She is one of the 1000 women proposed for the Nobel Peace Price 2005.
She says: « I hoped we would not repeat history, that there would be no more wars or concentration camps. But like an evil spirit from Pandora’s box – hatred, war, internment camps, and prosecutions returned ».
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Anna Bu – Serbia
She works for the Ecumenical Humanitarian Organization EHO.
Anna Bu was born on Human Rights Day in 1946, in a concentration camp in the town of Pancevo in northern Serbia. This was a place where members of the ethnic German minority were interned, after they were deprived of all civil rights in the aftermath of the World War II. Some 80,000 of those interned, ethnic Germans living along the Danube River, died in the camps of the former Yugoslavia after World War II, many of them elderly and children. Until recently it was still forbidden to talk about these victims and the camps.
Thanks to the brave and persistent efforts of her father Janos, Anna and her ill mother were released from the camp in Gakovo in August 1947. The family stayed in Pancevo until 1951, after which they moved to the town of Zrenjanin, where they lived with her father’s family in a part of town mainly occupied by ethnic Hungarians. As the neighborhood children called Anna a “stinking German,” she did her best to learn Hungarian as soon as possible. She attended primary school and grammar school in Zrenjanin, where she engaged intensively in various student associations, and was always among the best of students.
For two years Anna studied civic engineering in Belgrade, after which she married Istvan Bu, a technology engineer. She moved to the city of Novi Sad, and in 1971, as the best student of her generation, she graduated from the German Department at the university. During the second year of her studies she gave birth to her first son Lorant, and in 1973 to her second son Robert. At that time she was already employed at an architectural bureau, where she worked until 1993, when a colleague from the office, Karoly Beres, invited her to join him at the Ecumenical Humanitarian Organization.