Suszi (Suzi) Molnar was born in Debrecin, near Budapest, in Hungary. In April 1945, she was found with her brother, Tibor (Terry), in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the British liberators. She was two years old and her brother was five. 

Suzi’s father had been taken away by the Nazis. Suzi, her mother, and her brother were rounded up and forced into cattle trucks. They were sent first to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women and children, and then on to Bergen-Belsen. During the journey, the three huddled together, their mother attempting to shield them from the overcrowding and squalor. On arrival at Bergen-Belsen, the two-year-old was washed down with a fire hose. 

Suzi remembers her mother giving her and Terry almost all of her own rations. Eventually, her mother became so weak that she was moved to another hut, she did not return and died of typhoid shortly after the arrival of the British troops. 

When the camp was liberated, Suzi herself was ill with typhus. The army established a makeshift hospital for the thousands of ailing survivors. An Irish volunteer pediatrician, Bob Collis, working with the Red Cross, befriended some of the orphaned children and eventually brought them home to Ireland. 

Suzi and Terry recovered their physical health and Bob Collis arranged for them to be adopted by an Orthodox Jewish couple, Elsie and Willie Samuels, in Dublin.

Like many Holocaust survivors, for Suzi, the emotional damage has outlasted the physical. According to the prevailing attitude at the time of her youth, traumatic experiences were suppressed in the hope that they would be forgotten.

Suzi buried her concentration camp experience. However, she still lives with a fear of water, an utter abhorrence of dirt, and mistrust of all that is unfamiliar. Also, like many other survivors, she was unable to speak about Bergen-Belsen until fifty years after leaving it behind.

Suzi married Alec Diamond and she has spent her life in Dublin. They have two grown-up children, Bernard and Lynette. Terry passed away in January 2007 and Alex passed away in 2020.

Suzi meets her cousins, 2016

Suzi grew up believing that her entire extended family died in the Holocaust. In 2015, she was contacted by a man living in Hungary who believed they may be related. Read her story in her own words below:

In Spring 2015, Holocaust Education Trust Ireland was contacted by someone in Hungary called Sandor Molnar, who thought he might be related to me. Over the course of emails and exchanges of photographs and documents, it transpires that he is indeed a relation – he is my first cousin!

He is named after my father and he has filled in a few details about my family, which I had not previously known. I have learned that my father was one of four brothers who lived in the small town of Karcag about 100 miles from Budapest, where they ran a timber business. My new cousin, who was born after the war, is the son of the youngest brother, Andor, who survived the Holocaust along with another brother, Lazlo. My father and the fourth brother, Béla, perished in a Russian labour camp in 1943.

Last June I visited Karcag and saw my grandfather’s house, the Jewish cemetery where my grandparents are buried, and the synagogue where all my family prayed. 778 Jews lived in Karcag before the war; 461 of them were murdered in the Holocaust. There is a memorial scroll on the synagogue wall recording the Jews from Karcag who perished in the Holocaust. My family is listed on it, but now the scroll has to be corrected because my brother and I survived!

I am gradually being introduced to new first cousins and their children living in Hungary and in the United States. This is all very new information for me to absorb as a new and emotional chapter in my personal story is beginning to unfold.