Judith Nemes Black’s earliest memories are steeped in trauma.

She remembers being forced from her home to move to a ghetto; waking up in the night and calling for her mother, who was gone; carrying the secret of living under a false identity; hiding in a dark cellar as bombs fell.

Born in Budapest in 1941, Nemes Black was a small child when Jews in her country were persecuted first by Hungarian fascists and later by the Nazis during the Second World War.

She survived the Holocaust and eventually moved to Montreal. But her traumatic childhood shaped her life in profound ways she only came to understand much later.

Nemes Black will share her story at the Montreal Holocaust Museum’s Yom Hashoah ceremony Monday evening. The theme of this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration, unfolding amid rising antisemitism and intensifying global conflict, is The Courage to Be Hopeful.

“I grew up with both the horrors and the courage of survival, and also the losses,” said Nemes Black, 84, in an interview prior to the event.

Nemes Black was barely two years old in 1943 when her father was conscripted to work in a Serbian copper mine by the Nazi-allied Hungarian regime. While life was dangerous for the Jewish women and children left behind, things got worse when the Nazis invaded in 1944.

She and her mother were forced to move from their apartment to a crammed ghetto house with other Jewish families. As the Nazis began mass deportations to Auschwitz, Nemes Black’s mother managed to escape.

“My mother knew she was going to get deported, so she entrusted me to........

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