Missing Pieces: My Life as a Child Survivor of the Holocaust.

Susan Merskey is freelance writer in London, Ontario.

Born in the small Hungarian town of Szarvas in 1936, Olga Barsony-Verral lived an idyllic existence for the first seven years of her life. Surrounded by her loving, observant, yet culturally assimilated family, she remembers the good times, focusing around the preparations for and celebrations of the Jewish holidays.

All that changed in March 1944 when the Nazis occupied Hungary. Olga and her family were moved first into the Szarvas ghetto, then to the Szolnok ghetto, and eventually to the Auspitz concentration camp just across the border in Czechoslovakia. Despite nightmarish conditions and appalling hardships, the whole family survived, returned to Szarvas, and continued to live there for the next 11 years.

The 1956 Hungarian Uprising provoked a new upsurge in anti-Semitism, and in December, Olga, her parents and sister fled across the Austrian border to join her brother Tibi, who had gone ahead. Her other brothers and their families followed. In February 1957, they all arrived in Canada, settling in Winnipeg. Olga married Cantor Orland Verral and they had two daughters, Judy and Lesley. They moved to Toronto in 1969.

Unhappily, Olga continued to be haunted by the hardships of her earlier life, and never lost a nagging sense of emptiness. She had a complete breakdown after Orland’s death and was encouraged to start writing this memoir as part of her healing process. Her story, from her childhood until the present time, is told here simply, but extremely vividly. We experience both the good times and the bad through the power of her writing; it is no surprise that those wartime horrors were the stuff which nightmares are made of. Today, Olga continues to live in Toronto, close to her daughters and grandsons.

Missing Pieces is a truly triumphant telling of Olga’s life story. While there are many memoirs of Holocaust experiences, by both adult and, increasingly, by child survivors, hers is one of comparatively few to record the Hungarian experience, especially of those who remained in the country until 1956. It is also the first one to describe the little-known Auspitz labour camp. Recommended.