried me around while she worked in the hospital. She breastfed me and did everything she could to keep me alive for as long as possible.”

Erika holding her wedding portrait, 1964

As the Nazis were being defeated, Erika’s mother saw a truck with American soldiers inside. She asked if they were heading to Hungary. They answered, “We will be passing by.” With her two daughters in her arms, she begged them to give her a ride in that direction. These American soldiers went out of their way to bring her all the way back home to Debrecen.

It was there that she was reunited with her husband and his parents. They had made a pact before separating that they would meet back at her in-laws’ home in Hungary if they survived. Erika’s mother, father, sister, and grandparents all survived the war.

By war’s end, Erika’s parents and grandparents had lost their wealth and their status. Communist Hungary took everything that was left and they had to rebuild from scratch. For the next 12 years of her life, Erika grew up under harsh Communist rule.

Her mother and father eventually had a third child, a baby boy. He became ill and was taken to the local hospital. At the time, there wasn’t enough supervision of infants in the hospital. The crib panels where he was kept were very wide, and the baby suffered a tragic accident. His head got caught between the crib bars and he suffocated.

After this, Erika recalls that her mother suddenly became very religious. She began covering her hair, keeping kosher, and dressing modestly. She had previously lost all her ties to religion because of Communism and persecution, but decided to make changes after her baby’s death.

The Escape

Once, three men came to her building in uniform and forced a religious man with a beard and sidelocks to start digging. “The soldiers assumed he was hiding gold or jewelry. He had to dig for about an hour and was sweating under his shtreimel. There was nothing he was hiding, but that image has never left my mind.”

Erika explained that a lot of young Jewish people joined the Communist party to survive. “If you wanted to do well, it was important to join the Communist party. Otherwise, you couldn’t get anywhere in life. We didn’t know any differently because we were so young.”

It was during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution that her family escaped.

Erika’s father had a mother who was elderly. “She must have been in her late eighties, and my father was the only child that had not been killed. He couldn’t leave her alone.”

Erika’s mother wanted to get out of Hungary immediately. All of her siblings had moved to America after the war. “My mother decided that she, my sister, and I should escape. We left my father behind to watch over his mother. We had no idea where we were going. Going to America was like trying to go to the moon. She took the two of us, and we got onto a train that she heard would be going close to the border. It was a nonsensical idea because we didn’t know the neighborhood.”

The family entered their local train station and asked the first person they saw, “Which train will bring us closest to Austria?”

The stranger pointed her towards a specific train, and Erika’s family hopped on.

A random person on the train asked, “Are you going to Vienna?”

Erika explained, “It could have been a Communist or anyone, but my mother said, ‘Yeah I’m going to such-and-such a place.’

“Another man approached my mother on the train and asked, ‘Are you trying to run away?’

“Naïvely, she answered, ‘Yes.’

“He said, ‘Me, too. You can get off the train and follow me.’

“He could have been a Communist. We went as far as we could on the train, and eventually got off with a bunch of other people.”

Erika with the author

When Erika and her family exited the train, they had no idea where they were. It was three in the morning, and pitch-black outside. Someone shined their flashlight to illuminate the path, knowing that they could be caught at any moment. They had no choice but to blindly continue.

Suddenly, someone standing in the middle of the road shouted, “Achtung!” which means stop in German.

“We got lucky. It was there that HIAS (The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) picked us up.”

The group had arrived in Germany, and we were finally safe. HIAS took them to a synagogue to sleep. They provided mattresses for them to stay overnight. Afterwards, a different train took them to Vienna, where documents were arranged for the group. It was here that they were reunited with Erika’s father.

While Erika’s father had initially stayed behind with his mother, he also procured information on how to cross the border. He soon said goodbye to his mother, whom he left in the hands of a caretaker, and attempted to escape. The first time he was caught and sent back to Hungary.

His second attempt began during one of the biggest snowstorms of the century. At one terrible moment, he felt he could not continue on, at which point his guide said, “If you stop, you’re a dead man.” He continued on, step by step, despite being unable to see even two feet in front of him.

Finally, the guide announced, “You are here. I am not going further. You are now on your own.” Her father kept walking until he met people that spoke German and he realized he was in Germany.

Erika and her husband with two grandsons

Eventually, he was reunited with his family in Austria at the synagogue. Together, they stayed in Austria for several months while waiting for their American visas. When their visas came through they were put on a military cargo plane which flew them to Camp Kilmer in New Jersey, where they stayed for one month before being reunited with family in Brooklyn New York. “The U.S. took care of us. This is where I lived from the time I was 12 years old.”

Erika claims that even though she grew up in Communist Hungary, the most painful part of her childhood was actually moving to the U.S. as a child, and not being able to speak the language. It was exceedingly difficult for her to fit in and the bullying that she endured was excruciating.

In 1964, Erika married at the young age of 19, right after high school, and moved to Los Angeles. “At the time, everyone got married as young as possible. I met my husband at a Shabbaton in the Borough Park Young Israel Synagogue.”

Antisemitism Today

Erika believes that today’s antisemitism has reached a new level. “We have to learn from the past and recognize that things can change at any moment. The world keeps changing, but not for the better, unfortunately. Hopefully we are not headed in the same direction, but things don’t look good.”

Erika remarks that just like people today can’t understand the reaction of the world in the face of Jewish persecution, the Jews in Europe didn’t understand their situation, either.

“Nobody has an answer, we just hope for the best.”

Photos by Lynn Abesera Photography