My story: Another Holocaust survivor

Gibor Weinberger was born in Budapest in January 1935, to Arpád and Anna (Nusi) Weinberger. Arpád was a medical doctor, and was conscripted into forced labor in 1943, but since he was a doctor, he was sent to Komárom to work until 1944, when he was discharged. Following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, the family was forced to resettle in a Jewish district in Budapest, but after Arpád was rounded up with other neighborhood men, and never seen from again, neighbors decided to send Gibor to live with a great-aunt who was a Gentile, in Zuglo, a suburb of Budapest, where he was rejoined by his mother once she was able to escape from the Jewish ghetto. The two of them were sheltered by this aunt, Margit Vági, and her sisters, from November 1944 through January 1945, and Margit was posthumously recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2014. Following liberation in 1945, Gibor and his mother went to Ankara, Turkey, at the invitation of an aunt who had settled there prior to the war, and they remained there for several years, until immigrating to Israel. After serving in the army, Gibor found work in the dining room of a cruise ship, the S.S. Theodore Herzl, in 1957, and on one of his trips abroad, he reunited with members of his Hungarian extended family, Susan Foldes and John (Janos) Balint, who had immigrated to New York. During a Caribbean port-of-call, he met his future wife, Beryl, who he married in 1959. The two settled in New York, but eventually returned to her native Montreal, where he established a career in the hospitality industry and restaurant management.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Katherine Foldes

Gift of Katherine Foldes, 2015. Foldes is the daughter of Weinberger's second cousin, Susan (Balint) Foldes.