Our Stories

Born Veronika Deutsch in an area on the outskirts of Budapest in 1938, the Calvary Hospital patient says that her cancer has metastasized. It’s July 1st, 2024; time, she says, to document her survival story.

She tells Chaplain Helen Odell and Rabbi Rachmiel Rothberger, Director of Jewish CommunityRelations, that she wants to preserve her memories and truth, and that she needs to explain and reclaim her real identity.

“I am a Holocaust survivor. I have not talked about it often,” she begins.

“One day my mother came over with a yellow star and put it on my coat. And then she said to me, ‘You’re going to wear that star from now on,’ and I remember saying, ‘Why?’”

Soon after, Veronika and her parents – like thousands of Jews – sought safety inside Budapest’s city limits. It was 1942. They escaped in the middle of the night.

“The last memory I have is my puppy running after our train, and we had to leave him.”

They moved into a small apartment with extended family. By 1944, however, conditions had changed drastically. German occupation severely restricted Jewish life, ghettos had been established, synagogues had been destroyed, and deportations from the suburbs of Budapest to Auschwitz-Birkenau had begun.

“I remember this clunking on cobblestone and the Germans ordering everybody out. They made you line up and stand there,” Veronika recalls, vividly.

“I [saw a] German take the baby from the mother, and… he threw this baby against the wall and the next thing I see is blood just falling. My mother covered my eyes. I can never forget that scream.

The next morning it was pouring rain. We were standing in a big field. That’s where they were loading people up for the wagons,” she says.

“There’s too many things I remember that I wish I didn’t remember. I wish I didn’t have the memories.”

Veronika and her family hid in locked, stifling basement storage units. She recalls hearing her grandfather being beaten by soldiers. Food was scarce.

Bodies piled up in the courtyard. Her father’s resourcefulness and determination helped them survive.

It was the heroic work of Swedish and Swiss diplomats Raoul Wallenberg and Carl Lutz that saved all of their lives. Together with other envoys and representatives, Wallenberg and Lutz protected tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from deportation and death by issuing security documents and establishing safe houses. Like some other Jews, Veronika and her family also converted to Catholicism as a means of protection. She was baptized and received Holy Communion.

“If the Germans stopped [you], and you showed you were Catholic, then they let you go, but you had to be baptized to get the paper,” she explains.

Almost everything in Budapest had been destroyed or in shambles by the war’s end. More than a half million Hungarian Jews had been murdered.

“I remember my father took me one day and he said, ‘That is a synagogue.’ And there was a big lock on the gate. Not that I’d ever been in any synagogue. I didn’t get to learn [my religion]. It was the war.”

When she and her family finally made it to America in 1956, after the Hungarian Revolution, Veronika avoided talking about the Holocaust:

“I never brought it up. I never talked to my kids about it other than they knew I was born Jewish.” Inside, however, she was tormented.

“From the time I was 18, I was hovering between my Jewish and Catholic faiths. I didn’t know where I belonged,” she explains, gesturing to her rosary and angel statues on her hospital room lunch table.

“Veronika was afraid for most of her life to express the fact that she was and is Jewish,” said Rabbi Rothberger. “That was a fear that she lived with, always.”

“She was trying to resolve that conflict. There was something inside her that was yearning to reconnect with her Judaism.”

At Calvary, there was something that would enable her to feel good about and rediscover her Jewish heritage: the Torah.

“The central piece of Jewish tradition, the Torah is our living document, our guide for everyday life. It is the written word of God. It is the written law,” explained Rabbi Rothberger.

“Calvary is home to a very special Torah scroll, rescued from Czechoslovakia after the war, and restored by Calvary. Veronika told us she had never seen a Torah, let alone touched one.” So, she did.

With Rabbi Rothberger and other Calvary staff she loved beside her, Veronika took a spiritual journey two floors down from her hospital bed to the Calvary chapel, where she was presented with the Torah. She kissed it, wept over it, and prayed at its side: “There is only one God.”

“Veronika’s experience at Calvary definitely helped her release the shackles of fear that the Holocaust had created for her and break free in her journey and reconnect to Judaism,” said Rabbi Rothberger.

Veronika wanted her story to give people hope and inspiration, according to Fr. Robert Joerger, who met and prayed with Veronika during her stay at Calvary over the summer.

“Sometimes we share stories when we’re supposed to. We meet the stories when they’re ready to be told, and we meet our own stories when we’re ready to have healing,” he said.

Veronika passed away on August 28th. As per her wishes, she was given a Jewish funeral, through the generosity of Calvary donors and the support of old and new friends, including Calvary Chaplain Helen Odell.

“Veronika was meant to be at Calvary,” Odell said. “She wanted people to know that what a child learns in life, they take with them. They take that fear through to adulthood. Calvary is what Veronika needed because we are open, loving, and we care. We connect to people quickly. We bond.”

Veronika had told everyone she encountered at the hospital that Calvary was her home.

“I feel like I got part of myself back here. There’s so much love and care around. At Calvary, I feel that scaredness went away, that I could be myself,” Veronika said.

“Wonderful, mystical things happen all the time at Calvary,” Rabbi Rothberger observed. “We call them divine interventions. There are no coincidences here.”

The Best Hospice Care in the New York Metro-Area