Julianna Ötvös

Born: Unknown 1907, Hajdúnánás, Hungary

Julianna was born in Hajdúnánás, Hungary into a Protestant family with seven children. Her father was a farmer; they had their own land and he also farmed some rented land. Her mother was a housewife. Julianna was a regular church-goer and which is where she and her brother met Jehova’s Witnesses.

Her brother was baptized in 1935, and she and her sister were baptized two years later. Julianna went out proselytizing, and whenever she could, she went to other towns to lecture to audiences from the notebooks of the Biblical Society. Because she left the Protestant Church and also due to her proselytizing, she was constantly harassed by the local priest. After her baptism in 1937, she was taken to prison several times. Only the help of her family saved her from starvation in her prison cell. Due to the conditions, she fell ill and had to stay in bed for a year, and never again able to do hard physical work.

In 1941 she spent a month in prison in Hajdúnánás and was then transferred to the prison in Budapest. She and other Jehova’s Witnesses were taken by train to the Ravensbrück camp, where the purple sign sewn on her clothes indicated her belonging to an ’other religious sect’. She was placed with 12 other believers from Hungary and with hundreds of other Jehova’s Witnesses from all over occupied Europe. The camp was liberated by the Soviet army; Julianna first went to a friend in Berlin and then went back home to Hajdúnánás. She lived the rest of her life in the family house where she had been born.