Aranka Siegal

Aranka Meizlik was born on 10 June 1930 in Beregszasz, Czechoslovakia (present day Berehove, Ukraine), to Meyer and Rise Meizlik. Her father died when she was nine months old, and her mother remarried Ignac Davidowitz. She was the fifth of seven children: her older sisters Lili, Rozsi, Etus and Iboya, and her younger half-siblings Sandor and Joli.

She spent summers with her grandmother, Babi, on a small farm in Komjaty in the Carpathian Mountains. Her grandmother lived a strictly Orthodox life and taught her reverence for books. When Jewish children were barred from public schools, the few books her family owned became treasures.

In spring 1944, while her stepfather was serving in the Hungarian Second Army, thirteen-year-old Aranka, her mother and siblings Iboya, Sandor and Joli were forced into a ghetto set up in the Beregszasz brick factory. They were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, arriving on 9 May 1944, where Aranka and Iboya were separated from the rest of the family and never saw them again.

The sisters were later moved to Bergen-Belsen, where British forces liberated them in 1945. Of her immediate family, only Iboya and Etus survived with her. The Swedish Red Cross brought the sisters to Sweden, where they were rehabilitated, attended school and worked in a factory for three and a half years.

After emigrating to the United States in 1948, Siegal settled in New York. Once her children were at college she returned to education, earning a BA in social anthropology from New York University in 1977, and recounted her experiences on a WBAI radio programme. She also worked as a substitute teacher and lecturer.

Her first book, Upon the Head of the Goat: A Childhood in Hungary 1939-1944 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), was a 1982 Newbery Honor Book and won the 1982 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Nonfiction and the Janusz Korczak Literary Award. The title comes from the scapegoat passage in Leviticus 16. Grace in the Wilderness: After the Liberation 1945-1948 (1985) was named a Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies. Memories of Babi (2008) was a National Jewish Book Award finalist and a 2009 Sydney Taylor Honor Book.

She wrote for young people, she said, "because they will be the recorders of history in books yet to be written". For more than 60 years she spoke in schools and colleges across the United States and abroad, including in Hungary as the guest of two US ambassadors.

In 1951 she married Gilbert Siegal, a Harvard Law graduate and attorney who had served as a US Air Force officer in the Second World War and received the Distinguished Flying Cross. They had two children, Rissa and Joseph, and lived for many years in the New York suburbs before moving to Aventura, Florida, in 2000. Gilbert died in 2004. She spoke six languages and loved tennis, swimming and water exercise classes with friends.

Aranka Siegal died on Monday 2 November 2026, aged 96. Her obituary was published on 9 November 2026 by Levitt-Weinstein Memorial Chapels and Cemeteries at Beth David in Hollywood, Florida. The cause of death was not made public.

Siegal's books remain widely read in schools as an introduction to the Holocaust through a child's eyes, and have appeared in editions including Japanese and Chinese. Her lifelong message was tolerance, compassion and refusal to make anyone a scapegoat. She was the subject of the film Aranka Siegal: The Anne Frank Who Survived, which premiered in Amsterdam.