Pulling the threads of her past
After finding a letter, Holocaust survivor Judy Young Drache compelled to find out more about her past
Holocaust survivor Judy Young-Drache holds a photo of her mother and father, Irma and Gyorgy Balazs, who were killed in the Holocaust.
Judy Young Drache, 74, thinks it was the hope of finding a hidden gift that led her to open the dresser drawer.
What she found that day, more than six decades ago, was a message from another life.
There was a letter, written by a man she soon realized was her real father, dated June 30, 1944.
That had been her first birthday, and perhaps just a few short days before Jews were deported from his neighbourhood in Budapest, Hungary, and sent to Nazi death camps.
He was one of them. So was her mother.
She, a baby at the time, had been spirited away to live with the cousins she thought, until she found the letter, were her parents.
In the letter, her father
expressed his wish that his daughter be raised with the Jewish faith.
That desire, like the true story of her family, was buried with silence.
Sensing her adoptive parents wanted to keep it that way, she told no one about what she had found.
Many years later, long after she settled in Canada, Drache began pulling the threads of her past.
“I couldn’t help it once I started it,” says Drache, who has shared her story with the Centre for Holocaust Education and Scholarship at Carleton University.
She learned her father had been an archaeologist who worked at the Jewish Museum in Budapest, and that he had lied when he said on his registration form at a subcamp of Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, that he had no children.
She still does not know exactly how he died.
He listed his wife and their parents as residing at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland, where Drache assumes they were killed upon arrival.
Drache spent years working in the multiculturalism program of the federal government, but says she had always been hesitant to view her own life through that lens until she set off on her personal journey to rediscover her own religious and cultural identity.