Lea Csengeri

Who is Lea Csengeri?

Lea Csengeri and Yehudit were born in June 1937 in Simleu Silvaniei, Transylvania, to Zvi and Rosalia Csengeri, who had married just nine months before. The twins were raised in Budapest, and the family was both religious and Zionist. In 1942, Zvi was arrested and forced to work in a Hungarian labor battalion which was sent to the Ukraine. Initially told that he would be gone for one month, Zvi did not return to Hungary until 1945. As the Hungarian government collaborated with the Nazis, the Jews of Hungary were largely untouched until the spring of 1944. Then all the anti-Semitic decrees and deportations that had taken years in the rest of Europe, happened quickly in Hungary.