Sarah Weinstein was born in 1907 in Budapest, Hungary. She married Sandor Schaechner in 1927, and they had two children, Tibor and Magda. In 1941, her parents and two of her brothers (along with 16,000 other people who had problems with their Hungarian citizenship) were turned over by the Hungarian authorities to the Germans. They were all killed in Poland.
In March 1944, the German army occupied Hungary. Within two weeks, Sarah’s husband was drafted into a slave labor battalion and never returned. He died three days after liberation in a concentration camp in Austria. From that time on, Sarah and her children stayed in two protected “safe houses” – one a Swedish safe house set up by Raoul Wallenberg, and the other set up by the Vatican.
By the middle of December 1944, they were forced into the Budapest Ghetto, where Sarah’s ten-year-old daughter, Magda, was killed in the house-to-house fighting before the Russian army liberated the ghetto.
In 1947, Sarah married Peter Biro, an Auschwitz survivor. In 1960, they moved to El Paso, Texas, where her son, Tibor Schaechner, lived with his family.
Connecting Stories: Peter Biro, Tibor Schaechner