My mother, Vera Frankel, was born in April 1927 in Budapest, Hungary. Her mother, Alice was one of eight children and her father, Lawrence was an attorney with a practice in Budapest. Three of my grandmother’s siblings died in concentration camps; my grandfather Lawrence spent four years in a forced labor camp. Miraculously, my mother and her parents survived the Holocaust. Because of their experiences, I heard many stories about the war as I grew up. My mother told me that in Budapest in 1944, during the last year of the war, Jewish children wore the standard yellow star and weren’t allowed to attend school. Half a dozen families lived in one apartment and the most basic necessities like toilet paper were almost impossible to find. The brunt of the war came late to Hungary. In 1940, Germany pressured Hungary to join the Axis powers and for the next four years, Jews in Hungary led restricted lives. They lost their businesses and Jewish men were sent to labor camps, but they were not part of the final solution.  In late 1943 and dragging on into the early months of 1944, Hungarian Prime Minister, Miklos Kallay secretly engaged in negotiations with…