United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Maria Louise Kiss Madi (14 May 1898-4 December 1970) was born and raised in Budapest, Hungary. Around 1920, she married [Lajos Felsöbuki], who was an orthopedist. They had one daughter, Hilde Felsobuky, born on November 26, 1920. Maria, who attended school in Leeds, England, and in Budapest, earned a medical degree in 1922, specializing as a radiologist. She and Felsöbuki divorced in 1924. Maria alternated her name as “Maria Madi Kiss” and “Maria Kiss Madi.” In 1939, Hilda married George G. Walton, a geologist originally from Indiana, who was doing surveys in Romania. She emigrated to the United States in April 1941 and spent most of the war in Shreveport, Louisiana, giving birth to daughter Barbara in August 1941. Son Stephen was born in 1947. Maria, who had been planning to join her daughter in the United States, began her diaries when the United States entered the war, ending her immigration plans. She describes her life in Budapest, keeping her diary as a means of “communicating” with her daughter and sharing her experiences. She also describes the invasion and occupation of Budapest and what she saw and heard of the war. She also writes extensively about the persecution of the Jews, including her efforts to aid a seven-year-old boy, Alfred Lakos, in the fall of 1944. Maria was finally able to emigrate to the United States in December 1946. She lived first in Boston, becoming a naturalized American citizen in June 1952, later moving to Columbus, Ohio, and eventually to Houston, Texas. In the United States, Maria worked as a psychiatrist. She passed away in Houston, Texas, on December 4, 1970 at age 72. Maria Madi was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 2015.
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Consists of seventeen bound volumes containing diaries written by Dr. Maria Madi, a non-Jewish female physician living in Budapest, Hungary, between December 1941 and September 1945. In the diaries, which are handwritten in English, Dr. Madi describes what she is hearing about the war, about propaganda in Hungary, and about missing her daughter, who immigrated to the United States in 1939 and started a family. After the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, Dr. Madi describes constant air raids, intense deprivation, and what she knows and sees of the ongoing persecutions against Jews. She also references a young boy whom she hides in her home in the fall of 1944. The diaries include photographs, clippings, and correspondence, as well as pencil notations Dr. Madi made in the 1960s. Also includes one diary from Budapest during World War I.
Maria Madi diaries