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Agnes Adachi (nee Mandl Ágnes) was born in 1918 in Budapest, Hungary. Agnes’s father owned a textile factory and she was an only child. After finishing secondary school, she traveled to Germany to stay with relatives. There, she attended the 1936 Olympic Games, where she saw the famous African-American runner Jesse Owens. Between 1939 and 1942, she attended university in Switzerland.
In 1944, after the German occupation of Hungary, she secured a Swedish protective passport (Schutzpass). But unfortunately it was impossible to travel to Sweden at that time. The deportation of Hungarian Jews from all areas of Hungary except Budapest began in spring 1944, resulting in the murder of almost the entire rural Jewish population. However, Jews in Budapest relatively safe until they were deported in the fall of 1944. Before Christmas of 1944, Arrow Cross Party members shot Jews into the Danube River en masse. Agnes joined Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and his team and played an active role in rescue operations, including going to sites where massacres were taking place and saving people. Budapest was liberated by the Soviet army in early 1945. Wallenberg was immediately captured by the Soviets and taken to Moscow, where he was imprisoned and later died. That same year Agnes and her family left Hungary. They settled in Philadelphia in the United States. She subsequently married and had two sons. The interview was conducted in New York in 1996.