Holocaust Survivors’ Needs Grow, and Aid Is Slow to Catch Up

Agnes Galgoczi, 84, can no longer make it to the toilet on her own. It sits in the kitchen of her apartment in Budapest, just three feet from the bed, where she sings to herself to fight loneliness. Several blocks away, Vera Varga, 78, slides decades-old movies into her videocassette player. The images remind her of the outside world.

They are two of the estimated half-million remaining Holocaust survivors around the world, a group whose needs are growing in complexity and cost as they age, while funding from a variety of sources that have provided for them over the past two decades is starting to dry up.

Both women are widowed and rely on help to shop, cook and clean. Neither can leave her one-room apartment without assistance. Mrs. Galgoczi could use round-the-clock care, but even if Hungary had adequate nursing homes, neither she nor Mrs. Varga would make the move. The Nazis forced them out of their homes once before, marching them to the Budapest ghetto, ripping their families apart and sowing seeds of fear and mistrust that have resurfaced as the women enter their final years.