by Alex Kershaw
That night, Alice and Erwin found shelter in an empty apartment in the neighborhood. The next morning, they crossed the city to Wallenberg’s offices on Ulloi Street. It was a much larger building than 1 Jokai Street and had several air-raid shelters below it. Erwin’s parents and his sister hid in one of them. In another, Alice and Erwin huddled together on a straw mattress. They had not eaten but were so physically and emotionally drained that they quickly fell asleep.
At 7 that evening, loud shouting and screams again awakened them. Arrow Cross soldiers were flooding the building and were soon standing in the air-raid shelter where Alice and Erwin had taken refuge. The soldiers ordered the 150-odd people in the shelter to line up. Everyone was searched, and many were kicked and hit with guns. Then they were all ordered to march outside with their hands above their heads. “They told the Jews not to bother about taking any personal belongings with them,” recalled one of Wallenberg’s staff, Tibor Vayda, who managed to hide. “They wouldn’t need anything where they were going. The Arrow Cross claimed that the air-raid shelter was not part of the embassy, and that they could do with the Jews in the shelter as they pleased.”18
On the fourth floor, Marianne Lowy watched in horror. She had asked her husband, Pista, to accompany her to obtain flu vaccine from a doctor who worked in deplorable conditions in the bombed-out upper stories of the building. But Pista had been distracted, staring into a shard of a broken mirror as he tried to shave.
A few feet from Marianne was a brilliant violinist called Victor Aitay. “We rushed to the window,” recalled Marianne. “A long line of people was being marched out from the basement.” Among them were Marianne’s husband, Pista Reiss, and Alice and Erwin Koranyi. “I was certain that I’d seen the last of my husband,” added Marianne. “Whenever the Arrow Cross got hold of Jews, they simply marched them off to the banks of the Danube and shot them into the river.”19
The winter night was bitterly cold. Soon, Alice and Erwin and the others found themselves at the entrance to the Maria Teresa barracks. They were herded down narrow wooden stairs to a basement.20 A teenaged, red-haired Arrow Cross soldier was sleeping on the floor, a submachine gun on his chest. The youth woke up.
“Take them to the Danube,” he murmured to other Arrow Cross youths, and then fell back to sleep.
Alice and Erwin and the others were soon out on the street, marching again with hands above their heads, toward the local Arrow Cross headquarters, at 41 Ferenz Ring. On its first floor, they were pushed against a wall and their coats taken away. “We stood in our shirtsleeves,” recalled Erwin. “We knew that eventually we would have to shed the rest of our clothing, all but the underwear. Soon, but not yet. Questions were being asked by one of the Arrow Cross soldiers, who was seated behind a small table. A search for more valuables, and more abuse.”21
Erwin was now close to collapsing from exhaustion. He stared at Alice. She, too, looked like she was “a hundred years old.” Fatigue had left deep lines on her face; her thin, pointed nose was now prominent. “A narrow, barely blue blood vessel arched up under her pale skin on the side of her neck, and where her jawbone protruded, a fine but visibly rapid, fluttering pulse betrayed her frightful expectation at parting so abruptly from her young life.”22
Alice turned to face Erwin.
He would never be able to forget what she said next.
“I’m pregnant.”23
Erwin held her close.24
Then they were on the move again.
The Arrow Cross told them they were going to shoot them all and dump their bodies in the Danube.
MEANWHILE, BACK ON the fourth floor of Ulloi Street, Victor Aitay, who operated the telephone switchboard, called a secret number and managed to get a message to someone working on Wallenberg’s staff at Section C.
IN THE BREAST POCKET of Erwin Koranyi’s jacket was half a cigarette. But the jacket had been taken away. It was all he could think about as he faced the Arrow Cross executioners.
Mortars landed in nearby streets.
Erwin wanted it all to end.
What if I jump into the Danube before the Arrow Cross opens fire? Would I stand a chance? Maybe it’s better to get it over with . . .
Erwin was “impatient” to die.25
Alice then saw a large American car pull up nearby. A man in a dark-blue suit, wearing a fedora, stepped out of the car. He was holding up a megaphone.
Alice stared at Wallenberg. He was unarmed, shouting that he wanted his Jews back. They did not belong to the Arrow Cross. They were his. “It was extraordinary because everybody could kill him,” Alice recalled. “Why not kill him? Killing was everywhere.”
It was around 2 a.m. as Alice and the others watched, barely able to believe what they were seeing.
“These are Swedish citizens! Release them immediately and return their belongings to them!”
To Alice, it seemed as if God had answered her prayers. “For an instant,” she recalled, “I thought: ‘God has come to save us.’ To our astonishment, the executioners obeyed Wallenberg. He seemed very tall indeed—and strong. He radiated power and dignity. There was truly a kind of divine aura about him on that night.”26
Erwin saw several policemen, who were clearly working for Wallenberg. “The policemen were talking to the Arrow Cross commander. What was happening? One of the high-ranking police officers was Pal Szalai, with whom Wallenberg used to deal.”27 The police were armed. They began to take guns from the Arrow Cross youths. Among the policemen was a man in a leather coat, Karoly Szabo, whom Erwin recognized. Then some of the policemen told Alice and Erwin and the others to form a line and walk back to the Ulloi Street building.
More than two hours had passed since Marianne Lowy had seen her husband and the others marched away. She was still on the fourth floor when she looked through the window and saw, to her amazement, a line of people trudging back under the protection of armed Hungarian police. Snow drifted down. She looked among the gray-faced survivors. There, unbelievably, was Pista. “If that was not a miracle, I don’t know what is,” she would later recall. She rushed down to greet him, overwhelmed by joy and relief. “It was like getting life back.”28
Meanwhile, Erwin Koranyi’s sister, Marta, spotted Erwin and Alice among the returning Jews. She cried as she kissed her brother and Alice.
All the returnees were given some bread.
Someone struck a match and the stump of a cigarette was lit. Erwin took it, filled his lungs with nicotine, and exhaled.
It was hard to believe, but he was still alive.
ANARCHY AND CHAOS ruled the streets. But Wallenberg’s presence still counted.29 Each evening, even though he was effectively on the run, Wallenberg would visit his protected houses and check on those he had saved. Thirteen-year-old Vera Herman was still hiding in the cellar of one of the protected houses with her parents, Emil and Margit. Several times, she saw Wallenberg arrive late at night and spend a few minutes playing with the young children in the cellar. “I think it was a relief from all the stresses and the tensions,” she recalled. “He loved children. His first goal was to save children.”
Vera could feel little except a constant aching hunger and a lingering fear. “There is a numbness that takes over. We went on day after day until we became a well-oiled machine, but numb. Then to see Wallenberg—it gave me an absolutely indescribable feeling of hope and of wonder. It was remarkable to see someone who thought your life was worth saving.”30
Wallenberg also found time each night to check in on his workers in Section C. The section had gone underground, moving from one building to the next, often a few hours ahead of Arrow Cross thugs intent on stopping the manufacture of Swedish protective passes. Because his staff might be seized at any moment, Wallenberg had insisted that they all wear sturdy boots, which were donated by a shoemaker, Miksa Boschan, who was later murdered by the Arrow Cross. “I witnessed the death marches to Hegyeshalom,” Wallenberg explained to his staff. “I saw how, after a few kilometers of marching, the
shoes of men and women, which were not suitable for long marches, fell apart and thus the fate of the deportees was sealed. We never know whether there will be a repetition of these marches; everybody should be prepared for it.”31
One night, recalled twenty-four-year-old Agnes Adachi, who worked for Section C, she and her fellow Jews were based in a grand villa in Buda when Wallenberg showed up. To Adachi’s shock, Wallenberg announced that they were next to a building occupied by the SS.
“No talking,” he said, “and, please, write lightly.”
Adachi and the others would create the passes and then divide them among themselves and deliver them to Jews in hiding throughout the city. These deliveries were very risky: They would be shot on the spot if caught. But as Adachi recalled, “It was impossible for us to be afraid with Wallenberg as our leader because we thought that if he could take such risks, then so could we. His calm relaxed us, and I can remember thinking, ‘Boy! It would be easy to fall in love with a man like this.’”32
That night, Adachi gathered the passes, five hundred of them, and wished everyone in the room a good evening. Then she set out for Pest, on the other side of the Danube. All she could hear, she later recalled, was the sound of her “footsteps in the crisp snow.” She managed to deliver the passes, which included some for several of her friends.
On another night, remembered Adachi, she was present when Wallenberg answered an urgent phone call and was told that eight Arrow Cross thugs had raided a house on Katona Street full of his protected Jews, most of them women and children, including several infants.33 Wallenberg immediately contacted the Foreign Ministry of the Arrow Cross.
“How can you do this?” he protested. “This house is protected by the government—your government!”
He was told that his “Swedes” would be returned, but he knew this was probably a delaying tactic and rushed with Thomas Veres and others to the house.
The entrance was open.
Behind the windows and iron gates of protected houses nearby, Jews looked on, faces etched with fear—they had “felt the proximity of death only a very short time before.”
Wallenberg ran inside only to find an Arrow Cross officer searching for anyone who might have tried to hide. He told Veres to ask the officer where the protected Jews in the house had gone.
“In the Danube,” said the officer.
“Why?” shouted Wallenberg.
“They were dirty Jews.”34
There was nothing more to be done. Wallenberg had not made it in time.35
Worse was to come. The next raid was on a Swedish-protected orphanage, which Wallenberg visited most days. Agnes Adachi recalled that he arrived there and found that all but one of the children had been taken away and killed. “This was the first time we saw Raoul really desperate,” she remembered. “He went down on his knees and cried. After a long while, he got to his feet and said that he would fight on.”36
A few nights later, recalled Adachi, Wallenberg arrived at the Section C offices and asked for volunteers. He had learnt that the Arrow Cross was executing Jews on the banks of the Danube.
“How many of you can swim?”
Adachi raised her hand. “Best swimmer in school.”
“Let’s go.”
It was a black night. There was no moonlight, no stars.
The Arrow Cross did not hear Wallenberg and his group of rescuers approach. Adachi and other swimmers, with ropes around their waists, soon stood on an embankment. Doctors and nurses waited nearby in cars. There were others to help pull Adachi and her fellow swimmers back out of the Danube. “I never thought twice about what I was about to do,” remembered Adachi. “I stood fully dressed with coat, boots, and hat at the edge of the water, waiting for the sound of the gun so that we could synchronize our jumps with the bodies falling. Four of us, three men and me, jumped in and then pulled people out. We pulled fifty people out. But then we were so frozen that we couldn’t do it anymore.” 37
Adachi would not see Wallenberg again. After her freezing night on the banks of what would forever be the Red Danube in her memory, she fell so sick that she was unable to continue her grueling and dangerous, though profoundly satisfying, work for Section C.38 She would survive the siege and make a new life in America after the war, becoming a librarian in Queens, New York.
HOUR BY HOUR, the Soviets closed in, having now encircled Budapest. On January 10, with Soviet forces only a mile from the Danube, Wallenberg met for the last time with his friend and colleague Per Anger. Anger begged him to stay with the other Swedish Embassy officials who had moved to Buda, on the western bank of the Danube, but Wallenberg refused to leave Pest, where more than one hundred thousand Jews still lived in two ghettoes and dozens of protected houses. He would not abandon those he had saved. Anger recalled how he “pleaded insistently” with Wallenberg to suspend his operation: “The Arrow Cross men were especially on the lookout for him, and he ran great risks by continuing his aid work. But Wallenberg would not listen to me.”39
Anger asked Wallenberg if he was afraid.
“Sure, it gets a little scary, sometimes,” replied Wallenberg, “but for me there’s no choice. I’ve taken on this assignment and I’d never be able to go back to Stockholm without knowing inside myself that I’d done all a man could do to save as many Jews as possible.”40
Anger’s fellow diplomat, Lars Berg, would recall that Wallenberg was daring and fearless when he stepped in to rescue Jews. “I like this dangerous game,” he told one aide.41 But otherwise he was “not at all a brave man by nature. During the air raids, he was always the first one to seek shelter, and he was badly affected when the bombs sometimes fell a little too close to us. But when it was a question of saving the lives of his protégés, then he never hesitated a second.”42 According to the Hungarian writer, Jeno Levai, who interviewed many of Wallenberg’s protégés after the war: “Wallenberg was not born a death-defying, brave hero. He was fully aware of this. With his characteristic self-deprecating humor and exaggeration, he always called himself a Hassenfuss—a timid rabbit. It is undoubtedly true that he was afraid for his young life—and he had every right to be.”43
WALLENBERG HAD BY NOW made his base a large safe house on Benczur Street, under the protection of the Red Cross, which had so far not been raided by the Arrow Cross. The house was close to the front line and the most imminent threat was a direct hit from heavy Soviet shelling, which now seemed some days to continue around the clock. Within days, if not hours, the area was sure to be liberated by the Soviets, hence its attraction to Wallenberg, who wanted to contact them as soon as possible so he could urge them to speed their advance and begin supplying food and medicine to Budapest’s Jews. He had been only just dissuaded from trying to cross the front line by some of his staff and trusted police contacts, who had told him it would be tantamount to suicide.
The Benczur Street house was already home to several wealthy Jewish industrialists and other prominent Jews. Remarkably, contemporary accounts reveal that a German colonel—according to Lars Berg, it was SS colonel Kurt Becher—had provided protection for the premises, having dined with the refined occupants several times, much preferring the company of the cultured Jews to the uneducated criminals of the Arrow Cross. According to one account, Becher, with whom Wallenberg was in regular communication, had actually posted an SS guard outside the house to fend off attacks by the Arrow Cross.44
Wallenberg had devised a detailed plan to help the Jews after the Soviets had liberated Budapest. He hoped to help them find jobs, reunite with families, and get new housing. He told aides he wanted to meet as soon as possible with the Russians so he could implement the plan, hopefully with their help. If they did not want to provide material support, he would use American funds from the War Refugee Board.
On January 12, 1945, Wallenberg left the Benczur Street safe house despite heavy street fighting. He visited his offices on Ulloi Street and signed his last batch of Schutzpasses.45 Then he paid a visit to the town hall, where
he met with his Arrow Cross informant, Pal Szalai. “After the Russians take Buda, I hope you’ll make your way to my Ulloi Street office,” he told Szalai. “From there, we’ll go together to visit Malinovsky. Afterward, I’ll take you with me to Sweden to introduce you to the king.”46
Wallenberg then headed to the Swiss Legation, where he met with a Hungarian Jew, Miklos Krausz, who had helped Wallenberg’s rescue efforts and also assisted Lutz.47 He told Krausz he was there to pick up some money and documents. That night, the Russians advanced to within a mile of Benczur Street. Only a few hundred yards now separated the central ghetto from the Red Army. Intense shelling continued through the night, forcing Wallenberg and all those hiding in the Benczur Street two-story house to seek refuge in the basement.
The following morning, January 13, 1945, Wallenberg was still huddled in the basement when he saw its walls start to shake. He could hear the Soviets drawing closer, battling their way through neighboring streets and the sewers and corridors that linked many basements and cellars of Pest. There was a loud banging. Bricks in the cellar wall were knocked loose, and fifteen Russian soldiers burst through the wall, covered in plaster and dust.
The Soviets soon realized they had liberated a basement full of Jews.
“We also are Jews,” one of them said, “but don’t tell anyone because there are a lot of anti-Semites among us.”
“I am a Swedish diplomat,” explained Wallenberg, who then showed the soldiers his official papers.
“You’ll have to speak with my commanding officer,” said one of the men.