Ferenc Andai (1925–2013)

Ferenc Andai was born to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. In May 1944, under Nazi occupation during World War II, he was 19 when he was sent with approximately 6,000 other Jewish Hungarian men to forced labor at a copper mine in Bor, Serbia. He survived four months there and a death march out of the labor camp in September to be liberated by pro-Soviet partisans. He made his way back to Budapest and was reunited with his mother and an older sister in 1945. He resumed his studies at Eötvös Loránd University and after obtaining a PhD degree in history, worked as a newspaper journalist. There he met his future wife Eva, a photographer. In 1957, after the failure of the Hungarian Uprising, they decided to emigrate to Canada. The couple had two children. Ferenc earned an MA degree in Slavic Studies from the Université de Montréal and a teaching diploma from McGill University. He taught history at a high school in Montreal and then was head of the Department of Social Science at Pontiac Protestant High School in Shawville, Quebec, until his retirement. He returned to Budapest frequently over the years to visit family and friends; in 2005, he returned to Bor to appear in a documentary about Miklós Radnóti, the renowned poet whom he met there in 1944 and who was shot on the death march. Ferenc's memoirs, first published in Hungarian in 2003 as Mint tanu szolni: Bori történet (To Bear Witness: A Story of Bor) received the Miklós Radnóti National Prize in 2004. An English-language version entitled In The Hour of Fate and Danger was published posthumously by the Azrieli Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program in 2020.