This Jewish New Yorker survived the Holocaust and the Hungarian Revolution, and is still helping

Susan Kalev, 80, lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights. On a sunny spring day, you’ll find her three cats zooming around her apartment, surrounded by gallery walls of photos documenting Kalev’s long and full life.

From the relative idyll of her uptown home, Kalev, a Holocaust survivor, can still remember the sounds of the Russians’ rifles not far behind her family as they fled into the woods from their home in Budapest. The year was 1956, and Kalev, 12, and her family were fleeing Communist rule, making their way to Austria and, eventually, New York.

“It was very hush-hush,” Kalev, who still speaks with a slight Hungarian accent, told the New York Jewish Week. Her parents “just packed a suitcase, and they said, ‘yes, we have to go.’”

The four of them — Kalev; her mother, Ilona Spiegel; her stepfather, Arpad Steiner, and her younger half-sister, Marian — were among 200,000 Hungarians who fled the country during the Hungarian Revolution.

This was the second time that ...
[Short citation of 8% of the original article]