"Sunshine," written and directed by Istvan Szabo, is a film about five generations of a Jewish family in modern Hungary. Watching "Sunshine" I often had the eerie sensation that I was looking at old home movies made by a distant relative.

I was born in Budapest after WW II and my family and I left Hungary shortly after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Ivan Sors, the narrative voice of Sunshine and, at the end of the movie, the only survivor of the five generations, is a man born about twenty years before I was. Ivan, who survived the labor camps as a teenager, had been forced to watch his father die a horrific death there. Ivan and I have much in common, though, thank God, not that.

My family didn't show up in the film, but I still recognized many places, people, stories and situations. For example, I felt a surge of delight when I saw the brief scene in the breathtakingly beautiful temple in Budapest where Ivan's grandparents are married, and where, as a child, I listened to my father lead the Shabbes (Yiddish for Sabbath) services as Cantor.

There were scenes in the movie that were painfully familiar. No, unlike Adam, Ivan's father, I was never threatened and humiliated at the point of a sword by one of my classmates. But, even as a small child I was never allowed to forget that, as a Jew, I was not welcome in Hungary. I recall that just months before our family emigrated, a man walked into our second grade classroom and, pointing to my twin brother and me, said with a sneer, "Who are those two little monkeys with the beanies?" He was a minor Communist official and this was his disdainful name for our yarmulkes. And, there were other resonances between the movie and my life that cut even closer to the bone. As I listened to Ivan recount how his uncle, along with countless others, was shot on the bank of the Danube in Budapest, his body left to float in the river, I remembered my uncle Feri, my father's only brother, suffering the same fate.

My father was more fortunate. He merely had to endure three years in forced labor camps in Poland. When he returned from the labor camps in late 1944, he weighed less than 82 pounds. He had lost almost 70 pounds under the harsh conditions and little food in the MunkaszolgÖlat, the forced labor detail of the Hungarian Army, attached to the German Army fighting in Poland. Without his beard, and looking like a skeleton, no one recognized him in Kunhegyes, the small town about 100 kilometers east of Budapest, where he had lived for more than five years before he was forced into the Musz. Like Ivan in the movie, my father began working for the secret police, helping to round up the Nyilas, the Hungarian Nazis. In a scene perhaps more dramatic than almost any in the movie, my father wound up one day interrogating a man, a former member of the hated rural police.

"Did you know a Mrs. Etta Slomovits?"

"Oh, yes. A fine woman. I felt terrible when the Nazis took her away."

"Did you steal anything from her?"

"Oh, no. I was just helping her carry her possessions to the train. We didn't know where they were going."

At this point my father, unable to control himself any longer, dove across the table, and attacked the man with the butt of a pistol. He had testimony from a number of witnesses, including his next-door neighbor, that this was the man who had brutally beaten his wife and children before they were forced onto the cattle carts to Auschwitz. That he had screamed at them, "Where is your gold? Where have you hidden your gold? It is not possible that the Rabbi's family has no gold."

Unlike Ivan, my father did not continue working for the secret police for long. In late 1945, he moved to Budapest to accept a job as a Cantor.

In the movie, after he wins the gold medal in 1936, Adam is offered the option, by an official with the U.S. fencing team, of leaving Hungary and coming to America. Both my parents were offered that same option after the war, after they were liberated, my mother from Ravensbruck, my father from a labor camp in Poland.

They refused. For the same reasons that Adam gives in the movie: family, and love of their homeland.

After Adam is killed in the camps, his son Ivan returns to Budapest to find that almost all of his relatives have been killed, that the sole survivor, his grandmother, is now forced to share the family home with strangers. My mother, too, returned to find strangers occupying her apartment and learned that her fiancé and her only brother were dead. My father found Russian soldiers stabling their horses in his house, and discovered that he had lost both his parents, his only brother, three sisters, two nephews, and his wife and their three children.

The final resonance between the movie and my life relates to the Hungarian Revolution in November of 1956. In the movie, Ivan finally steps out of his blind allegiance to the corrupt Communist government and sides with the revolutionaries, a stance that lands him in prison after the revolution is brutally put down.

My parents didn't choose sides. They finally withdrew from the deadly game that they had been forced to play all their lives, the game known as, "Can Jews survive in Hungary?" In February of 1957 they exchanged their furnished apartment for an exit visa. And we began new lives.