The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (47 page)

On July 6 almost two thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz from the southern Hungarian city of Pecs. The Hungarian Prime Minister, Dome Sztojay, immediately summoned SS General Veesenmayer and reiterated that Horthy had ordered a halt to all further deportations to Auschwitz. Two days later the imminent round-up and deportation of all hundred and fifty thousand Jews from Budapest itself—which Eichmann had planned to begin within a few days—was suspended. On the following day, July 9, Raoul Wallenberg arrived in Budapest. He brought with him a list of 630 Hungarian Jews for whom Swedish visas were available.

Wallenberg’s list of ‘protected’ Jews was given to the Hungarian government at the same time that Carl Lutz submitted a Swiss list of seven hundred Jews whose emigration to Palestine had been approved by the British government. Later, that list grew to eight thousand numbered certificates, and when Lutz continued to issue them beyond the original eight thousand he deliberately began numbering them again from number one, to avoid arousing Hungarian suspicions. A number of ‘protected’ houses were set aside for those in possession of these Swiss and Swedish certificates, each house being marked with either a Swiss or a Swedish diplomatic emblem.
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Eichmann’s SS Commando, thwarted in its work of despatching Budapest Jewry to Auschwitz, returned to Germany. However, danger to the city’s Jews persisted in the threat of attack by the violently anti-Semitic Hungarian Arrow Cross movement. To offer some protection from this peril, on July 24 Carl Lutz extended the Swiss Legation’s protection to a small department store, the Glass House, at 29 Vadasz Street, which was declared to be the ‘Swiss Legation Representation of Foreign Interests, Department of Immigration’. Several hundred Budapest Jews were able to register there as Swiss-protected persons.
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DURING AUGUST AND
September 1944, the Jews of Budapest felt a degree of safety. Then danger returned: on October 15 the Arrow Cross, under the leadership of Ferenc Szalasi, seized power. Eichmann and his SS Commando returned to Budapest. Facing the combined anti-Jewish ferocity of the newly empowered Arrow Cross and an SS Commando earlier cheated of its prey, Wallenberg and Lutz intensified their efforts to extend the number of protected safe houses. Other foreign diplomats in Budapest also gave what protection they could. At the Swiss Embassy, Dr Harald Feller hid several Hungarian Jews in his residence, and on one occasion managed to send fourteen Jews to safety in Switzerland, two of whom he had first to get out of the Kistarcsa concentration camp.
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As Arrow Cross terror continued, the Spanish diplomat Angel Sanz-Briz rented several buildings in Budapest in which he housed Jews with Spanish protective documents. ‘On all buildings’, he wrote, ‘we put signs in German and Hungarian, “Ex-territorial buildings belonging to the Spanish Embassy.” And although this seemed absolutely impossible, the Hungarian nationalists, the Arrow Cross, honoured these buildings.’
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On October 23, Sanz-Briz put Giorgio Perlasca, an Italian subject whom he knew and respected in charge of the Spanish safe houses in the city.
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The Portuguese Chargé d’Affaires in Budapest, Carlos de Liz-Texeira Branquino, received permission from his government to issue five hundred protective documents to Jews who had relatives in Portugal, Brazil or any Portuguese colony. In fact he issued more than eight hundred. These Jews were given refuge in safe houses established by the Portuguese Legation.
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As the killings by the Arrow Cross continued, Friedrich Born, Director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Budapest, issued more than three thousand Red Cross letters of protection and more than four thousand employment certificates to Jews in the capital, and established Red Cross safe houses to protect those who held these documents. These included more than sixty institutions belonging to the Jewish community, among them hospitals, old age homes and research institutes. Marked with the Red Cross insignia, these buildings became additional protected houses for Jewish residents.
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With Arrow Cross members killing Jews in the streets of Budapest, Angelo Rotta, the senior Vatican representative in Budapest, took a lead in establishing an ‘International Ghetto’ consisting of several dozen modern apartment buildings to which large numbers of Jews—eventually, twenty-five thousand—were brought, and on which the Swiss, Swedish, Portuguese and Spanish Legations, as well as the Vatican, affixed their emblems.

Individual churchmen were also active. Father Jakab Raile, Prior of the Jesuit College, saved ‘close to 150 Jews’ at the Jesuit Residence in the city.
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Father Jozsef Janossy, head of the Holy Cross Society, over-saw the rescue of Jews who had been given false baptismal certificates by Father Raile. One of the leaders of the Holy Cross Society, Margit Slachta, secured protective documents for one of the great Polish Jewish religious leaders, Aaron Rokeach, the Belzer Rebbe, whose entire family, including his seven children, had been murdered by the Nazis in the southern Polish city of Przemysl.
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The historian Eugene Levai has given a comprehensive listing of the rescue efforts of Christian organizations and institutions in Budapest, and of the terrible risks involved. For example, the monks of the Champagnat Institute of the Order of Mary, a Budapest monastic institution, took in a hundred Jewish pupils as boarders, together with fifty of the children’s parents. An
agent provocateur
, an SS man from Alsace, who pretended to be a French soldier in hiding, denounced the monks. As a result, they were surrounded one night by forty members of the Gestapo, who dragged six monks, two-thirds of the children and most of the adults away. The monks, after prolonged torture, were released; the Jews were killed. Those adults and children who had managed to find places to hide during the raid were saved.

In the nunnery of the Sisters of the Divine Saviour, a hundred and fifty children found refuge, but Arrow Cross members who were billeted in the neighbourhood found them and dragged them away. Sixty-two were driven to the banks of the Danube and killed. Elsewhere in the city, the Sisters of the Order of Divine Love hid more than a hundred Jewish refugees, but they were also discovered by members of the Arrow Cross, who were billeted on the other side of the road. They attacked the convent, dragging away and killing all the refugees with the exception of five who managed to escape through the roof.

The Convent of the Good Shepherd hid 112 girls, who twice escaped the Arrow Cross by hiding in neighbouring houses while the convent was being searched. In the home of the Sisters of Mercy of Szatmar, twenty Jews were hidden, and although the inhabitants of the house—which was part of a large tenement building—knew that the nuns were hiding Jews, all were saved. In the Convent of Sacré Coeur two hundred women and children survived. Eleven Jews were hidden in the small premises of the Charité. One night the manager was arrested, interrogated and threatened, but he did not betray those in hiding, and all of them were saved. The Josephinum—the Society of the Virgin Mary—only a few hundred yards from the Arrow Cross headquarters, hid sixty children and two adults. Twenty Jews found refuge in the small hospital of the Sisters of the Eucharistic Union. They were discovered and taken away by the Arrow Cross, who tortured the prioress, but set her free with a warning that they would kill her if they caught her hiding Jews again. After her escape she immediately contacted a prelate, Dr Arnold Pataky, who put his four-room apartment at her disposal. Using it as a hiding place, the prioress again gave sanctuary to as many persecuted Jews as she could.
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An Armenian doctor in Budapest, Ara Jeretzian, set up a medical emergency clinic in a private house, and took in forty Jewish doctors and their families, as well as other Jews—four hundred people in all. In the building he fed them, used his own funds to buy them medicine, and arranged forged papers for them. Dr Jeretzian was helped in this work of rescue by his Hungarian assistant, Laszlo Nagy, of whom Yad Vashem noted: ‘He could have quietly walked away from these dangers and risks, because he was disabled. He received no remuneration.’
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A Hungarian army captain, Laszlo Ocskay, who commanded a Labour Battalion in Budapest, protected approximately fifteen hundred Jews by taking them into his company’s labour camp inside the city. Two-thirds of those whom he protected were women and children. More than two dozen survivors testified to the fact that they had been saved by Ocskay, who also provided manpower from the company to help the work of the Red Cross in the city, supplying food and medicine to children’s homes and orphanages in which Jews were hiding. He also hid Jews in the cellar of his own home.
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In one incident, when a group of Arrow Cross soldiers were threatening a group of women in Ocskay’s labour company, he was immediately informed, and alerted a friend of his in the SS, a certain Weber, who brought a group of German soldiers to protect the women from the Arrow Cross.
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In a letter to Yad Vashem seeking Righteous status for Ocskay, who had died in the United States in 1966, Dan Danieli (formerly Denes Faludi) wrote: ‘Myself and my family survived, together with about a thousand relatives of the Labour Company members; relatives who had no legal right to be in the compound and survived only due to Ocskay’s deeds.’
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Individual Hungarians in Budapest sought various means to save Jews. Gusztav Mikulai, who before the war had founded an all-female orchestra, and who was married to a Jewish woman, not only provided his wife and in-laws with false identity papers, but also found hiding places for other Jews all over the city, smuggled families out of transit camps, and even managed to pull some off the trains. Eighty Jews, including many children, were saved as a result of his efforts.
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Vilmos Racz, who had run for Hungary in the 1908 London Olympics, and fought in the First World War, hid sixteen Jews in the basement of his house in Buda. One—a humorist in better times—stayed there for more than six months; when he eventually ventured out to cross the river, he was shot on the Chain Bridge. Racz hid four more Jews on his country estate.
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Oszkar Szabo, a deserter from the Hungarian air force, saved the lives of twenty-eight Hasidic Jews by hiding them. He also provided false identity papers for his Jewish fiancée and her parents.
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A medical doctor, Sandor Tonelli, arranged for forty Jews to hide in the basement of an abandoned hospital in Budapest during the German occupation. He and his staff obtained extra food rations and shared them with those in hiding. He kept the Jews safe from raids and searches of the building, and certified papers for them to find refuge in the International Ghetto.
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On 26 October 1944, within two weeks of the Arrow Cross seizing power in the city, the newly appointed Hungarian Minister of Defence agreed to Eichmann’s request to deport Jews to Germany for forced labour. Twenty-five thousand men and twelve thousand women were rounded up in a week. Most were sent on foot westwards towards the Austrian border—a distance of more than a hundred miles. On October 28, while the round-ups were under way, the Arrow Cross seized a Roman Catholic priest, Ferenc Kallo, who had been helping Jews with life-saving certificates of baptism. They killed him at dawn on the following day.

Seeking a means to help Jews faced with the resurgent Nazi threat and the deportations to Austria, Angelo Rotta obtained permission from the Vatican to issue protective passes to Jewish converts to Catholicism. Eventually, he was to issue more than fifteen thousand such passes, instructing his staff not to examine the credentials of the recipients too closely. Rotta also encouraged other church leaders in Budapest to help their ‘Jewish brothers’.
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Among his compassionate acts was an instruction to one of his priests, Tibor Baranszky, to approach the Jews on the forced marches and distribute letters of immunity to as many of them as possible, in order to save them.
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Even within Hungarian official circles the anti-Jewish violence of the Szalasi regime did not go unopposed. On 4 November 1944 the police chief of Budapest, Janos Solymossor, intervened to save ninety residents of a Jewish old people’s home from being murdered by the Arrow Cross. Nevertheless, on November 8 the first few thousand of the twenty-seven thousand Jews in captivity were ordered to march towards the Austrian border, forced to walk eighteen to twenty miles a day. On November 9 the Arrow Cross seized a further ten thousand Jews throughout the city and took them to a brick factory in the suburbs, where they were held prisoner, without food or fuel, in freezing conditions. The historian of the Swiss Righteous Gentiles, Meir Wagner, writes: ‘As many of these Jews were in possession of protective letters, Carl and Gertrude Lutz drove to the brick factory several times in order to personally free Jews holding these documents. Gertrude stood in the freezing cold for many hours checking the papers, and demanding the rights that the holders were entitled to.’
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Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Swedish Legation, and several individual Hungarian army officers, also took documents to the brickworks that enabled some Jews to leave.

On November 15 the Hungarian government established a ‘Big Ghetto’ (also known as the ‘Sealed Ghetto’) for sixty-nine thousand Jews in the centre of the old Jewish quarter; a further thirty thousand Jews, who held protective diplomatic documents, went to the area designated as the International Ghetto, finding sanctuary in the apartment blocks under the protection of the Red Cross and the Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese and Vatican diplomatic authorities.