The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  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.’7

  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.8

  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.9

  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’.10 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.’11

  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.12 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!”’13 Among those whom Horvath saved in this way, Friedlaender recalled, were even ‘three generations’ in one family: a grandfather, father and son.14

  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.’15

  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.’16 During the retreat of the labour battalions from the Russian front, Reviczky encouraged his Jewish conscripts to escape.17

  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.18 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.19 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.20

  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 reinf
orcing 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.21 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.

  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.22

  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.23

  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.24

  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.’25 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.26

  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.27 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.28 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.29 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.30

  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 hidin
g 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.31

  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.’32

  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.33 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.34 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.’35