Gabriela Brodska with her fiance Tibor Roth

In this photograph you can see my fiance Tibor Roth. The photo was taken in Roznava at the end of the 1930s.

Before the war I had a fiance; he was my brother's classmate from high school. And in such a small town we all knew each other. We had the same last name, even though we weren't related. He was named Tibor Roth. I had a very happy marriage and I really did like my husband, it was mutual, but the kind of love that I felt for Tibor, that's something that you experience only once in a lifetime. He was the only son of well-off parents. His father was the director of this one smaller distillery in Roznava. He was also a shareholder. They only had the one son. Tibor was a leftist, though he wasn't a member of the Communist Youth, but he had distinct leftist tendencies.

During the war Tibor was in the Budapest ghetto. Somehow, I don't know how, it's something that his aunt who lived in Budapest wrote me afterwards, he got into the Arrow Cross Party, that was a Hungarian fascist party - 'nyilas keresztesek.' He had very good knowledge of when and where raids were to take place and when and who they'd be arresting, and he would then anonymously notify, warn those people beforehand. But it began to be suspicious that when they would go get someone, they'd never find them at home. They began to follow him, and then he knew that things were bad. That was in February of 1945. He didn't want to go to his relatives', because that was the first place they'd look for him, and he didn't want his relatives to have problems. He hid under this one bridge in Budapest. You can easily imagine that there, in the winter, in February, he got a bad case of pneumonia. Around 10th February the Russians had already liberated Budapest. With the last remnants of his strength he managed to climb up onto the river embankment, and there he collapsed. People loaded him onto some cart and took him to the hospital. He lived a couple more days, but they weren't able to save him. I then wrote him from home; I had his relatives' address, because I used to send him letters there. And that aunt of his wrote me what had happened, well, it was a harsh blow for me.