Ilona Seifert and her family

My family on the roof terrace of our home in Budapest, in a photo from the 1920s. My father (on the right), my mother (on the left), and me (the short one) and my sister in front. I don´t know who the other people are. They must be some of my parents? guests. My parents bought this house when they married in 1917. It was a single story house which they extended by building additional stories on top. We lived in it, and it also housed Daddy's bakery and soda water workshop. Instead of a roof, the house had a terrace, which my parents turned into a lovely garden for their two children. Features included a child's sandbox, a flower garden, and a beautiful set of garden furniture. They constructed this garden because the house itself had no garden. Behind the house was the soda-water workshop, a garage for the car, and stables for the horses. When the Arrow-Cross people, the Hungarian Nazis, seized my father's workshop, they found this garden terrace and used it as a base from which to fire at airplanes. One of the planes fired back and hit the house, which was almost completely destroyed.

The Centropa Collection at USHMM

The Centropa archive has been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. USHMM will soon offer a Special Collections page for Centropa.

Academics please note: USHMM can provide you with original language word-for-word transcripts and high resolution photographs. All publications should be credited: "From the Centropa Collection at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington, DC". 

Please contact collection [at] centropa.org (collection[at]centropa[dot]org).