When he tells the story of his life, Robert Fokos begins with a solemn prologue. “I was born at the wrong time, at the wrong place,” he says in a slow, deep voice.

The year was 1936 and the place was Budapest, Hungary.

Born into a Jewish family, Mr. Fokos had, by the age of 20, lived through a Hungarian fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, a Communist regime and a national armed uprising. This month, at a Holocaust memorial in New Bedford, he will speak publicly for the first time about his experience.

It’s hard for Mr. Fokos to talk about his past, even when seated safely in his Chilmark home. When he thinks back on the many difficulties he’s faced, his eyes often glisten with tears. But lately, sharing his story has become a bit easier than it once was.

Last July, during a prolonged hospital stay, Mr. Fokos became a bar mitzvah. The Hebrew term means “son of the commandment” and it’s a coming-of-age milestone that’s typically reached at age 13. In a special ceremony, Jewish boys don tefillin, small black leather boxes with prayers inside, and begin to assume responsibility for their religious practice.

The bar mitzvah is typically an initiation into adulthood, but for Mr. Fokos, who was 77 when he became a man under Jewish law, it was a way to prepare for death.

“I was worried that if I die, I wouldn’t die as a Jewish man because I was never a bar mitzvah,” he said. He felt like praying, but didn’t know how. For most of his life, Mr. Fokos had distanced himself from his Jewish heritage.

Nazi occupation of Hungary began in March of 1944, and within weeks, they had begun requiring Jews to live in ghettos and to wear a yellow badge in the form of a Star of David. In a photo taken that year, Mr. Fokos, then a smiling eight year old, stands beside his grandfather and his younger brother wearing a yellow star on his left side.

At first, he and his family were sent to a ghetto, but when his father escaped from a forced labor camp, he managed to put his family under Swiss protection until the end of the war. Meanwhile, 424,000 other Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, and thousands more died in other circumstances.

By the end of the Holocaust, about 80 per cent of his family had perished. His aunt disappeared on the first day of the German occupation and was never heard from again. At his young age, Mr. Fokos didn’t understand what was going on.

“At that time, I didn’t understand what it was all about,” he said. “I was eight years old and lived in a very protected environment until the war started.”

Later, during the Communist regime, his father had a hard time getting work with the Jewish name of Fried. So the state renamed him Fokos, so he could get a job.

At the age of 20, Robert Fokos immigrated to the United States and started a new life.

“At that time, I decided to live my life like the first 20 years never happened,” he said. “It went so far that other than my immediate family, I was either ashamed or scared to admit that I was Jewish.”

He married a Lutheran woman, and they raised their children in the protestant Christian tradition. There were two reasons he didn’t want to raise his children as Jews. For one, he didn’t feel he knew enough about the religion to pass it on, having had no religious education growing up. He also worried he’d be putting his children at risk.

“I always had that lingering feeling that another holocaust may just happen,” he said.

Last year, he reclaimed his Jewish identity.

That journey started with a severe depression, which gripped Mr. Fokos during a 61-day stay at the hospital. Months earlier, he’d been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and had broken his ankle while undergoing rehabilitation.

“It got to a point where I wasn’t sure if I wanted to live or I wanted to die,” he said.

He told his daughter Michelle about his depression, a known side effect of congestive heart failure.

“The kind of depression I had at the time was impossible to describe, but I had that feeling that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to live,” he said. “It’s a horrible feeling.”

Michelle approached her father’s physician, hospitalist Yosef Glassman, who wore a yarmulke, a cap worn by some Jewish men, during rounds at the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.

“She mentioned to me that he was starting to re-explore his Jewish roots,” Dr. Glassman said this week. “He hadn’t had a bar mitzvah, and he felt like he hadn’t completed a certain portion of his Jewish rite of passage.”

Though he’d never performed a bar mitzvah before, much less in a hospital, the Orthodox Jewish doctor agreed to make it happen. On his day off, Dr. Glassman assisted Mr. Fokos in putting on the tefillin, and in saying the appropriate blessings. Mr. Fokos’ wife, Ency, was present, as well as his daughter and Dr. Glassman’s family.

“It was very meaningful for all of us,” Dr. Glassman said.

When he left the hospital the next day, Mr. Fokos felt healed, both physically and spiritually, he said. As is the custom, Mr. Fokos received gifts in honor of his bar mitzvah. Dr. Glassman gave him a two-handled washing cup and a Hebrew book “for the very beginner.”

Months later, Mr. Fokos still goes to cardiac rehab, but for the most part, he’s made a full recovery.

“I have an eternal peace that I got from the events, and I think that my feelings are totally clear as to who I am,” he said. “That is the way I am going to pass this world.”

After repressing difficult memories of his past for so long, he no longer feels he has to hide them.

“I’m free to tell anybody who wants to know how I lived my life and what happened,” he said. “That, to me, is part of my religion.”

Mr. Fokos will be speaking on the evening of Sunday, April 26 at Tifereth Israel Synagogue in New Bedford. The time is to be determined, for more information call 508-997-3171.