A box found among the ashes of a house fire launches Linda Ambrus Broenniman on a quest to discover the truth behind her family’s biggest secret—that her Catholic father was actually Jewish and the history of her family, as she had known it, was a lie.

In THE POLITZER SAGA (Bethesda Communications Group; September 12, 2023), Broenniman tells the story of her search for truth as she pieces together the astonishing story across eight generations of her Jewish ancestors, the Politzer family, whose remarkable lives were almost lost to her father’s secrets.

Broenniman’s findings are remarkable, riveting, heart-wrenching, and inspiring. She tells the story of a family tree dating back to eighteenth-century Hungary, eight generations. Each story, a life, of real people who lived, struggled, suffered, thought, and made decisions that affected others. Written like a fictional family saga, the story is rich with characters who come to life with luminescent clarity, making readers forget that they were actually thoroughly researched and not the figments of someone’s vivid imagination.

Beyond the personal stories, the book is a wonderful history lesson about a place and a people. Among her family members, Broenniman discovers highly accomplished and respected artists, doctors, business owners, freedom fighters, art collectors, and musicians. They are individuals successful in their personal endeavors but frequently broken by war, uprisings, religious persecution, unthinkable treatment, and irrational torture. The survivors needed to scratch and claw merely to live another day. Some of them served royalty. Some of them were killed by the Nazis.

Today, The Politzer Saga, a permanent exhibition, resides on the third floor of the Rumbach Synagogue in Budapest, Hungary. The exhibit is composed of 10 lyrical and artistically rendered seven-minute films about eight generations of the Politzer family based on the stories in the book. But readers can go deeper and discover the source material in Broenniman’s amazing narrative.

What did you think when you received the mysterious box that was full of family secrets? You knew that the box existed, but you didn’t know what it was.

I wasn’t sure it really existed. That was part of the problem, because my mother had told me that it existed. But I had looked for it everywhere and could never find it. I just assumed that it didn’t exist. And then when my parent’s house caught on fire, my sister was just bringing everything she could out. She was worried about the water damage from the firemen. My sister didn’t realize she had so many things, she didn’t realize what she had. She put the box in a closet and didn’t find the box until five or six years after the fire. It coincided with the time that I decided I was going to look into my family’s history.

It felt like an accident, but maybe it was a miracle. Who knows?

Then she sent it to me. It was overwhelming. It looked like a regular moving box, it was very musty and smelled like the scent in an old attic. Inside were a lot of documents and I had no clue. They were mostly in Hungarian. And I didn’t know what they meant. It was a little bewildering because I didn’t know what I was going to do at that point.

But you realized that you had found something important.

Yes. I always had in the back of my mind somewhere I’m going to find this, but to realize that maybe this is what my mother had been talking about years ago, and I was really going to find the truth, was exciting and overwhelming.

You already learned about your heritage in 1990. But finding the box triggered the real research process. How long did it take to find everything out about your family?

It took me basically 33 years.

How did you start your research?

At first, I tried to use Google Translate and all the translation software, and I realized very quickly that that wasn’t going to work. First, the translations weren’t very good, but I needed to find someone to help. I found my father’s diary from when he was twelve years old. At that point, I really had to find someone to translate it. But I realized I needed more than that. I needed somebody who could help me understand the context. Through a friend of a friend, I found a woman named Anna Bayer who lived about a half an hour from where I was. She is a Hungarian expatriate, but she still has a house in Budapest, and she usually spends the summers there. I went to her house, we sat down in her living room and started to go through the folders. And as we did and she told me what they were, we were both just in total amazement. One of the biggest things that

we found was a letter that my great-great grandfather, Ignácz Misner, had written to Regent Horthy. At that point, Ignácz Misner had been 99 years old,

and he wrote a letter asking for exemption from all the Jewish restrictions, because they had been forced to move to one of the so-called Yellow Star houses. He asked for an exemption and to be allowed to move back to his house and so on, and his request was granted! We found out later from another book that András (Gyekiczki – ed.) had found. But by that time, it was too late. To get back to Anna, she was a great help. I didn’t know anything about the Yellow Star houses, I didn’t know what they were. When she started putting everything in context, she said, you really need somebody who can do this research right. Anna suggested a few people, but she said the best person would be András Gyekiczki. She immediately sent him an email, and that’s how I met András.

You were raised as a Catholic. How did it change your spiritual life when you discovered that you had Jewish roots? Have you adopted Jewish traditions in your everyday life, even just symbolically?

That’s a great question. It has so many layers to it. We went to church every Sunday, both my parents were very religious, even my father who had converted in 1939. Even though we went to church, religion just didn’t take with me. I appreciate the traditions and the culture around it, but religion just isn’t a big part of my life. Thinking of what my Jewish relatives have been through, I’m so proud of them. The experience of learning the truth and coming to understand their values and the traditions has been just amazing for me. I have a very close friend, Yona, who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She has encouraged me for 30 years to look into and understand my family. When I finally started doing it, we became even closer than we were before. She helped me explain the meanings and histories of Jewish traditions. I just admire and love the culture and everything about it. I’m very spiritual, and I believe in a god, but I’m just not that religious.

Among all these remarkable figures in your family, is there anybody whose story is especially close to you or who inspired you the most?

That’s a hard question. Probably Rachel’s story. To think about somebody in the 1700s who was that educated and strong-willed. It’s just amazing.

Can you tell her story?

As a young girl, Rachel lived in Zalaegerszeg. Her brother went to America and came back a rich man. He made a lot of money and convinced his family to convert and go with him to America. Rachel did not want to convert, and she didn’t want to go to America. She ran away instead. At the time, as a young child, if your parents converted, you had to convert. Her case went all the way up to Emperor Francis II (Francis II or I – ed.) and he said that she could choose for herself, but she had to walk down the aisle between the Catholics and the Jews.

At the end of the aisle, she could choose, and she chose Judaism.

The rabbi said your family will be blessed forever, so I feel very blessed. Rachel became incredibly educated. She was the best Latin speaker in all the area, and people would come to speak with her. To think that a woman of that era was that well-educated, that strong, is remarkable. She is definitely an inspiration.

My great-great-grandfather, Ignácz Misner, who I mentioned earlier, when they got the exemption from Horthy, he was so proud of being Jewish that he refused to take off the Yellow Star. It is just amazing to me that someone could be so strong and firm in his convictions that he would live and put his life in immediate danger for his values.

The reason I really started this whole thing was that I wanted to learn about my great-grandmother, Margit. When I was here in 1990 with my mother, I discovered that my father was Jewish, and she told me some things, but they weren’t the whole truth. My mother knew Margit well from after the war. Margit grew up during the golden era of Budapest.  Her father became a successful lawyer, and the family was prosperous. Margit was an amazing and generous woman. During the First World War, she became a nurse and took care of people. As the so-called Jewish laws were passed and more and more restrictions were put on Jews, life became tougher and tougher, people lost their jobs, and Margit did everything she could to help them find jobs. She even paid for their education or medical bills. She opened her house once a week and anyone could come and ask her for help, and she’d give people food. She was just remarkable.

She is the one who helped the family survive during the Holocaust.

She found hiding places and used her network to make sure that everyone was safe. Unfortunately, she couldn’t save her brother. She couldn’t save her sister and she couldn’t save her father. She did what she could. She was just a remarkably strong woman.

Can you talk about your father’s time serving in a work camp in northern Hungary, Süvéte (today Šivetice, Slovakia – ed.)?

We don’t really know how he survived at all. He grew up very priviledged. But he was also very smart. He really became a different person in the work camp.

How old was he then, and how long was he held in the camp?

He was 20 years old. He was taken in May and he escaped in October. I found some of the letters between him and my mother. You can see in the letters how hard it was. They would get up at 4:00 in the morning, they did hard labor all day, and then they would go to bed at 11:00 at night and then start the next day. No one will ever know the details, but he escaped with five other people,

one of them was András Bródy, the famous economist and father of János Bródy, the famous songwriter and composer.

And by the way, none of them spoke to their families about what happened.

Was there any kind of pact among them concerning this?

It feels like it. One thinks of András Bródy, who became a famous economist and lived in Boston. The fact that András and my father didn’t connect there is also remarkable to me, because András had been present for his wedding, where he had one of the witnesses. I found the wedding certificate with his name on it. They were close, but they didn’t connect. Or maybe they did and we just never knew about it. There seemed to be something among the men. They wouldn’t talk to their families about what happened. To me, that means that something very traumatic happened at the camp. András Bródy mentioned on his website that they were out in the woods for some reason when a bomb hit the camp. Almost everyone else died, but they escaped. It was just short of a miracle. They were caught again, but they then escaped again and were caught again and escaped again. I don’t really know how they ended up making it back. But it’s an amazing story. When they came back, they ended up somehow with money to get on the train. Who knows how? They ended up sitting next to a Nazi soldier, and they were having a delightful conversation. When the police came to check their papers, he didn’t check their documents, because they were having this conversation with the Nazis. When they arrived and got off train,

the Nazi soldier said, “I wish every Hungarian were like you.”

When did your parents emigrate to the United States?

They were in medical school in Szeged first and they came back in April 1945 to Budapest and spent a year and a half in the city going to medical school. My father got a scholarship to go to Zurich, and after they finished their medical studies, my parents went to Paris and worked at the Pasteur Institute. They came to the United States in December 1949.

Could you tell me about the Politzer exhibition at the Rumbach Synagogue? Why is this exhibition so important?

Well, it’s amazing to have these people that were hidden for so long that I knew nothing about and now to have their stories come out. That’s important, because there are many stories about famous families and very wealthy families, banking families that survived and also families from the upper middle class. So many stories about how they lived and how they survived. And I’m not thinking exclusively of the Holocaust, but going back centuries. There were so many wars, so many hardships, diseases and economic upheavals and so on. They showed incredible resilience, no matter what got them down, and they believed in education and serving others. To have these stories told is a huge gift for me personally. But then also to understand that these people were representatives of Hungarian history and Hungarian Jewish history. People could learn about what it was like for a family across generations, and this is a huge gift to me, and others say that it’s a huge gift to them too. These stories are very relevant from the perspective of some of the issues that we face today, the resilience and the values that people embody.

Tell me about the ceremony you had in the beginning of September at the Rumbach Synagogue.

Oh, it was wonderful. It wasn’t really about the book. I feel so grateful to the people who put in all that work for this exhibition. It’s a beautifully done exhibition, and it took a lot of work from a lot of different people. I really wanted to thank them. Family and friends were here who were connected to my family, and it was wonderful for them to see the exhibit too.

Have you met new relatives?

Yes. Some of the relatives that I met were from California. They are Politzers too, though their name is now Nicholson by marriage. Miklós Nicholson is Zsigmond Politzer’s great-grandson. He is 86 years old, and the whole thing was very touching. We went to the cemetery together. I had been there before, and it was overwhelming. I think for him to see Zsigmond’s tomb was very emotional. He of course wouldn’t have been alive when Zsigmond was alive, but his grandfather’s name is also on that tomb, and he remembers his grandfather very well. I met Miklós and his wife Ann, I met György Máté and his sister Zsuzsanna, who’s great-grandfather was Margit’s brother-in-law. I also met Gábor’s (Gábor Virány – Linda’s father’s cousin – ed.) nieces, who are not a direct relation, but it feels like a relationship because they’re so close: Eszter Pataki and Klára Kovács. They gave me two teacups that had been Margit’s teacups as a gift. It was very moving gesture.

Can you talk about the role of András Gyekiczki in the research for your book?

I couldn’t have done it without him. We dedicated the celebration to him. His wife and his son were there, and we became very close. He found things that no one else would have been able to find. He is a trained lawyer and a sociologist, and he has a brilliant mind and is very determined. When he found something relevant, he would check many different sources to make sure it was correct. For example, András knew there were many Zsigmond Politzers. Back then, nobody really paid attention to the spelling. Zsigmond could be spelled five different ways, and Politzer could be spelled five different ways. He was always meticulous about making sure it was our Zsigmond Politzer. He was also brilliant in figuring out where he could find things. He would start with cemeteries, where the names and the dates and maybe something else was written. He would go to ancient registers and various archives to find handwritten documents. András really knew how to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

András said that he hardly knew of any non-fiction sagas that better exemplify Hungarian Jewish fate of the past 300 years. What does this mean to you, and do you think that through this book, your story could become a symbol for the stories of other families who had similar fates?

This is not just a Jewish story. I think it’s broader than that.

Many people who are not Jewish have said that the saga is amazing for historical reasons. We face many similar things today. Even if it’s not outright war, there’s a lot of anti-Semitism and racism in the U.S. I would hope that this story would be a little bit inspirational and would help people understand that we’re all just people and we’re all connected in various ways, and we have to make sure that hate never gets the upper hand. We’re all just trying to care for our families and build nice lives and serve others.

Why do you think your parents remained silent for so many years, and why did they keep the evidence in the box we talked about at the beginning of our conversation?

I think they were silent because when they came to the U.S., the U.S. was very anti-Semitic, and my father wanted to start a new life. I also think that once he started having children, he didn’t want us ever to face what he had faced. I will never really know, but that’s what I suspect. He wanted to make sure we were safe.

Do you think he would be happy to know that you have broken the silence?

I don’t know. My oldest sister, Madeline, was very protective of him, and she wanted to make sure that he didn’t know that we were doing this. When I look up, I don’t think he’s upset about it. It’s important that we not judge him. It’s easy to judge somebody. Why did he keep these secrets? Was he somehow anti-Jewish? He wasn’t, of course. I don’t know how I would have reacted under those circumstances. Facing what he faced. I really don’t know. As young man, for example, he had to identify his uncle’s body who had been shot in a mass grave. I don’t know how I would have reacted.

I was angry before because he didn’t tell the truth. For me, the truth is very important. That’s how we grew up.

My parents instilled in us a firm conviction in the importance of telling the truth. Yes, I was angry when I found out that they hadn’t told the truth. But the anger is now gone and as I said, I don’t know what I would have done in their situation. And I don’t judge. I don’t judge.