Gabor Maté

Thanks for the introduction.

Nice to be here with you.

Hungary at that time was the only Eastern European country that had, up to that point, escaped the Holocaust.

However, it was a very anti-Semitic country.

My father was in forced labor with the Hungarian army, which was an ally of the Germans.

In March of 1944, the Nazis actually occupied Hungary, and that's when began the extermination of Hungarian Jewry.

Within the space of three months, they killed over half a million people, including my grandparents in Auschwitz, and my mother and I came within a hairbreadth of being deported there ourselves.

But the whole first year of my life was spent under Nazi occupation with a very terrorized, reach-struck and struggling mother, who then, when I was 11 months of age, had to give me a two-complete stranger in Budapest, a Christian woman on the street, to save my life.

Yeah, because she thought that where we were living, I would not survive.

She took me to some relatives that were living under relatively safer conditions who then looked after me for five or six weeks.

Well...

I remember the books that I read, the playmates that I engaged with, schools.

I was very much a young acolyte of the communist ideology because I believed in the system.

And my parents, of course, and our teachers could not...

tell me otherwise for risk of dire consequences.

And the ideals of the system in terms of the brotherhood, sisterhood of humanity, equality, justice, really appealed to my own sense of justice.

In 1956 came the Hungarian Revolution against the communist regime and the Soviet rule, and overnight the scales fell from my eyes and I became disillusioned with

this previous system, this previous, the idea of this system in my mind.

So that was my first big disillusionment.

And shortly after that, when I was 13, we left the country and moved to Canada.