Angela Orosz

Angela Orosz-Richt (born December 21, 1944) is a Holocaust survivor. Of several thousand babies born at the Auschwitz complex, she is one of the few who survived to liberation. Her testimony has led to the 21st century convictions of two former Nazis.

Early life Birth parents Orosz-Richt's parents, Dr. Avraham (Tibor) Bein (born June 2, 1912) and Vera (Veronika) Otvos (born April 2, 1920), were Hungarian Jews. They married in March 1943, in Sarospatak, in northwest Hungary, where Avraham lived and Vera was working as a nanny. During the Nazi cleansing of Hungary in 1944, they were sent by cattle car on the day after Passover to the nearby Sátoraljaújhely ghetto. On May 22, they were sent on another cattle car to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they arrived on May 25.

Concentration camp Both went through the selection process upon entering Auschwitz, and were deemed fit for the work camps. Otvos-Bein was pregnant with Angela at the time, which should have been an immediate death sentence during selection. Her mother thought that her pregnancy would elicit sympathy, and told Josef Mengele about her pregnancy. He laughed, calling her a "stupid goose," and apparently did not believe her, sending her to the work camp instead of the gas chamber. She had prisoner number A6075 tattooed on her wrist. A Jewish camp doctor tried to convince the mother-to-be to abort the child, but Vera's mother appeared in a dream telling her that "Hashem (God) is with you", and she decided to keep the child.

When Otvos-Bein went into labor, she confided in another Blockaelteste, whose position and medical knowledge, gained from her own father's medical practice, allowed her to assist in the delivery. Due to the malnutrition and medical experimentation suffered by Otvos-Bein, the baby was severely underweight, about 2.5 lbs (a little over one kilogram), and too weak to audibly cry. This probably saved their lives.

They spent several months in the DP Camp at Sluzk. The four of them returned to Budapest in November 1945, where Otvos-Bein's mother had survived the war, hidden in a printing camp.

Some details of her history are known to her through a recording her daughter Katy made during a high school project of a telephone interview with Vera. Katy went on to earn a doctorate in Human Genetics from McGill University.

She first visited her birthplace in 2015, when she was 70. She noted her discomfort with traveling to Auschwitz in comfortable business class with an entourage knowing that her parents travelled to Auschwitz on a prisoner train. He received a five-year sentence.

She returned to Auschwitz again for the 75th liberation anniversary.

In September 2022, in a guest contribution for the German-Jewish newspaper Jüdische Allgemeine, she criticized the United Nations for hosting Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in New York: "I sometimes read that the United Nations were built on the ashes of the Holocaust. Today, that fact seems to have been forgotten. I was born into the ashes of the Holocaust. In December 1944, I could not cry but today I can. And I say this: Shame on you, United Nations, for hosting a man like Ebrahim Raisi! In doing so you insult millions of Jews around the world."