She left Hungary with her husband Peter Halász and children, Mónika and Valér, in the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

Soon after graduating, thanks to her fine mezzo-soprano voice, she began to get small singing roles in films and before long the popular songwriters of the day were composing hits for her.

Between April and November of that year five Jews lived there clandestinely, until Rácz was inadvertently betrayed by the husband of one of the resident fugitives.

Rácz was arrested by the Hungarian secret police and incarcerated at their headquarters, the notorious Hotel Majestic, where prisoners were interrogated and often tortured before being deported or killed.

In 1991, almost half a century after those events, she was honoured as a Righteous Among the Nations by the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority at Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem.

Their son Valér was born in the Fifties, followed two years later by their daughter Mónika (who later became the London-based journalist Monica Porter).

Monica Porter’s book about her mother’s wartime exploits, Deadly Carousel: A Singer’s Story of the Second World War, first published in 1990, brought the life and career of Vali Rácz to the attention of a wider audience, outside Hungary.