I am allergic to birthday celebrations.

Nevertheless, my Williamsburg friends organized an elaborate gathering on my 99th birthday. In fact, if they had followed the ancient Chinese custom of considering a child one year old at birth, I would have celebrated my 100th birthday.

Regardless, I have a past that carried me from my hometown, Parkan, a small border town on the Danube River, in the Czechoslovak Republic, first to Lake Placid, than to historic Williamsburg.

My life is an open book.

During my 45 years of punditry at the Virginia Gazette and the Lake Placid News, publishing more than 2,000 columns, I have described happy times but also events that had brought me repeatedly to the edge of death.

I am a Holocaust survivor who survived Hitler and Stalin.

My childhood was a happy one in the democratic Czechoslovakia. I was born into a prosperous family. My mother was a former teacher in an elite private school in Budapest, Hungary. Culture, history, and politics were a staple at our dinner table.

In 1938, everything changed. As a result of the Munich agreement between Hitler, and British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlin, democratic Czechoslovakia was dismembered, and the region where we lived, was incorporated into Nazi-allied, semi-fascist Hungary.

Hungary had laws already on the books that made Jews second-class citizens. Laws that permitted universities to accept only 6 percent of Jewish students, no matter how capable they were. No Jews were allowed in public service jobs.

Hungary, however, was still a relatively safe haven for Jews. While from other parts of Europe, the Nazi’s were deporting hunoert’s of thousands of Jews to extermination camps, no transports left Hungary.

All this changed on March 1944, when Hitler fearing that Hungary may sue for a separate peace with the Allies, invaded Hungary. Soon, SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, and his goon squad descended on Hungary and the deportation of Jews began to the Auschwitz extermination camp.

I was shipped in a railroad cattle-car to the Carpathian Mountains, in Transylvania, a territory that earlier belonged to Rumania, to a slave-labor camp. We were to build a railroad line, through the rugged mountains, for the German Army.

It was backbreaking labor, from sunrise to dusk on a starvation diet. The work would have killed me. As a youngster I had my own pony, and I learned how to take care of horses. The camp commandant needed a groom for his horses, and I talked myself into the job.

I also drove the commandant to nearby villages, and Rumanian peasants gave me some extra food and old clothing. This later enabled me to escape from the slave labor camp.

The Red Army moving up through the Balkans, made the Germans abandon the railroad project, and relocate the slave laborers toward the Hungarian heartland.

We arrived at Budapest on Oct. 15. 1944, the day when the extreme right-wing Nyilas Party took over the government from Regent Horthy. A reign of terror ensued.

Our slave-labor detachment was billeted in an abandoned brick-making yard, and the next day we were put to work on repairing the railroad line leading to the last standing railroad bridge, spanning the Danube River, out of Budapest.

U.S. B-17 Liberators, and British Lancaster bombers made daily raids on the bridge, but because of the heavy anti-aircraft fire had to fly high, and didn’t manage to hit the bridge. However, when there was an alert that the bombers were approaching, we, the slave laborers, were herded into the adjoining cornfields, to hide.

Following one of those raids, I remained hidden in the corn fields. I removed the grab that identified me as a slave laborer. Under it, I had hidden the old clothing the Rumanian peasants had given me. I crawled out of the cornfield, walked a short distance to a tram station, and boarded a tram that took me to downtown Budapest.

There, on Vilmos Czaszar Ut I jumped off the still moving tram, in case I am being followed. Hitting the pavement on the sidewalk, I ran, miraculously, into the arms of Bela Engel, my brother-in-law.

He escaped earlier from the Bor-copper mines slave-labor camp, in Serbia. He made its way to Budapest, joined the Zionist-led, anti-Nazi underground movement.

Bela, took me to one of the Swedish Safe Houses, established by Raoul Wallenberg, the legendary Swedish diplomat who saved tens-of-thousands of Hungarian Jews from being shipped to Nazi extermination camps.

I was one of them.

Shatz is a Williamsburg resident. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place” the compilation of his selected columns. The book is available at Bruton Parish Shop and Amazon .com

(The second chapter will follow next week.)