Oct 07, 2026

Holocaust survivor Robert Ratonyi was six years old when soldiers marched his mother out of a Budapest courtyard. Three years after October 7, he tells Jenny Beth Martin what happened to a Jewish child in Budapest in 1944 and what he says it has to do with Hamas today. Born in Budapest in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, Ratonyi lost his father to a labor battalion in 1942. On October 10, 1944, soldiers took every adult in his building and left the children behind. A friend of his mother's walked him across a bombed city to his grandparents, and the family moved between the walled ghetto and the Swedish protected houses set up under Raoul Wallenberg until, too weak to walk, he was carried back into the ghetto on his grandfather's back. The Red Army reached the street on January 18, 1945. His mother came home in July. He has studied every genocide of the twentieth century and spent sixteen years telling Georgia students what he found. He explains the thin line he says runs through every human heart, why he says Hamas crossed it, and why the Constitution's divided power is the answer to the most dangerous thing in the world. Robert Ratonyi is the author of From Darkness into Light: My Journey Through Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to Freedom and a speaker for the Georgia Commission on the Holocaust and the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.

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