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 a lady (who was a Christian relative) and she was gone for about four weeks. And during this period that’s my earliest memories, one of them is waking up in this lady’s house and crying for my mother,” Nemes Black recalled. “I remember that quite vividly.”

But her mother soon returned with new identity papers.

“I had to learn a Christian name,” said Nemes Black. “So the last few months of the war, with these false ID papers, we went to hide with this lady and her children. And my other memories are in the cellar, hiding from Russian bombardments.”

Once the Soviet army liberated Hungary, Nemes Black and her mother had no idea where her father was, or if he’d survived.

Her mother had to earn a living, so she tried to revive her father’s business exporting feathers. Luckily, Nemes Black said, her parents had “good Christian friends” who had run his company and hidden all their valuables and money.

“We got everything back, which is not the case of many people,” she said.

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While her mother worked, an aunt looked after Nemes Black at her own home. One day, in October 1945, the young girl answered the door there.

“The doorbell rang — I’m going to start crying; I still get tears to this day,” Nemes Black said. “I was about five years old, and I went to the door. And my father was there. We didn’t know all this time if he’d lived or died. I recognized him and I told him: ‘Daddy, I recognize you.’”

Her father had endured death marches from the copper mine to concentration camps inside Germany — first Dora-Mittelbau, where he made airplane parts, then Bergen-Belsen, where he was liberated.

He weighed under 100 pounds at that point, Nemes Black said, and spent six months recovering in a British military hospital before he was strong enough to go look for his wife and daughter. He later told Nemes Black that he went to the aunt’s house first because he was too afraid to go home lest he find out she and her mother had died.

After the war, Nemes Black’s parents tried to pick up their lives in Hungary, but soon realized life under Communism would be unbearable.

They moved to Israel in 1951, then Paris, before settling permanently in Montreal.

While many Holocaust survivors tried to bury their painful memories and move on, Nemes Black said her parents and their friends spoke about it freely.

“Being an only child, I spent a lot of time with the adults,” she said. “The people around me talked about what happened to them. There were amazing stories of survival. What struck me as a child was what they did to survive. I didn’t see them as victims as much as I saw them as strong people who fought back.”

This openness ultimately influenced Nemes Black in profound ways.

After getting her master’s in French language and literature from McGill University, writing her thesis on the theme of concentration camps in postwar French novels, and working as a teacher, she returned to study psychology. She worked first as a psychologist in schools.

But she later focused on post-traumatic stress, then an emerging field, and became the first woman to serve as a psychologist counselling officers from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

“My interest in the Holocaust initially was intellectual. I realized our personal story, but I didn’t quite understand. We didn’t know about the psychological effects in those years,” said Nemes Black. “So I think because of my background, without knowing that initially, I was drawn into the field of psychological trauma. … I think I came by it honestly.”

Sharing her painful experiences is also a way of reckoning with the lessons of history, countering Holocaust denial as well as antisemitism.

Nemes Black said she is saddened to see the resurgence of old hatreds.

“I naively used to believe when I was younger that it was over. But it isn’t,” she said of antisemitism. “It’s actually scary how present it is and how it was there all along. It never died, so it hurts a lot.”

She’s also troubled to see new wars unleashing fresh suffering around the world.

“I think once you recognize trauma, I think you read differently some of the news,” said Nemes Black. “People need to recognize the pain, but they also perhaps need to recognize that hopefully there will be less repetition of it. And I don’t just mean for Jews.”

Judith Nemes Black speaks as part of the Montreal Holocaust Museum’s Yom Hashoah ceremony Monday, April 13 at 7 p.m. at 5151 Côte-Ste-Catherine Rd. Admission is free, but reservations are required via museeholocauste.ca.

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