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Oral history interview with Louis Bakay

Oral History | Digitized | Accession Number: 1990.338.1 | RG Number: RG-50.037.0001

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    Oral history interview with Louis Bakay

    Overview

    Interview Summary
    Dr. Louis Bakay, born in 1917 in Hungary, describes growing up in a non-Jewish family in Budapest; his father being a professor of surgery at the medical school in Budapest; attending the medical school; becoming a surgeon in the Hungarian Army around 1942; conditions in Hungary during the war; antisemitism in Eastern European countries, especially in the lower classes in the cities; restrictions on Jews; the German occupation and the emergence of Hungarian Nazis; the atrocities against the Jews starting; the deportation of Jews, including some of his friends, in 1944; Admiral Horthy being unsuccessful in his attempts to limit the deportations; people not believing the stories of exterminations; listening to BBC broadcasts in Hungarian, which were full of obvious misinformation; the story of a respected Jewish lady in a university town, where the whole faculty came to the deportation station to see her off as a sign of solidarity instead of trying to hide her; Jews being hunted down during the last few months of the war; working for the Red Cross in the fall of 1944; meeting Wallenberg and the Catholic Church saving a number of Jews; Jewish refugees and working in a large monastery where he performed many operations under difficult conditions and had unqualified assistants (he shows a photograph of one operation); his hospital work during the winter of 1945 and 1946; the difficult conditions in Hungary after the war; seeing the return of concentration camp survivors; not knowing if his parents survived for two years but finding them later; deciding to leave Hungary in 1947; going first to Prague, Czech Republic and then to Stockholm, Sweden; being invited to Boston, MA to work at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard where he stayed until 1961; moving to Buffalo, NY; getting married to a Canadian woman in Boston; his daughter and son; believing he is better off in the US than he would have been in Hungary; visiting Hungary with his children; a book published in Hungarian in the 1970s which credits him with his surgical work in the monastery; and his reflections on the war and Holocaust.
    Interviewee
    Louis Bakay
    Interviewer
    Mrs. Toby Back
    Date
    interview:  1990 March 05

    Physical Details

    Language
    English
    Extent
    1 videocassette (VHS) : sound, color ; 1/2 in..

    Rights & Restrictions

    Conditions on Access
    There are no known restrictions on access to this material.
    Conditions on Use
    No restrictions on use

    Keywords & Subjects

    Corporate Name
    Royal Hungarian Army

    Administrative Notes

    Provenance
    Toby Ticktin Back of the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo conducted the interview with Louis Bakay on March 5, 1990 with the cooperation and support of WIVB-TV in Buffalo, NY. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History branch received copies of interviews from the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo from 1990 - 1993. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives received the collection by transfer from the Oral History branch in February 1995.
    Record last modified:
    2023-11-16 08:08:10
    This page:
    https:​/​/collections.ushmm.org​/search​/catalog​/irn511760

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