Paul Hermann Ornstein (; April 4, 1924 – January 19, 2017) was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor. Early life Ornstein was born in Hungary in a Jewish family to parents, Abraham Ornstein, an accountant, and Frieda Sziment. At 15, Ornstein left home to attend Franz Josef National Rabbinical Seminary in Debrecen, Hungary. On a visit home from seminary, he met his future wife Anna Brunn. Interest in psychoanalysis While he did attend a rabbinical seminary, he did not want to become a rabbi; rather, he wanted to study literature, archaeology, and philosophy. His interest in psychology evolved from reading novels, handwriting analysis, and poetry. At the seminary, he joined a study group that read Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud as well as Thalassa by Sándor Ferenczi and Ritual by Theodor Reik. Reik's book fostered Ornstein's interest in psychoanalysis especially because of his ability to connect it to his daily life as an observant Jew. Thus, at 15, he decided that he wanted to be a psychoanalyst. The Holocaust In March 1944, Germans invaded Hungary, and Ornstein was forced by the German Army to dig trenches as part of a forced labor battalion in World War II on the eastern front of Poland and Ukraine. He was successful on his third attempt to escape from his battalion and reached Budapest, which was still occupied by Nazis at the time. During the siege of Budapest, he spent several months during 1944 hiding in the basement of the annex of the Swiss Embassy in Budapest. After the Soviet army took over Hungary, he returned to his home town in search of his family and Anna. However, Russian soldiers arrested him and forced him to work in a Soviet labor battalion until he escaped. Other people were living in his childhood home and no one had heard of his family or Anna. Initially, he found no surviving relatives. With few options, he decided to leave with a friend to Romania and enroll in the medical school at the University of Cluj. Months after the war had ended, Ornstein was still in medical school in Romania when he discovered that his mother and three younger brothers were murdered in Auschwitz. However, in the same week, he got two telegrams from Budapest: one from his father, who had survived a six-month death march, and the other from Anna, who had survived Auschwitz. He hid