Agi Bar-Sela on Jewish Budapest, Hungary’s 1944 Catastrophe

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2026/02/28

Agi Bar-Sela is a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor whose testimony appears in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum collections. Raised in Budapest, she describes a Jewish world spanning Orthodox practice and Hungary’s Neolog tradition, then the rupture that followed Germany’s occupation of Hungary in 1944. In her account, wartime persecution, hunger, and the loss of male relatives shaped childhood and memory. She recounts joining a Zionist youth group and emigrating in 1949, travelling via Vienna and Italy before settling in Israel. A 2024 portrait project also profiles her as a survivor reflecting on aging, family, and endurance. She shares her story today. 

In conversation, Scott Douglas Jacobsen speaks with Agi Bar-Sela. She recalls family ties to the Fejér és Dános building contractor tradition and the discipline of upper-class Orthodox life, alongside Neolog influences. The interview turns to rupture: Germany’s 1944 occupation of Hungary, the mass deportations, and the precariousness of Budapest’s “yellow-star houses.” Bar-Sela describes postwar displacement and a 1949 Zionist youth migration—walking to borders, regrouping in Allied-occupied Vienna, travelling by train to Italy, and sailing to Israel—followed by kibbutz shock, hunger memories, and hard-earned resilience, and a commitment to testimony.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, my first question is: where and when were you born?

Agi Bar-Sela: First of all, I was born a long time ago. I am not a typical Hungarian Jew. On my mother’s side of the family, my grandfather was one of the leading builders in Hungary. He bore a family name that, in Hungarian, means “white”: Fejér, an older form of fehér, “white.” His father, my great-grandfather, was also very wealthy. They started a building company, and it grew so much that my grandfather and my grandmother’s brother ran Fejér és Dános(Fejér and Dános), which became one of the largest construction firms in Hungary up to the Second World War, including during part of that period.

They built many of the country’s prominent and well-known buildings. The company, a Jewish firm called Fejér és Dános, was known throughout Hungary. My grandfather held an honorific status roughly comparable to a “sir”, not an exact English equivalent, but close in social standing. Even today, not only Jews but Hungarians in general still send me documents, photographs, and other materials related to this company, because that level of achievement has never really been repeated in Hungary.

So, on my mother’s side, I come from one of the more prominent Jewish families. The family name involved in the company was Fejér és Dános. Yes, in that social world, they were treated as sirs and ladies.

It is now remembered as one of Hungary’s largest historical construction companies. Given that I come from a very, very wealthy family, I do not know what else I can add. 

Fejér is an older form of the Hungarian word for “white,” fehér. Historically, the spelling shifted; you can think of it as dropping the h and using a j, but it preserves the same basic meaning of “white” or “light.”

They were one of the biggest firms in the country. My grandfather was treated as a kind of “sir,” my grandmother as a “lady,” and I come from a very original, distinguished family. Fortunately, we also have cousins in London. We became close with them only in the last twenty years; they are the sons and grandsons of my grandfather’s business partner.

There are many things I know that other people do not. It is striking that a very Orthodox Jewish family built one of Hungary’s largest construction companies.

Do you understand the difference between ordinary religious observance and the rigorous observance of Orthodox communities? My mother’s side belonged to the strictest form of Orthodoxy, yet they built the country’s largest construction enterprise at the time. On my father’s side, they were also in business, and my grandfather there was president of a Neolog Jewish community, the more modern, reform-oriented wing of Hungarian Jewry. So we were connected across different parts of the Jewish world, from strict Orthodoxy on one side to Neolog leadership on the other.

I saw my grandfather working closely with her father. My mother, of course, did not work; that was not expected of women in that world. That was another kind of environment I grew up in. It is difficult to fully understand how this all happened because so many of those families originally came from the Carpathian Mountains, from Galicia, and were Orthodox Jewish, arriving in Hungary and then building fortunes.

A child like me was not spoiled, because spoiling children was not the custom. The higher you rose socially, the less you spoiled your children. I find that interesting as well.

Jacobsen: What was the ethic behind that style of child-rearing?

Bar-Sela: I do not know exactly. I think wealthy Jews did not show off, which may have been part of it. And of course, I also come from a very old family. I went to the Jewish Gymnasium.

There were many things I did not see or did not receive, baruch hashem. We were Orthodox Jews at the Jewish Gymnasium. We were not ultra-Orthodox, but we were religious and well-educated. The Gymnasium, the Jewish Gymnasium of the Dohány district in Budapest, was one of the best schools in Europe.

Jacobsen: How would you characterize Hungary before the Second World War?

Bar-Sela: When I first knew it, I was a child. Coming from a very important and very wealthy family, you do not see everything, because life is different at that level. For example, we lived in a building my grandfather’s company built, six floors high, with every apartment spanning half a floor, the larger ones.

We lived in a five-room apartment, with staff working for us. My mother did not know how to cook, nor did my grandmother, not even an egg. There was a kitchen maid, a maid, and a cleaner who took care of the house. This was not the typical Jewish way of life. It was something you would find more commonly in Canada, I think, than in Israel, the lifestyle of wealthier Hungarian Jews in Budapest, the big city.

It is difficult to tell the story, because you remember only what you knew. Money always helps; that is absolutely true. When the Nazis arrived, it made no difference whether you were wealthy or poor: a Jew was a Jew. And of course, they said very little about us publicly.

Unfortunately, all the men in my family, my father, all my uncles, were killed during the war. None of them returned alive. Only the women and children survived. There was so much to learn about what the Jews in Hungary endured, and what Austrians or Poles at the time did not even know how to imagine.

Money, money, money, but when the Nazis came into Budapest in March 1944, everything changed. When the Western front collapsed and the fighting intensified, those Jews who were not in Budapest, the poorer Jews in the countryside, were taken away first. And there is nothing good to say about Hungarians in that period, nothing at all. Perhaps that is harsh, but I believe it is true.

Jacobsen: I understand. 

Bar-Sela: I do not know what kind of family you come from.

Jacobsen: Mainly Dutch and Norwegian background: broadly Northwestern European and wider European, mix of Dutch and American immigrants, Canadian nationality.

Bar-Sela: Dutch Jewish or Dutch?

Jacobsen: I am often asked whether I am Jewish because of the name Jacobsen, Israel Jacobson, and Reformed Judaism circa 1810. I do not know.

Bar-Sela: I think we cannot know everything. The fact is that in Hungary, the deportations began in 1944, and by 1945, it was over. We were the last country where Jews were killed and taken to Auschwitz and elsewhere, murdered wherever they could be found, with everything collapsing around them.

Nothing good could have happened to the Jews if it were not for the Russians entering Hungary. The best thing was that the Zionist movement began organizing, and we were able to leave Hungary. The Russians arrived, and we could get out; that was wonderful.

I met Amos’s wife in 1945, the first time the Zionists gathered children in a camp together for protection. That is where we met. We were less than four years old.

Jacobsen: What was the journey from Hungary to Israel like? How did you come to Israel?

Bar-Sela: First of all, I was in a Zionist children’s group by myself. No one else in the family was involved. My second grandfather, the only one who survived, belonged to the Neolog Jewish community rather than the Orthodox one. He was already an older man, active in business and on the stock exchange.

One day in 1949, I came home from the Zionist group and told my mother I wanted to go to Israel. My mother said, “We will ask your grandfather,” meaning my father’s father, the only one still alive, and we would see what he said. She told him that she would also speak with her Zionist friends in Hungary to hear their opinion. The next day, he called my mother and said the Zionists told him, “Not tomorrow, yesterday.” In other words, the child should leave the country immediately.

I was in a Zionist group, and so was Amos’s mother, though not in the same one. That is how we left, almost walking all the way to Vienna, via Austria. From there, we were under Zionist direction and education. We spent a few weeks in Vienna.

At that time, if you are interested in this history, Vienna was under Allied control: the Americans, the British, and the French. We were all under their administration after the Nazis fell. I am not sure whether you know that part of history. From Vienna, they took us by train to Italy, and from there we boarded a ship to Israel with many other Jewish refugees.

We were seventeen, seventeen and a half years old, which in everyday life means young women, not little girls. That was our Aliyah, our departure from Hungary, and it was almost unbelievable to experience.

We walked from a Hungarian train station to the Slovakian border, 32 kilometres. We walked under border control, guided by people who earned a great deal of money arranging these crossings. We were not transported by car. There was no rescue escort, no military convoy.

It was not an easy journey. There were dangers everywhere, and by then we were not yet in Israel, not yet in Palestine. I cannot know exactly what interests you most. I can only tell you what I remember.

Leaving Hungary was the best thing possible. Not staying there even one more day was a blessing. Hungary was a terrible place for us. Including my father, all my uncles, and all the young men in our family, none of them came back from the war. Everyone was killed, my father, my uncles, all of them.

On top of that, my great-grandmother, my great-grandfather’s mother, was also lost.

Bar-Sela: It was not an easy life in those days. We were just ordinary children. And Hungary was a terrible country for Jews once the Germans were inside. It is a wonder that we are here at all. 

Amos’s father took him to Hungary so he could see and understand what happened. They went together. It was very meaningful. His father was brilliant, and I think Amos learned a great deal about what the family went through and how we survived. Of course, survival was rare. No family in Israel could say, “We all survived.” I survived, but my father did not. My husband’s brother did not. My father-in-law did not. All the men were killed. We did not know any other kind of life.

We did not know what it meant to live an everyday life. Every day was something different, something threatening. And then the Russians entered as well.

There was one very tragic event in my family. My great-grandmother on my grandfather’s side was very old. My grandfather decided she could not stay with all of us in the Jewish house. The “Jewish house” meant we had to wear the yellow star and were all kept together under strict control. They believed she would die from the bombings and the chaos surrounding us, so they decided she should go to a care home, an Orthodox home.

Soon after she arrived, in early January 1945, Hungarian forces, not Germans, came in and killed all the Jews, all the doctors, all the nurses, and burned the hospital. The Hungarians did that. So yes, people travel there now and say it is beautiful, the food is terrific, and so on, but for us, that history is never gone.

Jacobsen: I have not been to Hungary.

Bar-Sela: Why are you interested in Hungary?

Jacobsen: I am primarily interested in Holocaust history, and Hungary is part of that wider narrative. I am also a traveller. I have been to Lithuania, Poland, France, Switzerland, Italy, Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Ukraine, Greece, and elsewhere. One central question: What is the biggest lesson from your early life, in reflection?

Bar-Sela: First of all, I was fortunate to have a very clever mother and a grandfather who cared for me more than anything. They understood that the child, I, had to leave Hungary. The communists were arriving, the Germans were still there in influence, the Nazis were still present in spirit, and antisemitism was everywhere. So I did not face opposition within my family. I believe it was an enormous decision on my mother’s part. She was a brilliant woman. And luckily, until the communists entirely took over, we were still financially secure. We could afford the “luxury,” if you can call it that, of sending the child out of Hungary, walking or not walking.

We all came out the same way, walking from Hungary to Czechoslovakia, then to Austria, and spending many months on the road.

I cannot always speak about it; I do not know whether it is interesting.

Jacobsen: It is interesting.

Bar-Sela: Everyone experiences things differently; that is important to understand. On the other side of my life, from my husband’s family, my father-in-law was a prominent Zionist leader in Hungary, a real builder of bridges with the Russians. He received a special passport, which was extremely rare. They had arrested my father-in-law and his wife, and my husband, their other son, did not return from Auschwitz. My father-in-law owned a factory and had connections with the British and with the Russians. Suddenly, he was summoned to the ministry, and they told him to write something; they handed him a passport, which was extraordinary. There were no passports like that then.

They told him he must leave Hungary with his wife, because everything was going to be destroyed, or he himself would be taken. So he received that passport, and that is how he left.

We had an exciting life overall, but also a deeply tragic one, losing everyone and almost everybody. Talking about it is easy in one sense, yet of course, it would have been better if none of it had happened, no father, no uncles, everyone gone. For my husband’s family as well: his father and mother were both alive in Israel, which was a miracle. Almost no one still had fathers. Some of us had a mother, an aunt, or a grandmother, but not everyone.

My mother and grandmother eventually escaped from the communists because my grandfather told my mother that my grandmother must be taken out of Hungary, because of the family’s wealth, and because of what would come. So my mother and grandmother came to Israel, which was no small achievement.

Ask if I should tell you something. I do not always know what interests you. I wanted my own children to have a better childhood than I did.

Jacobsen: How would you describe your early life in Israel?

Bar-Sela: I first came to a kibbutz. On the second day, they sent me to work in the fields, and I decided it was not for me; I would not stay there. So I left. I had a different kind of life than some others. My mother had friends who already had contacts in Israel, and I was given names and addresses of people I had never met. Once I knew I did not want to remain in the kibbutz, I began visiting and calling those people.

I stayed in a home located on the same street where I live now. Then I met my husband, and our life became more normal.

You never truly forget these things. You do not speak about them constantly, not to everyone, not all the time, but they remain with you. Losing your family, your uncles, everyone. Not eating enough, there was no food. Everybody was hungry all the time. There was no basic food at all.

Even now, I cannot imagine my home without certain foods that were unavailable during the war. Beans, for example, bean soup is something I eat every day, mostly red beans. Those things stay with you.

It is not only now, but it has also come up again every few years with another kind of life. Many Hungarian Jews from Budapest went to Canada, mainly to Toronto.

Jews should live in Israel. It is not always the best solution, and today it could be better, of course, but it is tough here. Politically, it is tough at the moment, and antisemitism is rising all over the world, which is astonishing.

I just had a cousin visiting from France yesterday. She said there is antisemitism in Paris; she had never heard her parents say that before. It came from within our own family. Things are not simple anywhere anymore. But I wish you a better life than we had.

You did not have to live under the Nazis. It honestly should have been another kind of life. I completely agree with everyone who says so. I cannot understand why people keep putting themselves in danger. Of course, we did our best for our children and grandchildren, but I still think staying far away from Hungarians is best for you. We did not need them, and they did not need us. They should live without us, and we without them.

Otherwise, let us hope things improve. Let us see what President Trump will do with us, how he will act. At the moment, our president is meeting him in the United States. It is a significant story. I am reading about it. But life is not easy right now.

You can ask me anything, anytime, it’s no problem. Whenever you have a question, I will find an answer. I am glad to speak with you.

Have a good life.

Jacobsen: Thank you.

Bar-Sela: Ciao. Bye-bye.

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