Watch Iván Balkányi’s testimony clip, then read his short biography.
Iván Balkányi was born in 1930, in Kosice. His bourgeois family preserved its Hungarian identity, in spite of the fact that Kosice was annexed to Czechoslovakia as a result of the Trianon Treaty. His father was a mechanical-engineer and led a successful enterprise. In 1938, Kosice and the southern part of Czechoslovakia was re-annexed to Hungary by the First Vienna Award. Later on, it unraveled that the reannexation strengthened the Arrow-Cross movement and led to a democratic backslide. During WW2 he was forced to the local ghetto with his family in Kosice, and later, they were deported to Auschwitz. He and his father survived the Eule and the Ebensee concentration camps, and finally arrived home to Budapest in 1945. After the war, he studied medicine and became a physician at the Uzsoki Hospital. He is married and has one child. His interview was recorded in Budapest, in 2001.