Biography
Dorottya (Dolly) and her twin sister Ida Marianne (Mari) Dezsoefi are the daughters of Johanna Selinger Dezsoefi. They were born on January 31, 1930 and raised in luxury by their mother and grandfather, Mozes Selinger, a prominent Jewish jeweler in Budapest. In 1938 Johanna married George Paul, a non-Jewish Serbian jeweler, and moved with her daughters to Subotica in northern Serbia. The girls received instruction in their home in Serbo-Croatian and Catholicism from a local priest. Following the public hanging of Jewish communists in Subotica in March 1941, Dolly and Mari were sent to a convent school in Budapest. The girls remained there until the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, when the nuns were no longer willing to hide Jewish children. The girls then hid for six months at the Hotel Lukacs in Budapest with their mother and stepfather. When Johanna was arrested and sent to a work camp in October 1944, Dolly and Mari went to hide with the son of a family friend. The family was reunited in January 1945. With the help of Elizabeth Tieberger, Johanna's older sister, Dolly, Mari, and their cousin, Dorothea (Babi), were smuggled to Subotica by Russian soldiers. Dolly attended school in Subotica for two years before returning to Budapest to await her Hungarian passport. After she received it in April 1948, she left immediately for Switzerland. There is met her fiancé, Janos Fenjves and married him on May 8, 1948 in Paris. They left for Venezuela one month later. There they had two children but soon divorced. Dolly later married Yozef Tiger and emigrated to Canada in 1961.
