Eva Aigner was seven years old when the Nazis took her and
800 other Jews from their neighborhood in Budapest, Hungary, to stand in a line on the banks
of a river. She and her sister waited, shivering under a blanket
and crying, for their turn to
be executed.
What happened next she described as a miracle. Her mother, who had escaped by jumping from a moving train, came to the riverfront on that cold, December night in 1944. She recognized her children’s crying and gave her wedding ring, the only thing of value she possessed, to the guard in exchange for their freedom.
“Most of our family didn’t make it,” Eva Aigner said. “Especially the ones who stayed
in Czechoslovakia.”
Eva and her husband, Les Aigner, survivors of the Holocaust, described their experiences with the Nazis to about 60 people in the EMU Fir Room on Tuesday night.
The speech, sponsored by the Jewish Student Union, the Cultural Forum and Oregon Hillel, was presented as part of Holocaust Awareness Week. Eva and Les Aigner’s speech is the third event of the week.
Eva Aigner was born in 1937. Her family fled from their home in Czechoslovakia to Budapest to escape the Nazis after her father lost his job and their savings were seized, she said. When the Nazis arrived in Hungary, her
father was taken to a forced labor camp and eventually killed. She and her mother and sister were taken from their home and put in the ghetto, which was surrounded by barbwire fences to keep Jews in. There, they had to live in a tiny room with limited sanitation. Disease was rampant.
They remained there until the Russian army liberated Budapest in 1945, she said.
Les Aigner was born in 1927 in Czechoslovakia and was 15 years old when he was taken with part of his family to Auschwitz, an infamous Nazi concentration camp in Poland.
Upon their arrival, Aigner said, he was separated from his mother and sister and taken away with the able-bodied men.
“As I looked back, my little sister gave me a faint wave. … That was the last time I saw them,”
he said.
Over the course of the war, Les Aigner said he was in several other camps and, by luck, avoided jobs that would have meant certain death.
“I’m the luckiest man on Earth that I survived,” he said.
“Your grandparents or great-grandparents, whoever served in the second world war, whoever you know that served in the war, were my liberators,” Les Aigner said to the audience. “I am greatly indebted to them. They are in my prayers all the time.”
Danielle Marchick, who helped organize the event, said she thinks it is beneficial to hear Holocaust survivors speak because of the personal stories they bring.
“It’s very powerful to hear them speak about their experiences,”
she said.
Eva Aigner said she and her husband started to talk about the Holocaust in the late 1980s and early 1990s because neo-Nazis began saying it never happened.
“We decided we had to come forward and talk about the fact that we were witnesses,” she said. “We’re not teachers, we’re not politicians, we’re not historians. We are ordinary citizens who lived through the Holocaust as children.”

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