Agnes Balint: personal accounts of World War Two in Hungary

Agnes Balint (née Schachter) was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Budapest. Her parents were Jolan (née Gluck) and Francis Schachter, who was an engineer and director of Agrarglobus, part of the Weiss Manfred conglomerate. Her mother's parents were living with them. She went to a Jewish preparatory school and later to a state school until she was 17 years old.

In 1941 she married her childhood sweetheart, Janos Kurti, a civil engineer. One year later, Janos Kurti was taken to a forced labour camp in the Ukraine where he died in December 1942 in a fire at the camp. Agnes gave birth to their son, Gabriel Geza, in September 1942.

Agnes Balint lived through the Second World War in Budapest seeing her fellow Jews being arrested and deported. She and her son managed to hide and eventually flee Budapest with the help of some Christian friends who provided temporary shelter and forged documents. She managed to avoid moving to a designated Jewish house and went into hiding in the country, in Ordas, in 1944.

Agnes Balint nominated her rescuers Zsófia Mesterhazi (née Ditróy), Haas Ödönnéand Jozsef Strahl to be Yad Vashem's "Righteous amongst the Nations" in 2006.

In 1947 she got married to a Hungarian Jew, Andrew Balint, who was already a British subject. She moved with her son and mother to London where she worked as an electrolyst. Her son Gabriel Geza Balint-Kurti later married Kitty Stein (see WL1753).

Donated by Agnes Balint