A near capacity audience crowded into the spacious social hall of the Dunwoody United Methodist Church, just north of the Perimeter, last month to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The event at the church, which was sponsored by the Atlanta World War II History Roundtable, featured an hour-long multimedia presentation by Robert Ratonyi, who was only 6 years old when the Nazis began their destruction of the Hungarian Jewish community in the last full year of World War II, late in 1944.
Ratonyi has been a frequent speaker at the Breman Jewish Heritage Museum and at various programs around the state, sponsored by the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust. His book, “From Darkness Into Light,” is a 343-page personal memoir of growing up, first, during the Nazi invasion late in the war, and then during the Communist takeover of Hungary after the war. Later, as a young college student, he participated in the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and had to flee the country. His book is particularly about his memories of those dozen years that led him, as his book’s title suggests, to a new appreciation of freedom.
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The organizers of the event at Dunwoody United Methodist Church made a concerted effort to attract young people to hear Ratonyi speak.
After carefully leading his audience through the horrors he endured as a child he reminded them of how it was not just Germans who hunted down and killed Jews, but it was their Hungarian allies, the Fascist soldiers of the Arrow Cross army, who were at least as brutal and murderously antisemitic as their Nazi allies. He reminded the audience just how bloodthirsty and vicious these troops had been when he showed a film clip of how Jews were led to the edge of the Danube River bound, together by rope or in iron manacles, so they couldn’t escape and shot one by one on the riverbank.
It is those deep-seated urges that were…
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