Last April, Orly Sela stood before an audience in Taipei, Taiwan, recounting the story of Yehudit Biksz, her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor.
Sela is a member of the Remembrance Ambassadors, who tour the world to ensure the memories of survivors are not forgotten.
What she didn’t know was that halfway around the world, Norfolk resident Taylor Miller had been searching for Biksz after discovering that Biksz had been a pen pal of her great-grandmother, Virginia Longberry-Shohayda, more than 80 years ago.
Then, weeks before Rosh Hashanah in September, Miller stumbled upon a YouTube video of Sela's talk on Facebook. She contacted Sela immediately. What transpired gave Sela, her family and Miller the missing pieces of a story they had spent years trying to write.
Biksz grew up in Békéscsaba, Hungary, in the southeastern part of the country. She was about 15 when Nazi leader Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933. By 1939, he announced the eradication of European Jewry in the event of another world war. By 1942, he began deporting Jews to Chelmno, an extermination camp in Poland.
Biksz was raised in a secular Jewish family and only attended synagogue during the High Holidays. Sela describes her as a patriotic Hungarian who had primarily non-Jewish friends. As a child, she was fascinated with space and studying biology; by the time she was a teenager, however, Hungary had followed Germany and passed anti-Jewish laws that kept Jewish students from certain jobs and schools. Biksz attended trade school to become a cobbler.
Around 1937, Biksz joined a pen pal program and started writing to a Virginia Longberry in Ohio.
Letter exchanges in the U.S. and Europe were becoming popular in the 1930s. German Jewish teenager Anne Frank became pen pals with a girl in Danville, Iowa, in 1939. Anne's family later went into hiding from the Nazis in Amsterdam; Anne kept a diary that was found after the war and became a bestseller. Anne died in 1945 in a concentration camp.
When Biksz wrote one of her first letters to Longberry, there was no talk of Nazis or death. In one, dated Feb. 24, 1937, she was excited about getting to know her new friend and using her growing skills in English:
Dear Virginia!
I am very glad for receiving your letter. And so, I will answer very quickly … I attend in the High school of girls. We have to learn very much: Religion, Hungarian, English, German, Physics, Geographie, Mathematics.
She promised to send a photo of herself and her 8-year-old brother, Janos. She asked Longberry to do the same.
By 1938, Biksz was referring to Virginia as "Dearest Ginny" and sending small gifts. But the tone of her letters changed by early 1939; Biksz's letters went from a childhood innocence to a vulnerability about her family's circumstances.
Dear Virginia!
I received your kind letters and thank you very much.
I am obliged to you and your parents to turn with my request.
Certainly you have knowledge, that here what is the situation to The Jews (We are too Jews). For this reason, we want to emigrate in Kanada or in the U.S.A.
I ask you very much, that if you should can then you help us in this affair.
Biksz went on to tell Virginia that her parents are relatively young and would do anything for sponsorship. In September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, launching World War II. By November of the following year, Hungary joined Germany and the other Axis powers.
In 1940, Longberry received a letter from Biksz stating that the city had flooded and that many families were homeless. She then asked Longberry to write back soon.
That was the last letter Longberry received.
During the years, Longberry wondered if Biksz was OK.
She did not know that Biksz and her brother survived and moved to Israel, where she married another Holocaust survivor, and had Arie, Sela's father. Biksz settled in the farming community of Moshav Moledet and became a manicurist.
Longberry married in 1943 to Fred Shohayda and had two sons. They lived in West Mecca, Ohio and she died in 2007.
Shortly before she died, however, she gave a stack of aged letters to her great-granddaughter, Miller. Miller didn't read them until she moved to Norfolk in 2013.
Once she started reading them, she became obsessed. She wrote in a Facebook post about her great-grandmother, the pen pal and asked the public for any information on the Biksz family. Nothing.
Last September, Facebook generated a memory of the post and Miller did another internet search with Biksz’s name.
That's when she came across the video that Sela had posted as part of her tour. Miller immediately sent a message through Facebook. Sela was skeptical and then Miller sent her a photo of Biksz and a few letters.
The two women started filling in the gaps that the other had been looking for.
Biksz, her mother and brother had been sent to Auschwitz, a concentration and death camp in Poland, in June of 1944; her mother was sent immediately to the gas chambers. Her father was shipped to the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where he died of starvation.
Biksz was later shipped to a labor camp in Germany and bartered food for thread from workers at a parachute factory. She improvised knitting needles from the factory she worked in and made an orange sweater. She kept the sweater until she died.
Sela held the sweater while giving her presentation in Taiwan.
“….It was on me during my voyage to Israel. It was on me during my pregnancy with my son, Arie, and it was on me during my final immigration to Israel,” Sela said, reciting an account that she created from research and her grandmother’s stories.
During a recent video interview, Sela said her grandmother lost her faith in God, which Arie believes is because of the Holocaust.
Like many survivors, Biksz didn’t talk about the Holocaust. Sela learned what she did about her grandmother when Sela was going through her Bat Mitzvah, and she asked Biksz to share her history.
Sela was close to her grandmother, but it wasn’t until she saw the letters from Miller that she knew she had a friend in America or that she could speak English.
Despite her trauma, Sela said, Biksz kept her spunk until she died.
“She liked fashion and wearing red lipstick,” Sela said during the video interview, recalling her grandmother in her later years. “Even in Israel, you know it’s hot here, she would dress up all the time and wear makeup to take out the trash.”
Biksz, like her pen pal, died in 2007. She died during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year.
Soon after Miller and Sela connected, Miller mailed the letters to a friend of Sela's in America who was about to travel to Israel. Sela had the letters and photo in less than two weeks.
On Oct.29, the day before Biksz’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of her death, Arie sat at the kitchen table in Israel and cried as he spoke during a video interview.
“I’m so disappointed that she asked for help and couldn’t get it,” he said, referring to the letter asking for sponsorship. “I think my mother was very brave to ask for help. She had chutzpah because they were strangers. She knew bad things were on the way, but she wasn’t pessimistic.”
Arie couldn't speak as he looked at the photo Miller sent — the only photo the family has of Biksz before the war.
He managed “yaffa” through his tears, which means pretty in Hebrew.
For Miller, concluding her search after all those years has been fulfilling. Sela now has new details about her grandmother to include in her talks. She hopes her grandmother's memory will be a blessing to those who hear her story.
“Every person, no matter their race or religion, should talk with their grandmother and learn about their roots.”
