The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (46 page)

Michel and Leontina Avondet knew they could face reprisals. So, too, did their daughter Silvia and their relatives Maria and Alfredo Comba, who helped in the deception. None of them had any intention of betraying their guests. When a neighbour, frightened that the fugitives might be betrayed by someone in the village, expressed his fears that reprisals might affect the whole village, the Vitales offered to try to find somewhere else, and leave. ‘The Avondets knew very well that if they had been discovered they would have been shot, and the house burned down. As they lived in a small terrace, all the houses would have been destroyed.’ But Michel Avondet was adamant: “You stop here. Don’t worry. We’ll organize everything.”’ Ada Vitale commented: ‘Their solidarity helped us morally and physically.’
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In the village of Gandino—a village which was also the Nazi regional headquarters—a local Italian official, Giovanni Servalli, issued false papers to the Löwi family, refugees from Germany. These papers enabled them to change their names to those common in the region: Mariem Löwi became Maria Loverina, her daughter Marina took the surname Carnazzi and her brother became Gilberto Carnazzi.

Marina’s father, Leopold (Lipa) Löwi, had been in Belgium when war came; in 1942 he was caught in a round-up there and deported to Auschwitz. He did not survive the war. Marina was six years old when she reached Gandino; her brother was nine. Among those who gave them refuge were a teacher, Vincenzo Rudelli, and his wife Candida, parents of two grown daughters who offered them refuge in a mountain village. The Rudellis also gave refuge to five or six other Jewish families—in addition to several partisans whom they were sheltering.

Marina Löwi also recalled that Umberto Palomba, an Italian who had left Milan to avoid the Allied bombing, ‘befriended us and forewarned us of Nazi house searches, some of which we encountered, and round-ups’. At those times he ‘gave us sanctuary in his house’.
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Marina Löwi and her brother were eventually taken in by the Sisters of Maria Bambina in Gazzaniga, and looked after by the nuns in the boarding school they ran in the village. The Mother Superior and the local priest were the only ones to know that the two ‘Carnazzi’ children were Jewish—as indeed were several others in the school.
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IN JULY
1944, on the German-occupied island of Rhodes, on the second and third day of the internment of the Jews of the island, food was sent into their place of incarceration by local Italians distressed by the hardships imposed upon their fellow islanders. It is said on the island that the imam of the mosque went to see the rabbi, and offered to bury the synagogue’s Scrolls of the Law in the mosque garden. This was done, and the rabbi retrieved them safely after the war.
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Also on Rhodes, an Italian teacher from Sardinia, Girolamo Sotgiu, who was teaching literature at the local lycée, did what he could to help the Jews when the deportation was ordered. ‘He started by disguising himself as a porter,’ Albert Amato recalled, ‘in order to bring some food and some comfort (with the news that there had been an attempt to kill Hitler) to the men already herded together. Secondly, he told my wife that our little daughter, Lina, then eight years old, should not go to the concentration point and he risked his life taking her and hiding her with him. Thirdly he managed to find a horse carriage (the island was under blockade and there was no petrol for the cars nor feed for the horses) and took my mother to interview the Turkish Consul in a nearby village where the consulate had been transferred, owing to the bombing of the port and the town by the Allies.’
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The Turkish Consul, Selahattin Ulkumen, provided protective documents, in all, for fifty-two Jews on Rhodes (and nearby Kos) who had been born on the islands before 1912, when they were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. All fifty-two were saved.
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After the war, Girolamo Sotgiu returned to his native Sardinia.

IN THE ITALIAN
port of Fiume, which was under German control until the final months of the war, the Germans arrested a senior Italian police officer, Giovanni Palatucci. He had helped more than five hundred Jewish refugees who had reached Italy from Croatia, by giving them ‘Aryan’ papers and sending them to safety in southern Italy.
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Palatucci was sent to Dachau, where he perished.
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IT WAS NOT
until March 1944, with the German military occupation, that the Holocaust came to Hungary, which at that time—including the areas of Czechoslovakia and Romania which Hungary had annexed in 1940—had a Jewish population of three-quarters of a million. The Hungarian Regent, Admiral Horthy, Germany’s military ally but never a slavish adherent of the Nazi racial policies, had twice refused Hitler’s personal request to deport Hungary’s Jews to Germany. Without the German military occupation there would have been no deportations to Auschwitz. In August 1941, however, when Hungarian troops were fighting alongside German troops on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, Horthy had agreed to send twenty thousand Jewish slave labourers to German-occupied Russia. Most of them were from the eastern regions of Czechoslovakia annexed by Hungary the previous year; more than fifteen thousand of them were handed over to the SS and killed, eleven thousand of them in a single day of slaughter at Kamenets Podolsk in August 1941, when several thousand local Jews were also murdered.

One of those who managed to escape that carnage, Tibor Hegedus, later wrote that he and the twenty-seven who escaped with him owed their survival to their Hungarian commanding officer, a major, ‘who gave all the twenty-eight people who escaped the massacre a paper, stamped by the German Commander as well, saying that we were Hungarians, and could return to Hungary. Of course the majority of these people were Jews, and he knew it. There was a Russian lady teacher who helped three of us to hide in her flat until we received the abovementioned paper. The Hungarian soldiers were also helpful, giving food to us. The day of the massacre they were ordered to remain in their barracks, and the killings were done by German soldiers only.’
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Barna Kiss was a Hungarian officer in charge of one of the slave labour units. He had 214 Jews under his command. As they marched eastward towards the Russian front, his orders were to work them to death. Instead, he looked after them, ensured they were able to bathe their feet each day, and provided medical help for those who fell sick. The majority of them survived.
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Throughout 1942 and 1943 the Jews of Hungary were untouched by the deportations and killings that were taking place in countries all around them. Indeed, several thousand Polish and Slovak Jews managed to escape deportation to Auschwitz by fleeing southwards and finding refuge in Hungary. But within a few days of German forces entering Hungary Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a special SS Commando of ‘experts’, determined to deport all of Hungary’s Jews without delay. The first stage of this operation was to order all Jews to leave their homes and move into specially designated ghettos, often located in brickworks or factories or a run-down part of the town. The historian of the Jews of Bonyhad, Leslie Blau—who had earlier been taken away from the town to serve as a forced labourer—has described how, in a gesture of sympathy for the incarcerated Jews, a number of local Gypsies threw freshly baked bread over the ghetto fence. The leaders of the local Catholic, Evangelical and Reform churches also tried to help. But the final stage, when it came, in Bonyhad as in all Hungarian towns and villages outside Budapest, was swift and cruel: deportation to Auschwitz, and the destruction of a whole community.
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In the town of Kassa a nun, Ida Peterfy, hid several of her Jewish friends and their families, and organized a network of like-minded Hungarians to hide others.
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In Miskolc, Sandor Kopacsi—later one of the leaders of the 1956 Hungarian revolt against Communist rule—hid seven Jews in the cellar of a house that he had rented, saving them from deportation.
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In Munkacs, a Roman Catholic couple, Jozsef and Margit Strausz, saved a Jewish boy, Amos Rubin, from deportation. ‘I only wore my Star of David for twelve days,’ he later wrote, before being taken by his parents to his new home. The neighbours were told that he was a relative who had come from a small town. ‘One day Mr Strausz told me that the Germans had issued a decree in town that whoever was found hiding a Jew in his house would be severely punished. If found harbouring a Jew, he faced the possibility of death, his family would be killed, or at the very least he would lose his job. However, Mr Strausz comforted me and assured me that everything would end well.’
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Elie Wiesel, whose articulate writings on the Holocaust brought it to the consciousness of a wide public, has recalled how, in Sighet, after the establishment of the ghetto, ‘Maria—our old housekeeper, wonderful Maria who had worked for us since I was born—begged us to follow her to her home. She offered us her cabin in a remote hamlet. She would have room for all six of us, and Grandma Nissel as well. Seven in one cabin? Yes, she swore it, as Christ is her witness. She would take care of us, she would handle everything. We said no, politely but firmly. We did so because we still didn’t know what was in store for us. This simple, uneducated woman stood taller than the city’s intellectuals, dignitaries, and clergy. My father had many acquaintances and even friends in the Christian community, but not one of them showed the strength of character of this peasant woman…It was a simple and devout Christian woman who saved her town’s honour.’
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Frantiska Prva was nanny to two Jewish girls in Ungvar. As the deportations from the Ungvar region began in April 1944 she agreed to take the girls, then aged six and seven, to another town where they would not be recognized as Jews, and where she could look after them. Their parents were deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
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In Satoraljaujhelyen, a seventeen-year-old Calvinist girl, Malvina Csizmadia, together with her two sisters and her mother, helped Jewish men interned at a forced labour camp next to her home to maintain contact with their families. She also helped the men by smuggling food into the camp, and eventually, together with her family, over a period of five months organized the escape of twenty-five Jewish men to previously arranged hiding places on various farms.
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In April the Gestapo arrested a British subject, Jane Haining, who had been looking after four hundred Jewish girls in a school in Budapest belonging to the Church of Scotland Mission in the city. Among the charges against her were having ‘worked amongst the Jews’, and having ‘wept when putting yellow stars on the girls’.
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Jane Haining was deported to Auschwitz on April 28, from the concentration camp in the town of Kistarcsa to which she had been sent. Within three months she was dead. One of the young girls who saw her taken away from the Church of Scotland Mission in the Gestapo car later recalled: ‘The days of horror were coming and Miss Haining protested against those who wanted to distinguish between the child of one race and the child of another. A long time later I realised that she died for me and for others.’
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The deportations from Hungary to Auschwitz were carried out with brutal swiftness. Starting on 15 May 1944, within less than two months 437,402 Hungarian Jews were taken by train to Auschwitz from more than sixty towns and villages: 381,000 of those deported were murdered there, most within a few hours of their arrival.

Individual Hungarians tried to save Jews from deportation. A Hungarian army officer, Kalman Horvath, systematically drafted into his Labour Battalion Jews who would otherwise be deported. One survivor recalled how Horvath ‘conscripted both children and elderly people’, although the age range for Labour Battalions was between eighteen and forty-eight.
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Another survivor, Paul Friedlaender, later described the moment in June 1944 when ‘we were rounded up at the brick factory of Miskolc-Diosgyor. My mother and sister and hundreds of fellow Jews were made to wait there to be deported. The Gendarmerie treated us very roughly. It was a frightful night. Shooting, shouting, cattle wagons arriving. In the morning a miracle happened. An army officer named Captain Kalman Horvath (I only learned his name at a later date) ordered every man—from the age of fifteen to sixty-five—to gather in the courtyard. About forty of us were there, and had to form a soldier-like company. At this moment the commanding officer of the Gendarmes reprimanded Captain Horvath, threatening him for interfering with “his Jews!!” The miracle was that Captain Horvath ordered his soldiers to surround our Company, with rifles drawn, ready to protect us, shouting back to the Gendarme commander: “These men are enlisted to the Army’s Labour Force…” Turning to us, he gave the order: “Quick march! toward the exit gate!”’
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Among those whom Horvath saved in this way, Friedlaender recalled, were even ‘three generations’ in one family: a grandfather, father and son.
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Itzhak Steinberger recalled: ‘I was sixteen, thin, small, with big glasses and a limp. When my turn came to face Horvath, he asked me about my occupation. I was a high school student, but I claimed being a cobbler’s apprentice. Horvath did not even blink and let me enlist. My late father came next. He told the truth about being a merchant. Horvath asked him, surprised: You do not want to enlist? My father answered that he would leave that to fate. He stayed with my mother. They were both murdered a few days later in Auschwitz.’
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Randolph Braham, the historian of the fate of Hungarian Jewry, writes of how ‘many national governmental and military leaders, as well as many local commanders, aware of the realities of the ghettoization and deportation programme and motivated by humanitarian instincts, did everything in their power to rescue as many Jews as possible.’ One of the ‘most praiseworthy’ of these military figures, Braham adds, was Colonel Imre Reviczky, the commander of a labour battalion, under whose direction ‘all Jews who appeared for service at his headquarters were immediately inducted and provided with food and shelter, irrespective of age or state of health.’
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During the retreat of the labour battalions from the Russian front, Reviczky encouraged his Jewish conscripts to escape.
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The actions of those brave Hungarians who had the will or the means to help could not save more than a fragment of Hungarian Jewry outside Budapest. Having cleared the rest of Hungary of its Jewish population, Eichmann and the SS turned their attention to the capital. Eichmann planned to begin the deportation of all hundred and fifty thousand Jews from Budapest in the second week of July, as the culmination and conclusion of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. Even as his plans were being prepared, however, there were those in the non-Jewish community willing to take action to try to save Jews from the imminent deportation. On June 21, as rumours circulated of the mass murder of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz, the Christian clergymen of Budapest were criticized by the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior for saving Jews by issuing false baptismal certificates, but the pattern of protest and rescue was intensifying.

On June 26, information brought by four Jewish escapees from Auschwitz exploded on the Allied and neutral world: their report, smuggled out of the death camp itself, made it clear that all previous deportees to Auschwitz over the previous two years had been murdered there and that the Hungarian deportees were even then being gassed. The Jewish leadership in Budapest appealed to diplomats of neutral countries to do what they could to save the Jews of the capital from deportation. In an immediate response, the Spanish Minister in Budapest, Angel Sanz-Briz, and the Swiss Consul-General, Carl Lutz, joined forces to issue protective documents. Sanz-Briz distributed 1,898 such documents, using Spanish Legation writing paper.
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Lutz issued protective documents for 7,800 Jews, offering the holder the protection of the Swiss government; many of the documents, on Swiss Legation writing paper, were signed by him personally.
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On June 29 the German Embassy in Budapest protested to Berlin about these documents, but the head of the Swiss Legation, Maximilian Jaeger, a Swiss career diplomat, put his full authority behind what Lutz had done, and gave him freedom of action to continue with his rescue activities.
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The Swedish Legation in Budapest was also a focal point of Jewish appeals for help. ‘We were besieged by Jews who suspected what was coming and pleaded for help,’ recalled the Second Secretary at the Legation, Per Anger. Provisional Swedish passports were issued to Jews who had some personal or business connection with Sweden. In ‘rather a short time’ the Legation issued ‘no fewer than seven hundred provisional passports and certificates. The rumour of our work spread, and the host of supplicants swelled day by day.’ Everyone in the Swedish Legation, headed by the Minister, Carl Ivar Danielsson, ‘worked day and night during these months. When it became clear that our strength would be insufficient for this new enterprise, the Minister approached our Ministry of Foreign Affairs about reinforcing the Legation staff. A new appointment was made, specifically to head a rescue effort for the Jews.’ The holder of that appointment would be Raoul Wallenberg. In 1936 he had spent six months at a branch of his family’s bank in Haifa, where he came into contact with many Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution. On his return to Sweden he became an executive of an import-export firm headed by a Hungarian Jew.
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He was due to arrive in Budapest on July 9.

Despite the international outcry after the Hungarian deportations to Auschwitz became public knowledge, the deportations from the outer suburbs of Budapest continued. However, on July 4, Admiral Horthy told Berlin’s senior representative in the city, SS General Veesenmayer, that the deportations must end. He cited protests from the Vatican—recently liberated by the Allies—King Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Horthy also knew, from intercepted diplomatic messages, that the Allies intended to bomb government buildings in Budapest unless the deportations stopped.