| Alicia Balassa-Clark: Bella Gross Balassa, and Rozsie, Klari, and Paul Balassa, | To Whom it May Concern,
I am trying to find out what happened to my great-grandmother, Bella Gross Balassa (wife of Dr. Bela Balassa, a military physician with the Austro-Hungarian army) and her son, Paul, and daughters, Rozsie and Klari. My great-grandmother originally came from prominent family who owned a large parcel of land with beautiful horses in south-eastern region of Hungary, near Sombor, and which later became a part of Yugoslavia and then Serbia. My great-Uncle Paul was captured by the Gestapo and never seen again. He helped many Jews escape out of Budapest,Hungary, during WWII before he was captured himself, and was also a highly decorated officer from WWI. Bella and her daughters were boarded onto trains in Budapest to be sent to workcamps and never seen again. My great-grandmother was already elderly by then, and my great-aunts must have been in their mid to late thirties. As far as I know they were not Jewish, but had dark hair and eyes which I inherited. I was always told by my Grandfather that I looked just like my great-grandmother, Bella, because of my dark eyes. My grandfather, Dr. Leslie (Laszlo) Balassa, who went to Vienna University in the twenties and earned his degree in Chemistry there, and then emmigrated to Mexico in the latter part of the twenties to help his friend start a pharmacy, and then to the U.S. in the early thirties, where in Flintwood, Michigan, he married my Quaker grandmother from Maine, Alice Hussey Balassa, in which they married and had a single son, my father, John Paul Balassa. My grandfather later established his own chemistry lab, Lescarden, in Goshen, New York, where he worked on a formula to help in the cure of skin cancer using shark cartelage.
One little girl of my great uncle's, Paul Balassa, was born in a concentration camp, Klari, and later emmigrated from Budapest to Paris, France, with her prodigy pianist son, my second cousin, Nicholas Balassa Zsivkov, who we have also now lost contact with but who I believe is still in France. There was also an elder brother, George Balassa, who actually survived the holocaust and I believe died in Hungary of natural causes in the late 50s early 60s. The children of Bela and Bella Gross Balassa were five in total: George, Paul, Klari, Laszlo (my grandfather, born Sept. 6, 1903, Bacsfoldvar, was the fourth child), and Rozsie. I and my family would like very much to know the fates of my great-grandmother, Bella Gross Balassa, and great Auntes, Rozsie, and Klari, as well as my great-uncle Paul, and what happened to them and if there is any accounting anywhere as to their fates, and if our family here in America is due compensation for their slave labor and deaths as a consequence of their captivity and forced labor during World War II.
Thank you for reading the story of my family and please contact me if you yourself have any knowledge of this part of my family, or if you know of any means of finding out more about what may have happened to them, through the Hungarian government or other non-governmental agency that may be helpful to us.
Sincerely,
Alicia Balassa-Clark
2309 NE Cranbrook Drive
Vancouver, WA 98664
aliciabalassa7 -a-t- msn -d-o-t- com
360-896-1676 |
| | |
