Evi Blaikie

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Evelyne "Evi" Juliette Blaikie (January 1939, Paris, France) was a Hungarian Jew who was one of the Hidden Children who were in hiding during the Holocaust (1941-1945). Evi was born in Paris to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents. After World War II (1939-1945) broke out and Nazi Germany overran Paris in 1940, her father, Herman, a member of the Communist Party, went underground. Soon after, her mother, Magda, was caught in a raid and sent to a slave labor camp. At two and a half years old, Evi was taken to Hungary by an aunt under her male cousin’s passport. Two years later, Magda managed to escape from the camps and was reunited with Evi in Budapest just a few months before the Germans marched into Hungary as well on March 19, 1944. With false papers, Magda, Evi, and Magda’s nephew Peter sought refuge on a farm in the countryside. After a year in hiding, they were liberated by the Soviet army. By then, several members of their family had disappeared during the war, including Evi’s father. In January 1946, Magda and Evi returned to Paris. For the next ten years, Magda (died in 1952) attempted to put their lives back together while Evi lived in orphanages, a Catholic convent, foster homes, and with various family members in France and in England. While living in a Jewish orphanage in South London, Evi was accepted as a student at Saint Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls. Later, she attended the University of Vienna, Austria and after studying languages there for three years, she became an interpreter in English, French, and German. In 1960, Evi accepted an invitation from her uncle to work with him in Caracas, Venezuela. From there she emigrated to the United States and married into a politically active Irish Catholic family. She studied fashion design and worked on New York’s Seventh Avenue for twenty-five years. She is divorced now and has 3 children and 5 grandchildren. In 1991, at the first International Conference for the Hidden Child, Evi finally reconnected with her past and started writing down the memories of her childhood. With another Hidden Child, she cofounded the Hungarian Hidden Children, a group that still meets once a month. Evi is now retired and only has a few volunteer-based jobs, one of them is teaching English to new immigrants. Her first full-length book is called “Magda’s Daughter: A Hidden Child’s Journey Home. There is also a documentary about her - directed by Rudy Vegliante - "Remember Us: The Hungarian Hidden Children (2017).

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