Prewar family life in Hungary

Ernö (Ernest) Schiffer, born in Námesztó in 1893, studied medicine at university in Budapest. He enlisted in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I and was in charge of a medical unit on the Russian Front. In the 1920s, he worked at the Jewish Hospital in Budapest and specialized in the new field of radiology, developing techniques for the X-ray apparatus, various shutters, and cooling devices, and diagnostic dyes and methods. He also found time to study the new field in Vienna, Zurich, and Stockholm. The severe exposure to X-rays he received during this period likely later resulted in his early death from leukemia. He met Erzsébet while interning at the Jewish Hospital in Budapest. They married in 1928 and had János (John) in 1930. The family lived in Budapest next to City Park (Városliget). Ernö bought a car (an Opel) and learned to drive in the mid-1930s. Their daughter Éva was born in 1933. By about 1941 the Nazi threat was becoming more serious in Hungary. Ernö had a patient who was a Unitarian minister who agreed to baptize the Schiffers into the Unitarian church. Initially, Ernö was partly protected from the changing laws against Jews because of his military service and that he treated many influential persons (including the regent) as patients; there was also a minor distinction between Jews who had recently settled in Hungary and those whose families had lived there a long time. After March 19, 1944 yellow stars had to be worn and the family moved into a designated Jewish apartment. Ernö was able to obtain protective passports for the family from the Swedish embassy (through the Wallenberg initiative). Ernö was taken in a labor brigade in summer 1944 to dig trenches for the defense of the city; many of his family members went into hiding. In October 1944, the Schiffers were briefly moved into a house under Swedish embassy protection, and then back to their apartment at Katona Jozsef utca 23/a where they had kept a hidden store of food. Ernö had been marching with the labor brigade towards Germany but simply walked away from them one day and crossed the Danube by foot back to Budapest where he reunited with his family. The Schiffers remained together in the apartment during the Russian siege of the city until they were liberated in January 1945.