Born into Tyranny:
By: Michaela Walcott
Tags: Austria, Refugees, Holocaust, Hungary, Communism

An infant on the brink of death. On the morning of January 13, 1945, a baby was born near the tail end of World War II, in a concentration camp in Vienna, Austria. Her mother, Rozália was separated from her baby by the Germans in the camp. Cold, hungry, alone, and incredibly sick; trapped in the Wiener Neustadt concentration camp, a sub-camp of the Mauthausen camps. The infant is my grandmother, Erzsébet Zsedényi, and she was on a path of certain death.

On January 24, 1945, the Austrian camp was liberated by the Allies in the first attempts to save those affected by World War II. My grandmother’s biological mother, Rozália, assumed her baby died in the camp and never looked for her. Rozália instead left for the United States with a Japanese-American soldier named Henry Morita and started a new life in San Francisco.

My grandmother’s small, shivering body was found by another camp survivor who had lost her own baby and was able to nurse the infant while waiting to be saved. The baby was on the cusp of rescue, though she was malnourished and scared — the world looked bleak.

Looking to aid those in need after the indescribable horror in Wiener Neustadt, a woman named Ita Zsedényi found a near-death baby girl and claimed her as her own. Ita brought my grandmother away from the certainty of death in the camps and into a life in Budapest, Hungary.

Ita Zsedényi with my grandmother, Erzsébet.

Ita was unmarried due to her fiancé being killed by German Soldiers during the war, however, she kept her fiancé’s family name of Zsedényi. She pretended to have been pregnant with the child to ensure she would not be caught illegally smuggling a baby into Hungary. Away from the horrors of her start to life, the infant, now named Erzsébet, Hungarian for Elisabeth, was under the safety of the family.

Hungary post World War II, however, was not as safe as anyone would have hoped. Due to the lack of infrastructure, water, electricity, food, and security; adequate quality of life for Hungarians post-war was almost non-existent. Ita did her best to raise the infant on food stamps and the best care she could muster, however, the malnutrition due to inadequate food sources and unreliable conditions caused serious complications.

Budapest, Hungary after World War II.

Erzsébet was sick and thin, struggling to survive. To the outside world, she was part of the Zsedényi family, however, she was denied by her adopted family. They treated her as an outcast, and this made life exponentially harder. She now had only Ita and her grandmother to help raise her, and her determination to be productive and a valued part of her family grew.

As the years passed, she worked to support herself and her family. At age 6 to 8 she was going each day to the local market to help peasants do menial labor jobs in an effort to obtain two or three apples to provide for her family. She would barter certain food stamps for better ones, like meat for her mother so they could have a more adequate source of food instead of just bread and water.

A few years passed and she began singing in the Hungarian National Children’s Choir called Nemzeti Ifjúsági Kórus at age 9 to 13. She is noted as a founding member of Nemzeti Ifjúsági Kórus from the years 1954 to 1958 with accolades from her teachers and friends. She was also a member of Erzsébet Sőnyi’s children’s opera at Princess Makrancos, a notable Hungarian Opera.

Erzsébet is pictured here in the Hungarian National Children’s Choir called Nemzeti Ifjúsági Kórus. She is in the second row from the bottom, first on the left.

As an esteemed vocalist and top of her group, she found comfort in making music and being a part of a bigger picture. Attending college at the Budapest University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture from 1964 to 1965, she would then receive her Doctorate degree in Marxism and find her passion for music and film.

This path into music started her career as a Hungarian Composer in 1964 and started her work into the Hungarian Film Television industry. She achieved an esteemed award called the Cannes Film Award and was regularly invited to performances and showings by directors after creating music for their films. Hungarian National Radio, also known as Magyar Rádió is Hungary’s main source of radio and my grandmother became a valued part of their team as she worked to create a beautiful space with music.