Gregory Wahl often heard his grandmother tell stories of surviving the Holocaust and Hungarian Revolution. He says her perseverance taught him that it is possible to beat the odds. The loss of a loved one often leaves survivors with a sense of sadness and loneliness, but it also allows them to reflect on what made that person special and a treasure to those around them.

Sometimes a death also gives people the opportunity to acknowledge — for the first or 100th time — that they have been in the midst of living history. It may also remind those left behind just how lucky they are.

Judith Karmi, who died Jan. 8, had been an Amherst resident since 1995, but the path that led her here was an extraordinary one.

Karmi was born

Judith Timár on April

26, 1924, in Budapest, Hungary. The daughter of a lawyer, she was “as rich as you could be for a Jewish person at the time,” said her grandson, Gregory Wahl.

Judith Karmi passed away Jan. 18. She was a survivor of both the Holocaust and the Hungarian Revolution. As Karmi reached her mid-teens, however, World War II began and everything changed.

On March 19, 1944, Karmi and her family were removed from their home and soon found themselves confined to a house marked with the Star of David and forced to do hard labor for five months at a brick factory.

The family went into hiding in August of that year but were unable to avoid capture by Nazi sympathizers.

From that point, they were beaten, forced to walk for seven days, imprisoned and put back on the road once more, headed toward Austria, a concentration camp and what seemed to be a certain and bleak ending.

Karmi’s father was shot en route by a soldier who was angry for being reprimanded after having stolen his coat. Although Karmi’s father was taken in by a family along the way, he later died of his wounds.

Karmi was able to escape and hide in a convent in Esztergom but was able to remain safe for only two and a half months before she was once again captured, this time to be tried as a spy. She was sentenced and deported to a concentration camp in Dunaszerdahely where she remained for three weeks, until Russian troops occupied the town.

After being freed from the camp, Karmi walked back to Budapest, a three-week journey, and was reunited with her mother and sister who had also managed to escape.

While these events in and of themselves contain enough hardship to break the average person, Karmi endured them, and more.

After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Karmi was once again forced to flee, this time in the back of a freight truck with her two daughters and only what they could carry, which did not include some possessions very dear to her, including a piano.

Music was a passion of Karmi’s, according to Wahl, and after she became settled once again, this time in Israel, she founded a music conservatory with two other teachers.

“I think [that] was one of her proudest moments professionally,” said Wahl.

Once she immigrated to the United States and settled in Kenmore, Karmi began teaching piano lessons and mentored hundreds of local children, a vast number of whom were present at services held earlier this month. “She really made an impression,” Wahl said.

After her death, Wahl and the rest of the family discovered just how much of an impression she had made.

Karmi was a member of the National Guild of Piano teachers for more than 40 years, and when Wahl called its Texas headquarters, the people on the phone line knew exactly who Karmi was.

Karmi was more than her movielike past, however. She was a grandmother and one full of life and sass.

“If she never called you an idiot, it meant she didn’t care,” said Wahl, laughing.

Despite her “no bull” reputation, Karmi was affected by the events of her past. After her passing, the family found a statement she wrote with respect to the German World War II tribunals’ Holocaust reparation program.

In the statement, she said her father had died of exhaustion during the march, rather than being shot, because she had been embarrassed by his true fate for many years.

Judith Karmi was a Holocaust and Hungarian Revolution survivor, a passionate teacher and admirer of music, a traveler, a woman with a vibrant social life and many other characteristics.

But above all, Karmi was a living lesson in many ways.

She was evidence that just because the events of the past are written in history books, doesn’t mean that those touched by them don’t still walk the same streets as the rest of us today.

She taught those around her that “it doesn’t matter what crazy odds you’re up against, you can still make it through and have things ‘your way’ again,” said Wahl.

Above all, she was a reminder that people need not be defined by the path they have walked, but rather the person they choose to be.