Ana Balog

Ana Balog Frenkel (February 27, 1930 – January 1945) was a Uruguayan Jewish girl murdered in the gas chambers of the Auschwitz concentration camp, during the Holocaust.

Biography Ana Bálog was born on 27 February 1930 at the Hospital Pereira Rossell in Montevideo, Uruguay, to Segismundo Bálog, a Christian convert to Judaism, and Kornelia Frenkel, who came from an Orthodox Jewish family from Öcs. Both of her parents were Hungarian immigrants. She had an older sister, Eva, born in 1928, who survived the Holocaust and later died in Uruguay in 2019.

Her parents, who had married in Hungary, decided to emigrate to Uruguay in 1928 due to economic difficulties and social rejection resulting from their interfaith marriage. They arrived in Uruguay while Kornelia, then 19 years old, was pregnant with their first daughter. The family settled in a tenement house in Montevideo's Ciudad Vieja, where Segismundo worked as a jeweller.

In the late 1930s, due to the family's ongoing economic difficulties and with the aim of re-establishing their daughters’ ties with their extended family, Kornelia returned to Hungary with the children. Eva was sent to live with an aunt in Tokaj, while Ana stayed with her maternal grandmother in Öcs.

Through the intervention of the Argentine diplomatic mission, Kornelia and Eva obtained diplomatic passports, enabling them to escape to Sweden and later return to Uruguay.

Legacy In 2007, Uruguayan President Tabaré Vázquez submitted to Yad Vashem official documentation and information held by the Uruguayan government regarding Ana Balog, including her birth certificate.

In 2009, a commemorative plaque in her honor was installed at the Holocaust Memorial in Montevideo.