Born: Kornélia Engelmann
Gyönk, Hungary
June 1, 1915
Died: November 21, 2012
Cornelia Serebrenik was born in the village of Gyönk, Hungary during World War I (1914-1918), when her father served as a soldier for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1918, Hungary became an independent country. The new state experienced a brief Communist upheaval and in the aftermath many Jews were falsely accused as communists. Serebrenik recalled her father returning home assaulted and beaten.
Still, Serebrenik remembered a happy childhood in Gyönk, where her father operated a farm and served as president of the local Jewish community. She grew up speaking Hungarian and German and had a number of non-Jewish friends. Her younger brother was born in 1920, and the siblings regularly visited the country’s capital of Budapest to spend time with their grandfather.
In 1937 Serebrenik married and moved with her new husband to the city of Novi Sad in Yugoslavia. They had two sons before World War II started in 1939. In the winter of 1942 Serebrenik traveled to Budapest to seek medical treatment for her children. While she was there, pro-Nazi forces killed her husband and all his family in Novi Sad. Serebrenik relocated the family back to Hungary.
Her father’s farm was confiscated, and after the Nazi occupation of Hungary in April 1944 Serebrenik was arrested and deported to the killing center of Auschwitz Birkenau. From there she was transported to Ravensbrück where she was liberated by Soviet forces in April 1945. Serebrenik’s brother survived the war as a university student in France, but her mother and two sons were murdered at Auschwitz.
After the war Serebrenik remarried and had two more sons. The family lived in a refugee camp in Vienna for seven years before immigrating to the U.S. in the 1950s. After a few years working a variety of jobs Serebrenik and her husband opened a small store in El Paso, Texas. The couple eventually moved to Houston where both their children had found work after finishing their university studies.
Serebrenik was Houston’s oldest known living survivor prior to her death in 2012 at the age of 97.
Parents:
William Engelmann, d. 1942
Olga Engelmann, d. Auschwitz, 1944
Siblings:
György Engelmann, survived
Spouse:
Ernő Bokor, d. Novi Sad, January 1942
Children:
Peter Alexander, d. Birkenau, May 1944
Tomislav (Igor), d. Birkenau, May 1944
Peter Thomas, born 1946
George Igor, born 1948