Linda Ambrus Broenniman, who lives in Northern Virginia, was alerted by a friend to watch the news on TV.
She was told the CNN newscast contained a report about the reunion of two Holocaust survivors: Dr. George Berci, a world-renowned surgeon and medical research pioneer, and me in Los Angeles.
[ An extraordinary reunion of two Holocaust survivors ]
Broenniman noticed that not only were the medical career and accomplishments of Dr. Berci very similar to her father’s, but their family background and survival during World War II was also similar.
She contacted Dr. Berci and told him her family’s saga, which she herself learned about only after years of painstaking research.
Linda Broenniman told me that after a house fire at the family’s home in Buffalo, New York, which resulted in the death of her mother at age 86, a non-descript brown box somehow survived the fire.
“The content became the catalyst for a journey of discovery whose seeds were planted 35 years ago — the day I learned that my Catholic father was Jewish and what little family history I knew was a lie.”
In a synopsis of her forthcoming book, “The Politzer Saga,” Linda talks about her family background.
“I am the middle child of seven children born to Hungarian physicians who survived World War II and started their new life in US. We were raised Catholic, in Buffalo. It was a happy childhood. A charmed life. But there were secrets. No one spoke of the past, about their lives and families before the war. As I got older, it become impossible to ignore a gnawing need for truth.”
With the help of a Hungarian researcher, Linda was able to piece together her family’s past.
Her father, Dr. Julian Ambrus Sr., was born in Budapest, Hungary, and began his medical studies in 1942 at the University of Budapest. There, he met a fellow student, Clara Bayer, and they fall in love.
In May 1944, however, Julian, like other Jews, was conscripted into a Nazi slave labor camp.
“It is not quite clear where the labor camp was, but was not far from Jolsva, high in the Ore Mountains,” Linda said. “One day the camp was bombed. Fever than a third of the people survived. My father and five of his friends miraculously escaped. They hid in the woods but were captured twice. Somehow, they were able to get free and get on a train back to Budapest. And back to my mother.”
Meanwhile, Clara moved into an abandoned factory where she was hiding her Jewish friends and their families. When Julian returned, he and one of his friends also hid in Clara’s abandoned factory.
In January 1945, during the siege of Budapest by the Red Army, Julian and two of his friends went out to look for food. This time they were captured by Soviet soldiers and taken to a prisoner of war camp. Eventually, Julian was set free and told to go to Szeged, a safer city than Budapest.
“When my father arrived in Szeged, the medical school was starting again. My mother, walked to Szeged, more than 100 miles, to meet up with my father and enroll in the medical school. My parents were married in Szeged in February 1945. At the end of April, they returned to Budapest and resumed their medical studies there.”
In 1947, Julian Ambrus received a scholarship to the University of Zurich, and together with Clara, finished their medical studies. From Zurich, they went to Paris to do fellowships at the Pasteur Institute. They must have built a reputation, because in 1950, they were recruited to the Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia.
Having made a name for himself in the field of medicine, Dr. Ambrus, in 1955, was invited to Roswell Park Cancer Institute as principal cancer research scientist and was put in charge of Roswell’s Springville Laboratory. He turned it into its own research unit, with 100 people working there.
Dr. Ambrus died in 2020, at age 95. He was named a laureate, the highest honor of the American College of Physicians.
He and his wife Clara, who was recognized by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as “Righteous Among Nations” for saving Jews during the Holocaust, also helped settle refugees from the 1956 Hungarian uprising.
All this makes their daughter, Linda, immensely proud of her parents. However, she needed to delve into their personal stories to heighten her awareness of the present.
When I asked Linda, why is it important to her to share her family’s saga with the public, she said:
“Growing up, I knew nothing about my parental ancestors — not even their last names. Along with their names, who they were, how they lived, what they achieved — all had disappeared lost and forgotten by my father’s silence. To find them has been a blessing. To share their lives help me to know they were real and remind me all that was lost when their lives were hidden.”
Shatz is a Williamsburg resident. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” the compilation of his selective columns . The book is available at the Bruton Parish Shop, and Amazon.com