Reti, Andy

Andy Reti was born July 16, 1942 in Budapest, Hungary.  He is a child survivor from the Shoah.  Andy’s father did not survive those terrible years:  he was taken to a forced labour battalion and later murdered in Auschwitz Birkenau.  Andy, along with his mother and grandparents, survived the horrors of the war through good fortune and grit.  Andy described here the fateful day in October 1944 when the fateful knock came on their door;  the Hungarian Nazi Party – the Arrow Cross – was now in power, and the family was ordered to take their belongings on five minutes notice.  They were forcibly marched through the streets of Budapest, where they were jeered by the crowd and saw their meagre belongings stolen.  They were then held in an open air race track for several days, where the conditions were brutal.  At one point mothers were separated from their children, but Andy’s grandmother picked him up, and through the intervention of a policeman they were directed to a group that would ultimately be saved by Raoul Wallenberg.  The next few months found them in the ghetto, dealing with hunger and deprivation; on January 18, 1945 they were liberated at the hands of the Soviet Red Army.  The communist regime was soon in place, and when the revolution came in 1956, they escaped Hungary and came to Canada as refugees. In Canada, they settled in Winnipeg and went on to build new lives for themselves.  Andy has worked as a swimming instructor and cab driver and author and museum guide, and he has also been a speaker at the Toronto Holocaust  Center.  He was first interviewed for this project in September 2015, and in March 2024 he returned to Crestwood to speak to one of the Grade 10 History classes.