Erika Holocaust Survivor Testimony
Erika Fabian was born in 1940 in Budapest, Hungary, into a religious Jewish family. When she was just three years old, her father was taken to a forced labor camp and later died in Bergen-Belsen.
As persecution intensified, Erika, her mother, and her sister were forced from their home and lived under constant threat. Through extraordinary courage and resourcefulness, her mother kept them alive—moving them from place to place, securing false identities, and hiding them as Protestants.
At one point, Erika and her sister were rounded up by Hungarian Nazis, only to be unexpectedly saved by a man posing as a Nazi who was, in fact, a Jewish actor. They were later reunited with their mother and remained in hiding until liberation.
Even after the war, danger persisted under communist rule. In 1950, the family fled once again, enduring a perilous journey that included imprisonment, before finally reaching the United States in 1956. Erika was 16.
She later became an actress, dancer, and writer, sharing her story as a testament to survival. Her message is simple: learn how to survive—and never forget to live.
