Dora Fiksler 's parents were born in Romania and owned animals, when she grew up. Her father was a construction worker. She grew up with six siblings and helped out with the animals in her free time. She attended a Hungarian school for eight years. During the war, she was initially deported to Auschwitz and then further to the Mauthausen concentration camp. There she worked at a factory until her liberation. After the war, she worked as shop assistant in a grocery store in Solotvyno.
Other Interviews:
After The WarYiddish and Hungarian
A Neolog Family
Solotvyno, Ukraine
Dora Fiksler describes her religious upbringing in Transcarpathian Nyzhnye Solotvyno. When she was born in 1924, the town belonged to Czechoslovakia but like most of Transcarpathia, had long been a part of Hungary. As a result, Fiksler's upbringing was Hungarian in orientation. She speaks a Hungarian inflected Yiddish and identifies her family as having been Neolog, a reformed version of Judaism followed by most Hungarian Jews. Her comment that her grandfather from Romania was Orthodox but her own father was already Neolog, can also be seen as part of a general trend that Romanian Jews were more orthodox and that levels of orthodoxy decreased with each passing generation.