03/11/2025
We are humbled to host a Stolperstein — a “stumbling stone” — in memory of Sándor Semler (1926–1945), placed last Friday in front of Bagatelle Gardenhouse, the Villa, where Sándor lived as a child and young adult until his deportation with his parents, the first owner of the Villa and his sister, Éva. Évas son, Paul Kuzmin came with his wife Margaret and his daughter Rebecca from London to join the Ceremony.
The Stolperstein project commemorates victims of the Holocaust across Europe. These small stones carry great meaning. Each stone bears a name, each name a life, each life a story that must never be forgotten.
One stone. One name. One memory.
We thank everyone who joind the ceremony, especially, the Kuzmin Family, Péter Kirschner (President of MAZSike), Dr. Péter Nógrádi (Vice President of MAZSIHISZ), Gábor Vadász (Deputy Mayor of District XII), Borbála Kriza (Sociologist, local historian).
We copy parts of Borbála Krizas text, which she read at the ceremony:
The Short Life and Circumstances of Death of Sándor Semler
by Borbála Kriza
(…)
Sándor Semler was born on March 31, 1926, in Budapest, into a well-to-do upper-middle-class family. His parents were Elemér Semler, a descendant of a well-known downtown cloth-merchant dynasty, and Erzsébet Epstein, whose father, Dr. Manó Epstein, was a respected physician and an active member of the Páva Street Synagogue.
Like many prosperous Jewish families of Pest, the Semlerslonged to move from the noisy city center to Buda. In 1936, Elemér Semler and his wife built and moved with their two children into the Semler Villa at 15 Németvölgyi Road. As with most upper-middle-class Jewish youth, the Semler children attended prestigious parochial schools: after moving to Németvölgyi Road, Éva enrolled at the Notre Dame de Sion convent school for girls on Sas Hill, while Sándor attended the Verbőczy Catholic Boys’ Gymnasium on Attila Road (today the Petőfi Sándor High School). Notable alumni of the same school included Attila József, Miklós Radnóti, and Árpád Göncz, who may even have known Sándor personally.
Although we know little about Sándor’s school years, it is likely that, from 1942 onward, as a Jew, he could no longer be a member of the school’s scout troop, and he probably suffered antisemitic insults from some teachers or classmates, as several other Jewish students of Verbőczy later recalled.
In March 1944, Germany occupied Hungary. According to the school yearbook, Sándor and his classmates still took their final exams in April, ahead of schedule.
(…)
Newly graduated Jewish youths—along with older men—were almost immediately drafted into forced labor service. Like most Jewish men from Budapest, Sándor was likely sent to Jászberény in June 1944.
In the autumn of 1944, Sándor was quartered with his labour service battalion in the Gömb Street School in Angyalföld, where they were assigned to cut wood. The last photograph of him shows him wearing a labor-service cap.
Toward the end of November, he was sent westward—either on foot or by train. From Hegyeshalom, near the Austrian border, the family received his last message on a postcard, probably thrown away and mailed by a local sympathizer. It was dated December 6, 1944. After that, his family heard nothing more.
Eighty years later, Sándor’s German file surfaced, revealing the circumstances of his death. Along with many Budapest Jews, he had been deported to Ohrdruf, one of the notorious subcamps of the Buchenwald concentration camp. His registration date was December 24, 1944.
(…)
A 24-year-old Hungarian forced labourer who survived later recalled the Ohrdruf camp:
“We were placed in barracks here too, terribly overcrowded—four or five of us slept in one bed, and some had to sleep standing up because there was no space. People even gave up their dinner to gain a bit of room. Most of the food was stolen, and there was general chaos. The SS and the Polish kapos beat us. There were all kinds of work commands, each harder than the other. We had to run several kilometers to the worksite, driven on by the SS. On the way to and from work, many boys were shot dead.”
Sándor died less than three weeks after arriving at the Ohrdrufcamp.
The record—filled out with German precision and signed by a N**i camp doctor—states that he died on January 11, 1945, at 9:15 a.m. The official cause of death: angina pectoris, or heart failure. The cynical and cowardly German bureaucracy routinely wrote this on the records of prisoners who had been tortured, beaten to death, or shot.
Sándor’s parents and sister searched for him for a long time, just as thousands of Jewish survivors desperately searched for their loved ones after 1945.
(…)
Sándor Semler was never officially declared dead, and his name never appeared on the lists of Holocaust victims.
