Debrecen4U April 24, 2025

A green space  area in Debrecen may be named after Éva Fahidi

“As part of Debrecen’s Jewish remembrance policy this year, several areas (parks, groves, promenades) are planned to be named after Holocaust survivors and persons who played a decisive role in preventing deportations,” László Papp writes in his submission to the General Assembly.

The Mayor first proposed that the green space in the area of Jókai Street – Nagy Imre Street – Cserepes Street should be called Fahidi Éva Grove in the future.

Éva Fahidi was born in Debrecen and graduated from the Svetits Catholic Girls’ Educational Institute in Debrecen in 1943. On 26 June 1944, she and her family were deported to a concentration camp, where she lost not only her parents and only brother, but a total of 49 family members during the Holocaust. At the end of the war, she escaped from a death march and later returned to Hungary. She retired as a foreign merchant. In 2003 she was commissioned by the museum in Stadtallendorf to write a memoir in German, and in 2005 her memoirs were published under the title, “Anima Rerum – The Soul of Things”, part of which became a textbook text in Germany.

As a survivor and contemporary witness, she participated in various national and international events and had regularly spoken out against racism and anti-Semitism in the international and Hungarian press.

Her mission was to keep the Holocaust alive in the memory of the young generation. In 2015, she took a leading role in “Tünet” ensemble’s modern dance production, “Sóvirág” (Salt Flower), and then in the film Euphoria of Existence, which recounts her life and the traumas she suffered.

Éva Fahidi passed away the year before last in September, at the age of 97, and was made an honorary citizen of the city in the spring of 2023.

Source and photo credit:dehir.hu