It was supposed to be a celebration, then the men with guns came

Tomi Kolomy never did find out what happened to his father.

The scrap metal merchant had been sent to the Russian front as part of a forced Jewish labour unit. But after bribing his commanding officer he was given three days leave and the family were planning to celebrate his homecoming.

Then the men with guns came. The concierge at the 'Yellow Star House' in which they had been forced to live had denounced Tomi's father Alfréd to the Hungarian Fascists, the Arrow Cross.

He was arrested just a few days before Tomi's eighth birthday and never seen again.

"My father had just had a bath. After all he had experienced there was going to be a celebration. We were sitting as a family circle. Suddenly these two guards knock on the door to take him away with the guns.

"We never found out what happened. There are two possibilities. One is he was taken to one of the killing camps.

"In those days they were running trains taking 2,000 people a day to Auschwitz. But not being satisfied with the speed of that the Arrow Cross would come round and march people to the River Danube. They would strip everybody naked, tie three of them together, shoot the person in the middle and he would fall, dragging the other two into the river. Probably that would have been preferable."

Tomi, 88, grew up in Kispest, on the outskirts of Budapest, the only child of Alfréd and Margit. Before he was born his father and uncles had changed the family name from Kohn in an attempt to avoid prejudice.

The Hungarian government of the time was closely aligned with Nazi Germany and from the late 1930s onwards had passed a series of increasingly repressive anti-Jewish laws. A few months before his father was arrested, Tomi remembers witnessing the German invasion