One of five children, Ara Jeretzian was born in Constantinople in 1918. Soon after his birth his entire family fled to Hungary to escape the on-going violence against Armenians. In the 1930s Jeretzian joined the youth movement of Hungary’s Fascist Arrow Cross Party, but resigned when the persecution of Jews began. He went into tailoring.

In March 1944 Budapest was occupied by the German army. The city’s Jews were subjected to a curfew and ordered into a ghetto. More than 220,000 people were supposed to be moved there prior to being sent to death camps in Poland.

Jeretzian was quick to spot the parallels between the events his family witnessed 30 years earlier and what he was observing in the very heart of Europe.

His son, Ara Jeretzian Jr, a businessman in Vienna, explains: “His mother told a lot of stories about the persecution of minorities in Turkey, and so my father felt a moral obligation to do everything he could to help other people who found themselves in the same circumstances. After all, he was only human.”