by Alex Kershaw
“Jump on it,” shouted Erwin.
Alice did so. Erwin was close behind. At the next stop, they got off and took another streetcar, having managed to shake off their pursuers. That night, they hid with a laborer and his family, in a one-room apartment. “He was a communist,” recalled Erwin. “He didn’t ask any questions. I wanted to give him money, but he would not accept it.” They left the next morning and were soon drenched because of the pouring rain. “Wherever we went, we saw groups of fifty, a hundred, two hundred Jews—all in line, hands above heads. Boys of sixteen with tommy guns were rounding them up, kicking, using whips, taking them toward the ghetto.”20
They kept on moving, trying to get across Budapest without being stopped by the Arrow Cross and asked for their papers. One of Alice’s shoes fell off because it was so old and worn. Erwin found a drugstore and bought some bandages, and, hidden in a doorway, he tied Alice’s broken shoe to her foot with gauze. To buy them a little extra time, Erwin took Alice into a hairdresser, anywhere off the street would do. Finally, they managed to get to the apartment in Pest where Erwin’s parents were hiding. Erwin knew immediately that it was unsafe because it was in an area of Pest where the Arrow Cross thugs were particularly thorough in their searches. He told them to leave immediately and they did so. Not long after, the Arrow Cross raided the apartment. One of the neighbors had reported hearing strange noises.
Erwin and Alice decided to take their chances and return to a small room they had found in Buda that summer. Erwin’s parents and sister Marta found refuge elsewhere. Later that day, Erwin and Alice arrived in Buda in time to beat a curfew. “Finally, we could clean up and get into dry clothes,” recalled Erwin. “We were aware of the continuous mortal danger but at this point we no longer cared. If this was the end, so be it.”21
THAT SAME DAY, October 17, 1944, Horthy left Hungary as a prisoner. At 4:30 that afternoon, he was escorted to a special train, in which his wife and daughter-in-law with her small son were already seated. Air-raid sirens sounded at all the stations along the route toward Austria, to make sure that any who wanted to see the regent leave Hungary would be in shelters instead. “We arrived in Vienna at midnight in the deepest depression,” recalled Horthy. “Here, Veesenmayer had told me, my son would join us. I strained my eyes in the hope of seeing my son, Miklas, but neither in Vienna nor at Linz nor in Bavaria did we find him. We did not even know where he was or whether he was still alive. Our request to be allowed to receive word from him for Christmas was not granted. Ribbentrop merely advised my daughter-in-law in a letter that he was ‘suitably housed,’ a cynical description of his residence in the Mauthausen concentration camp.”22
Horthy remained under house arrest in Bavaria until the war in Europe ended. On April 29, 1945, his SS guards fled in the face of the Allied advance. On May 1, Horthy was first liberated and then arrested by elements of the U.S. 7th Army, and eventually taken to the prison facility at Nuremberg in late September 1945, where he was reunited with his son, Miklas, Jr. After intense behind-the-scenes lobbying by a former American ambassador to Budapest, it was decided not to prosecute Horthy for war crimes. Stalin reportedly said that it “should not be forgotten that [Horthy] offered armistice in the fall of 1944.”
Horthy was released from Nuremberg and allowed to rejoin his family in Bavaria. In 1948, he testified against Veensenmayer, who received a twenty-year sentence.23 The following year, Horthy was given sanctuary in Portugal, which was under the sway of another prototypical fascist, Antonio de Oliviera Salazar, who ruled Portugal from 1932 to 1974. In his memoirs, Horthy naturally denied any knowledge of the death camps in the spring and early summer of 1944, when his own countrymen were dying at a rate of twelve thousand a day in Auschwitz. Horthy died in 1957, having escaped justice for his involvement in what Winston Churchill described as “probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the history of the world.”24
AS HORTHY WAS LEAVING HUNGARY, the “Master” reasserted his power in Budapest. It was a smug Eichmann who stood before representatives of the Jewish Council once more on October 17, 1944.
“You see, I am back again,” he told them.
Eichmann paused.
“The Hungarians thought that the events in Romania would be repeated here,” Eichmann continued. “They were wrong. They forgot that Hungary still lies in the shadow of the Reich. This government will work according to our orders. I have already been in touch with Minister Kovarcz and he has agreed that the Jews of Budapest shall be deported, this time on foot. We need our trains for other purposes.”
Eichmann smiled.
“Now we are going to work efficiently and quickly. Right?”
The Jewish leaders were dumbfounded.
Preparations were quickly being made to march Hungary’s last Jews—as many as a quarter-million—to the border. Finally, the country would be cleansed. Reich plenipotentiary Edmund Veesenmayer cabled Ribbentrop in Berlin: “A final settlement of the Jewish question can now be expected.”25
IN THE FIRST DAYS after the Arrow Cross came to power, thousands of Jews were corralled into synagogues and held without food or water. In the chaos, Wallenberg’s car was stolen and his Jewish driver, Vilmos Langfelder, arrested. For much of October 17, Wallenberg frantically cycled around Budapest, finally tracking down his driver and car at the headquarters of the Arrow Cross. Outraged by Langfelder’s arrest, he is said to have faced down several heavily armed Arrow Cross thugs before negotiating the return of both car and driver. Wallenberg then hurried to the Dohany Street synagogue—one of the largest in Europe—to try to free several hundred Jews who had been imprisoned there. He had telephoned Charles Lutz, the Swiss charge d’affaires, and Lutz had agreed to accompany him to the synagogue. Wallenberg and Lutz gained entry and walked through throngs of desperate Jews to the main altar.
“Does anyone here hold a Swedish Schutzpass?” shouted Wallenberg.
Hands were raised.
“Yes, I do,” someone called.
“Everyone with a pass form an orderly queue by the entrance,” Wallenberg shouted. “Orderly. It must be orderly.”
Wallenberg turned to several SS men inside the synagogue.
“These are Swedish citizens,” said Wallenberg. “You have no right to keep them here. I order you to release them at once.”26
Wallenberg and Lutz both gathered groups who had Schutzpasses. Then they led them out of the synagogue and to Swedish- and Swiss-protected houses, where most would hunker down in crowded, cold rooms and await the Soviets—now their best hope, other than the neutral diplomats, of surviving the Arrow Cross. Within a few days, thanks to the fierce protests of Wallenberg, Lutz, and other neutral diplomats, all the Jews held in synagogues were reportedly freed.27
ON THE AFTERNOON OF October 18, one of Budapest’s Jewish leaders, Rudolf Kasztner, arrived for a meeting at the Hotel Majestic with Eichmann. Eichmann was in a foul mood.
“I am back, as you see,” said Eichmann, who was dressed in full uniform. “My arm is long enough to reach you and your useless dung people,” he shouted. “They will all be deported now, you hear me? Not one of them will be spared. This time, there are no trains, no lorries—they will march all the way. I don’t want to hear any of your damned excuses. I don’t care how old they are or how sick they are. It’s all lies. I’ve heard it all before. We need workers for the defense of Vienna.”
Eichmann said that two hundred thousand Jews were left in Budapest—“Jew City.” They were all disguising themselves as gentiles or foreign nationals. He would get them all, one way or another.
“I am a bloodhound. Don’t you forget that! You think I can’t do it? You think my teeth have been pulled by Himmler?”
Eichmann dismissed Kasztner and laughed at him as he left the office. Kasztner met a grinning Wisliceny in the corridor outside Eichmann’s office.
“Didn’t think we’d be back so soon, did you?” smirked Wisliceny.
Wisliceny then explained to the stunn
ed Kasztner that Eichmann’s mistress had left him.
“The Obersturmbannfuhrer is in a foul mood—I wouldn’t even try to argue with him,” added Wisliceny. “Perhaps after the next fifty thousand have gone, you might have a chance at bargaining again.”
“Fifty thousand?”
“Yes, fifty thousand Jews to work protecting the Reich.”
Kasztner did not respond. Later, back at his apartment, he broke down in tears.
Part Three
RED DANUBE
10
The Arrow Cross
SO BEGAN A REIGN OF TERROR that at times allegedly unnerved even hardened SS veterans.1 Lars Berg, one of Wallenberg’s colleagues at the Swedish Embassy, vividly remembered how “all the lowest scum of the city, all crooks and street boys, came running. They were given a white party badge and an automatic weapon with plenty of ammunition . . . Nobody was safe any longer.”2
Even though the Arrow Cross now had political power, it seemed that the status of neutral diplomats such as Wallenberg would still be respected. But none knew for how long. Meanwhile, as Wallenberg scrambled frantically for the release of Swedish-protected Jews all across the city, the Gestapo were a step ahead. They had apparently managed to persuade the Arrow Cross minister of the interior, Gabor Vajna, to once and for all put an end to Wallenberg and the neutral diplomats’ interventions. On October 18, a formal announcement revoked the validity of any “letter of safe conduct of any kind [or] any foreign passport which a Jew of Hungarian nationality may have received from whatever source or person.”
The tens of thousands of Jews whom Wallenberg and others had saved were now stripped of protection. Wallenberg and his fellow diplomats knew they would have to act fast or all their rescue efforts would have been for nothing. So they exerted intense pressure on Vajna and other officials.
Wallenberg was particularly effective in his dealings with the young and pregnant aristocrat, Baroness Elizabeth Kemeny—the wife of Hungary’s new foreign minister Gabor Kemeny. “You [must] persuade your husband to honor the protective passes and soften his government’s policy toward the Jews,” Wallenberg told her, according to her recollection. “I would vouch for him. Your child would have a father, and you would know that you had helped to rebuild a world in which justice and morality are important, the kind of world you would want your child to inherit.”3
According to several accounts, Kemeny soon buckled under pressure from his wife as well as from the neutral diplomats in Budapest, and announced on the radio that protective passes as well as the safe houses were to be once again respected. On October 22, during a power outage, a harried but no doubt relieved Wallenberg sat in his office, surrounded by dozens of his aides, and by candlelight dashed off a letter to his mother. “I can reassure you that I am fine,” he told her. “The times are extraordinarily exciting and nerve-racking. We keep working and struggling on, and that is the main thing.”4
MARIANNE LOWY WAS still living as anonymously as she could in a Buda suburb, where she pretended to be the Catholic sister of a woman whose husband had been taken to a forced labor camp. But the Arrow Cross had informers everywhere, it seemed, and there was no shortage of people who reported suspicious comings and goings.
One morning, Marianne heard the front doorbell ring. She opened the door and was shocked to find five grim-faced Hungarian gendarmes, wearing hats with cock feathers, standing before her. She was terrified but managed to appear quite calm. They demanded entry. She showed them into a large dining room. They asked to see her papers and told her to sit down at the dining room table.
She pulled out her “gentile papers.”
The men examined them carefully.
“We’re here to question you,” one of them said.
“This is the end,” she thought.
Marianne was asked to explain all about the catechism. Thankfully, she had spent many hours studying it, and was able to do so. After an hour of intensive questioning, the men stood up and made to leave. Marianne thought she had convinced the men that she really was just a good Catholic girl, not a married Jewess with false papers. One of the men addressed her. “Well, we didn’t get you this time,” he said. “But we’ll be back.”
As soon as the gendarmes left, Marianne packed her few belongings—a toothbrush and some clean underwear—and made her way across Buda, then the Danube to a protected house where her parents and several Jewish families were living. She later moved to 44 Ulloi Street, Wallenberg’s main office, joining her husband Pista, who had escaped a labor battalion, and some three hundred other Jews who had found refuge there.5
Given Wallenberg’s daily presence, it seemed to be the safest place in Budapest.
But no one knew for how long.
ALICE AND ERWIN KORANYI had also been hiding in Buda, determined to hold out until the Soviets arrived. “No Jews were supposed to be there,” recalled Alice. “I worked in a library for a short time, but then German officials came to the library. One of the Germans liked me. It was a difficult situation. He said he would help me get to see my family.” 6 Alice did not take up the offer and left the library in case the German became vengeful. “Every encounter with an authority,” recalled her husband Erwin, “sometimes on numerous occasions during a single day, was rouge et noir at the roulette table.”7
It became terrifyingly clear one day late that October that even Erwin and Alice’s small hideaway in Buda would no longer be safe. Erwin was looking out a window when he saw a Hungarian soldier escorting a young Jewish man with a yellow armband. When the man reached the street corner, he made a break for it and ran for his life. The soldier took his rifle, aimed carefully, and killed the boy.
Erwin and Alice knew they had to move again. But where were they to go now? Thankfully, Erwin’s sister, Marta, who had recently become a typist in Section C for Wallenberg, discovered that there was space for them at a Swedish satellite embassy, at 1 Jokai Street in Pest. With enormous relief, they quickly found sanctuary there. They had to share a room with several others, but at least Erwin and Alice could sleep on a small, straw mattress rather than a cold, hard floor. And for the time being, they hoped, the Arrow Cross would be too busy hunting for Jews on the streets to look for them in the Swedish-protected building, with its large yellow and blue flag fluttering reassuringly outside.8
THE SUPREME COMMANDER was on the line. It was 10 p.m. on October 28, 1944. In his headquarters in Debrecen, which he had captured a week earlier, burly forty-six-year-old General Rodion Malinovsky, commander of the 2nd Ukrainian Front, talked on a telephone.
A brilliant strategist, Malinovsky had distinguished himself during the battle of Stalingrad and was one of Stalin’s most trusted generals. With a reputation for being stubborn and outspoken, Malinovksy, the hardened son of an impoverished Ukrainian peasant, did not like what Stalin, that cunning yellow-eyed Georgian, was now telling him—in essence that his exhausted men would have to return to combat before they had recovered from the fierce fighting to take Debrecen.
“Budapest must be taken as soon as possible,” Stalin said. “To be precise, in the next few days. This is absolutely essential. Can you do it?”
“The job can be done within five days,” replied Malinovsky, “when the 4th Mechanized Guard Corps arrives to join the 46th Army.”
“The supreme command can’t give you five days,” Stalin stressed. “You must understand that for political reasons, we have to take Budapest as quickly as possible.”
Malinovsky tried to stand his ground. “If you give me five days I will take Budapest in another five days,” he argued. “If we start the offensive right now, the 46th Army—lacking sufficient forces—won’t be able to bring it to a speedy conclusion and will inevitably be bogged down in lengthy battles on the access roads to the Hungarian capital. In other words, it won’t be able to take Budapest.”
“There’s no point in being so stubborn,” replied Stalin. “You obviously don’t understand the political necessity of an immediate strike
against Budapest.”
“I am fully aware of the political importance of the capture of Budapest, and that is why I am asking for five days.”
Stalin finally lost his patience: “I expressly order you to begin the offensive against Budapest tomorrow.”9
Malinovsky knew Stalin’s order was premature. The objectives he had been given were not likely to be met. Yet he had no choice. Like so many of Hitler’s best generals, he could only try his best to comply with the order.
11
The Road to Hegyeshalom
SS COLONEL ADOLF EICHMANN had been given a second chance. Key officials in the newly installed Arrow Cross regime—Vajna, Baky, and Endre—were eager to remove Budapest’s last Jews. But he would have to act quickly and with great ingenuity if he was going to deport all of Budapest’s Jews before the Soviets arrived. It was time for the “Master” to prove that his talents had not diminished.
Unable to requisition trains because of the pressing military situation in the East, Eichmann came up with a simple yet barbarously effective solution to the lack of rolling stock. He would make the last of the two-hundred-thousand-odd Jews of Budapest march to their deaths. They would be sent on foot, under armed guard, all 120 miles to the Austrian border.
The death marches began on November 8, 1944, when two thousand Jews were rounded up and sent out of Budapest. As winter set in and temperatures plunged, Arrow Cross gangs gathered thousands more terrified Jews each day and set them marching. Eventually, more than thirty thousand people would be herded into groups of a thousand and forced to walk to the border. They had no food, medical care, or shelter. Women in high heel shoes, old men without jackets, and young schoolgirls were marched out of Budapest, across the Danube toward Austria. “It was horrible for us to be standing as passive spectators,” recalled Wallenberg’s fellow diplomat, Lars Berg, “when young girls were driven together, arranged in files, and marched off as they were in silk stockings, high-heeled shoes, and thin office clothes.”1