Rob Aigner didn’t grow up knowing his parents were Holocaust survivors. Eva and Les Aigner had landed in Portland, Oregon, and set their pasts aside to raise their two children in a normal environment. “We didn’t discuss it. They didn’t wallow in depression or pity,” Aigner said during a virtual talk on Tuesday. “Rather, they just pressed on bravely and remained grateful for their second chance.” It wasn’t until Aigner’s teen years that he learned about the Holocaust in a history class and began to piece together his family’s story.
On Tuesday, Aigner, a University of Oregon graduate, recounted his family’s story of survival to over 100 listeners on Zoom. His parents were also present to comment on their experiences. The talk, “A Story of Resilience,” was hosted by the University of Oregon Alumni Association to virtually deliver inspiration and hope during the coronavirus pandemic.
Les and Eva Aigner were both born in small Czechoslovakian towns. They grew up in the 1930s and 40s as anti-Semitic undercurrents were escalating into blatant discrimination. By the time Iva was five, she wasn’t allowed to sing the national anthem at school and Jewish children were being singled out and bullied for their heritage. After both of their fathers lost work due to prejudice, Les and Eva’s separate families moved to Budapest, Hungary, a larger city where they hoped to find more opportunity. But discrimination had spread rampantly and followed them to their new homes where the families were pushed into cramped ghettos and forced to wear the Star of David.
Les and Eva still hadn’t met when the Arrow Cross, the Nazi party in Hungary, began knocking on ghetto doors and loading people onto transports to unknown destinations. Les spent a year and a half in four different concentration camps. Eva narrowly escaped a Nazi firing squad when her mother bribed a guard with her wedding ring in exchange for her daughters’ lives. Both survived the war by a string of miracles and returned to Budapest, where they met in 1956. The couple married 59 days later and promptly immigrated to the United States to escape conflict in Hungary.
In the U.S., Les and Eva started from scratch. Arriving in Portland with nothing and no one to turn to, they learned a new language, began careers and started a family. At first, they kept their Holocaust experiences from friends and colleagues. “We kept silent for many, many years because we wanted to forget about the past,” Eva said on Tuesday. But when Holocaust deniers started spreading hateful messages in the 1980s and 1990s, the couple “decided we couldn’t be silent any longer.” Over the past 37 years, they have spoken to hundreds of thousands of people. Their advocacy has contributed to the creation of the Jewish Museum in downtown Portland, the Holocaust Memorial in Washington Park and legislation mandating Holocaust education in Oregon.
Aigner, a journalism graduate, believes it is his duty to continue telling his family’s story. As well as speaking about the Holocaust to schools and business, he has started the podcast Clear Choices to highlight “people who have made that pivot, made that choice, to take something challenging that has happened and turn it into something special.”
His first podcast guests were his parents, who taught him tenacity and gratitude. “They were so overjoyed for their second chance, their rebirth, that nothing in our life was too small to be the object of gratitude,” he said. “An apple was a rare treat, a used car a blessing, a vacation a luxury afforded to very few.”
During the last 15 minutes of the talk, Eva and Les discussed what they have learned about surviving difficult times. Every experience has positive and negative aspects, Eva said. “The Holocaust taught us resilience and hope. This pandemic has already taught us to value family and our environment more than ever.” She advised the audience to accept that the future cannot be planned, to cope with things one day at a time and to not lose sight of what they are grateful for. “The most important thing in life is to think about your blessings,” she said. “You’re seeing the two luckiest people alive.”
