Sixteen years ago, Marta Seiler set about the mundane task of decluttering her house ahead of a move and came across a box of papers handed to her by her aunt that she had unthinkingly dumped in the attic.

What she found shook her to her core. “The very first piece of paper I picked up turned out to be the last message my paternal grandmother, Cecilia Lovi, ever sent before being transported to Auschwitz,” says Ms Seiler, 75, with tears in her eyes.

Her grandmother’s postcard was one piece of the family’s Holocaust history that had been kept secret all her life — and Marta’s initial reaction was to put it all away and try and not think about it. “I was overwhelmed and confused,” she says, “the historical had become personal.”

The discovery led to a series of heartbreaking revelations about her family’s past – but they would also help rekindle her Jewish faith.

The Seiler family lived in the village of Kistelek, in Hungary, and owned several businesses and properties. But the government fell under Nazi influence and antisemitic laws began to be brought in. By November 1940 Hungary had joined the Axis powers.

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Marta Seiler

“The postcard, addressed to my father, explained that Cecilia was being taken away although she didn’t know to where. She says that she is praying she will see her son again,” says Marta, her voice breaking. “Even now I’m crying because she sounds so desperate”

As Ms Seiler began to sort through the archive, she had far more questions than answers. “Nothing made sense,” she says.

As a small child, she first lived with her mother Izabella and her father Lajos Seiler in Kistelek. Her parents never spoke of their wartime experiences and in communist Hungary the
Shoah was not acknowledged.

When she was five, Marta’s father died from the long-term effects of the typhus he had contracted in a labour camp, and she subsequently grew up with a non-Jewish stepfather.

Marta was particularly puzzled why her grandmother had written to her son at an address in the south east of the country, near the Romanian border. “After painstaking research, I discovered it was a work camp,” she says.

Armed with this information, she began to learn about the policy of Munkaszolgálat whereby Jewish men, who were prohibited from serving in the Hungarian army, were sent to the forced labour camps where they were treated with extreme cruelty.

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Cecilia’s last message to her son

“I was combing through family papers and online information, but it was emotionally draining, and I could only do a little bit at a time. I’d get upset, not understand something, and then park it all, my task incomplete,” she says.

Then, in 2016, Marta suffered a serious stroke and after she recovered, she returned to her research with renewed vigour. “Being close to death gave me a sense of urgency, I knew I had to complete the the job,” she says.

During her research, she also began to slowly feel more Jewish, a sense of identity that deepened when she joined Maidenhead Synagogue.

“When I was growing up in Hungary, we would visit my father’s grave in the Jewish cemetery, but I mainly knew I was Jewish thanks to playground insults. It was becoming a member of the synagogue that made Judaism feel like my spiritual home.”

When Britain went into lockdown she finally completed her painful research. “I had the time and space to translate the remaining papers and letters.

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Marta’s paternal grandmother, Cecilia Lovi

This was when I found that my mother’s first husband, Ernest Tauber, had been beaten to death in a labour camp and that my mother had been sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.”

“I felt like I had completed a jigsaw. I just wished I’d had someone by my side to tell me how the pieces fitted together,” she says.
Learning about her family’s past also helped her to understand how the Shoah had shaped her parents.

“After the war, they returned to Kistelek where they married. Our family life thereafter, the way the way they raised me and my brother was, I now know, informed by the feeling that everything could be taken away from them at any time.”

Reading the letters also made her feel close to the grandmother she had never met. “I was actually named after her, but had never liked the name Cecilia and used Marta instead, one of other names I’d been given. This now makes me feel very guilty,” says Marta.

“It’s taken years to fully understand what was in that box and I’ve shed a lot of tears doing so. But I now know where I belong, and why.”

The Seiler family’s documents are held at Yad Vashem. Their story is told in ‘Surviving the Holocaust and Stalin: The Amazing Story of the Seiler Family’, by Vanessa Holburn