George Hajduska and Franceska Anna Schon

Franceska Anna Schon: Frances was born Franceska Anna Schon in Kaposvar, Hungary, just three weeks after the armistice that ended the First World War. Her parents ran a general store and she had a comfortable middle-class Jewish upbringing, attending school and studying ballet and piano. She was very close to her brother Istvan, who was five years her senior and an accomplished musician. More Related to this Story, according to Globe and Mail. In her late teens, the family moved to Budapest where she trained as an aesthetician. She had an active social life and met George Hajduska, whom she married in 1942. In Hungary the removal of Jews came later than in some countries, but eventually the Nazis came. George was sent to Russia with a forced labour battalion. Frances was captured with her mother at a railway station in 1944 and sent first to Auschwitz and later to the Parschnitz camp in Czechoslovakia and Grandmother, businesswoman, world traveller, survivor. Born on Dec. 1, 1918, in Kaposvar, Hungary; died on Jan. 9, 2014, in Vancouver, of pneumonia following complications from a fall, aged 95. Submit a Lives Lived column (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.