A Message of Hope and Remembrance: Piri Piroska Bodnar

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will lead the country in commemorating Days of Remembrance this week. This year’s theme is Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue. AuthorHouse has chosen to act by recording and preserving survivor legacies for future generations so nothing like the Holocaust ever happens again. AuthorHouse features a survivor’s story every day this week.

Holocaust survivor and AuthorHouse author, Piri Piroska Bodnar, is the fifth of our featured Holocaust Survivors this week. Fortunately for all of us, she and her husband, Zoltan, have recorded their stories as legacies for future generations in her book, Out of the Shadows.

Piri and Zoltan Bodnar’s stories begin as individual trials as they are subjected to “forced labor, near starvation and transports from labor camps to death camps.” Their determination to survive “even when they were certain that survival was not possible” is what merges their tales into a single story.

Having “endured and witnessed unprecedented brutality,” Piri and Zoltan survived to meet in a Displaced Person’s Camp soon after the War’s end. They fell in love and married in Bavaria just outside the camp. This time their determination drove them to start their lives anew.

Out of the Shadows reflects on “the joy and pain of liberation, and the journey that led them to a welcoming and renewed life in Sweden ... Canada ... and finally to the United States.”

In 2003, Piri was honored by the Californian Lutheran University for “her contributions as a lecturer, mentor and friend.” She and Zoltan both present lectures to students with the message that “we must never forget. For hate in its extreme can take us to the very abyss of inhumanity.”