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Brust family collection
Portrait of Szeren Schwarcz painted in 1943. Szeren was living in New York City, in the United States, with her husband, Adolf, when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, and started World War II (1939-1945). Szeren and Adolf were originally from Budapest, Hungary, where they had raised two children, Livia and Laszlo, and Adolf had run a wholesale watch business. In 1934, the couple’s first grandchild, Eva, was born to Livia and her husband, Elek Brust. Starting in 1938, Hungary began passing anti-Jewish laws modeled after Germany’s 1935 Nuremberg laws. In April 1939, Szeren and Adol...