“Like many many other other Holocaust survivors… my parents felt that they had gotten a second chance and they were not going to dwell on the past,” says food writer Cammy Bourcier. Still, there were moments in her childhood when their past entered the present. Cammy recalls a trip to Canada when she was little. When police stopped her family at the border to inspect a trunk filled with clothes from her father’s job in the garment industry, he panicked. “That was a lasting scar,” says Cammy. 

Her father Herman, known as Zidy in the family, was part of an effort that helped save 100,000 Jews during the war. Cammy recalls another story from when she was a teen, perhaps even younger she says, when a woman approached her father on the subway and said she recognized him from Budapest. The woman told Herman that he had saved her life. 

“My father left home in 1939,” she explains. He was the youngest of seven children in a family that lived in Uzhhorod, Czechoslovakia, which became Hungary in 1939 and today sits within Hungary’s borders. “He went to Prague with the intention of sailing to Palestine, but when he got to Prague, the Germans had made that impossible,” Cammy continues. Not sure where to turn, his mother, who had already lost two sons to Hungarian labor camps didn’t want him to return home. Herman instead headed south and east to Budapest where his brother Bela lived.

Through much of the war, Jews living in Hungary were subject to harsh anti-Jews laws but were not deported to concentration camps. “My dad kept a low profile,” working various jobs in Budapest, says Cammy. When Nazi forces occupied Hungary in March of 1944 and sent droves of Jews to concentration camps, Herman became deeply involved in a local chapter of the Zionist youth group B’nei Akiva. Working with friends, he helped provide Jews in Budapest with false papers, claiming they were Swiss citizens, and therefore protected from Nazi forces. 

In October of that year, Herman was caught on a tram with a briefcase of papers and was taken into custody and tortured by members of the Hungarian fasciast group the Arrow Cross Party. “They didn’t want my father. They knew my father was a little fish. They wanted the names of the big shots,” who were supplying him with false papers, Cammy says. “They beat him up to a pulp... but he didn’t give any names.” Herman was hospitalized for his injuries. And, when “his friends found out that he was in the hospital, they put on Nazi uniforms and they rescued him,” Cammy explains. 

After the war, Herman made his way to Israel where he met his wife, another survivor, and together, they moved to Brooklyn in 1957 following the Suez Crisis. In March of 2020, Herman passed away. As a way to honor his memory, Cammy continues to make his signature chopped liver, laced with mushrooms and caramelized onions. 

Cammy isn’t certain where he picked up the recipe — perhaps from his mother — but it was the dish he always brought to her home for large gatherings with friends. He would pick up rye bread to go with the liver for most of the year, and matzo for Passover. Last year, Cammy made it on Father’s Day and Thanksgiving, sharing some with a friend who loves Herman’s recipe so much she consumed it in the car with her fingers. She says: “When I’m making it I’m keeping his memory alive, for my friends as well.”