The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  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.36

  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.37 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.38 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.39

  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’.40 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.41

  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.’42 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.

  The Swiss Vice-Consul, Franz Bischof, personally hid more than thirty Jews.43 The director of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Budapest, Friedrich Born, obtained the release of five hundred children from the Big Ghetto after they had been taken there in violation of Red Cross protection. In all, Born and his staff saved between eleven thousand and fifteen thousand Jews. Though Born was initially criticized by his Red Cross superiors in Geneva for exceeding his authority in his rescue activities, a post-war Red Cross report exonerated him.44

  Working closely with Born and his Red Cross colleagues was an Evangelical minister, Pastor Gabor Sztehlo, leader of the Protestant Good Shepherd organization. Acting without concern for his own safety, Sztehlo placed 905 Jewish children and 635 Jewish adults in the thirty homes under his authority. In the pre-war years his organization had been primarily concerned with converting Jewish children to Lutheranism, but when the question of rescue arose, he at once made it clear that conversion was no longer his aim, nor did he pursue it in any way.

  Paul Friedlaender was one of the Jews who had earlier been saved from deportation from the Hungarian provinces to Auschwitz by Captain Kalman Horvath’s protective device of enlisting them in his Labour Battalion. In mid-November 1944 he made his way to Budapest, with false papers. He was eighteen years old. ‘I was lucky, nobody asked for my papers. During the day I wandered in the streets and even went to the cinema. I slept in doorways or cellars and heard the Arrow Cross gangs round up Jews and shoot them on the banks of the Danube. One night I slept in the annexe of the Dohany Street Synagogue, where I heard of a priest by the name of Gabor Sztehlo who gave shelter to Jewish children. On a late November afternoon I arrived in his office in Buda, only to be stopped by a fat doorman. We exchanged a few loud words, when an elegantly dressed young, but grey-haired man appeared. It was the Pastor, who smilingly invited me into his office. When, recovered from my surprise, I confessed my Jewishness, he said he would send me to a children’s home.’ The pastor then gave the young man a document, which he signed, on Red Cross writing paper, stating that the bearer was employed as a messenger by the Red Cross. Paul Friedlaender then went to the children’s home on a hilltop in Buda.45

  An eleven-year-old boy who was protected in one of Pastor Sztehlo’s homes later recalled: ‘We had Bible readings and prayer every evening. Pastor Sztehlo made no attempt to convert us, but he knew that faith in God was absolutely essential in helping us to overcome our sense of abandonment and terror. Quite naturally, he shared with us the religion he professed, Christianity. Although I never converted, I have retained a deep gratitude for the spiritual comfort that I received, which was critical to my survival and that of my friends during those horrible times. In the meantime, many of the homes were subjected to Arrow Cross raids, and Sztehlo himself was taken to an Arrow Cross district headquarters for questioning.’46

  Gabor Vermes, another of the boys whom Sztehlo saved, recalls that the pastor was ‘more concerned about the Arrow Cross than the Wehrmacht, and to use the latter as a potential shield he befriended several German officers. Sometimes these officers came to the part of the basement where we Jewish children were staying, and we sang them German songs. Sztehlo told me, after the war, that one of these officers told him that he knew who we were, but could not care less. We were lucky that it was him, and not a well-known sadistic SS officer who recognized us, because that SS officer also frequented our quarters at certain times.’47

  Another of those whom Pastor Sztehlo saved was David Peleg. He later recalled that ‘a family friend worked at a day care centre in an Evangelical Church which was under the auspices of the Red Cross. A wonderful priest was the head of the institution. I was accepted for day care as a Christian refugee. The priest gave me forged documents. After being there for about two weeks, the day care centre was attacked in the bombings and we were forced to leave the church. The Germans demanded our evictio
n. Where were we to go in the middle of the war? Once again, the same wonderful man came to our aid. He took us in, thirty-three Jewish children with forged documents to his private home in the basement where he hid us together with his family.’48

  Among those who helped Pastor Sztehlo were two fellow Lutheran pastors: Albert Bereczky, whose church was just beyond the northern end of the International Ghetto, and Emil Koren, of the German Lutheran church on Castle Hill. Sztehlo often worked inside Koren’s church to organize his rescue efforts.49

  Sandor Ujvari, a Red Cross official, suggested to the Apostolic Delegate Angelo Rotta that Rotta should prepare letters of safe conduct, signed by himself in advance, but with no names filled in; with the help of these blanks, an attempt would be made to keep a watch on the road from Budapest to Hegyeshalom and to rescue the most needy, sick and exhausted people from the Arrow Cross. When Ujvari admitted that he was using forged identity cards and baptismal certificates to help Jews, Rotta—according to Ujvari—made the following reply: ‘What you are doing, my son, is pleasing to God and to Jesus, because you are saving innocent people. I give you absolution in advance. Continue your work to the honour of God.’ On Rotta’s instructions his secretary then issued a pile of ready-stamped blank letters of safe conduct and the necessary authorization for Ujvari.50

  On November 19, diplomats representing the five neutral powers—Sweden, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and the Vatican—issued a second collective appeal to the Hungarian government, asking that ‘all decisions appertaining to the deportation of the Jews be withdrawn and the measure in progress be suspended, thus rendering it possible for the unfortunate persons dragged from their homes to return there as soon as possible.’51 As a result of this appeal the Hungarian government forbade any further ‘death march’ deportations from Budapest. But the situation actually prevailing in the capital was now approaching anarchy; Arrow Cross units were becoming a law unto themselves, and were all too willing to facilitate Eichmann’s work.

  On November 21 new deportations began. Auschwitz had ceased to operate. These new deportees were sent by train from Jozsefvaros station to Ravensbrück and Mauthausen. More than three thousand Budapest Jews were murdered in Mauthausen. On November 23, Raoul Wallenberg went to Jozsefvaros station with protective documents that enabled several dozen Jews to leave the train. He returned to the station five days later, and was able to secure further releases. At the same time, first on November 23 and again four days later, representatives of the Red Cross drove from Budapest towards the Austrian border. Eventually they reached the marchers who had been forced to leave the city just over two weeks earlier. Finding them exhausted, and tormented by brutal guards, they issued as many protective documents as they could. Under the emblem of the Red Cross, truck convoys were organized to pass out food to those being deported. Wallenberg, taking the same road, drove as far as the Austrian border to bring documents to the marchers. At his initiative, checkpoints were set up on the roads leaving Budapest, as well as at the border with Austria, to hinder the deportation of Jews holding the protective passports. By this means, an estimated 1,500 Jews were saved and returned to Budapest.52

  Rose Rosner was twenty years old when she found herself on one of the marches from Budapest towards the Austrian border. During the march, a Hungarian soldier, one of the guards, gave her his cross and his Bible, and told her to go to his parents in the country. He then let her slip away from the march.53

  ON NOVEMBER 30 the head of the Spanish Legation, Angel Sanz-Briz, was ordered to leave Budapest for his safety. His friend Giorgio Perlasca, the Italian whom he had earlier put in charge of the Spanish ‘safe houses’, became Spanish Chargé d’Affaires, taking the Spanish name Jorge. In this capacity he issued three thousand protective documents on the writing paper of the Spanish Legation. Nor was this all he did. A young Hungarian Jewish boy, Avraham Ronai, later recalled how Arrow Cross men broke into the Spanish-protected house in which he had found refuge, seizing a group of Jews, in order to march them down to the Danube, where they would be shot in the neck—‘a not uncommon sight in those days’. Because of his comparative youth, Avraham was spared, but his mother and sister were in the group about to be led away. The youngster recalled: ‘Suddenly out of nowhere appeared Perlasca, and began berating the Arrow Cross commander, threatening to cable and report to Madrid this violation of Spanish rights, an act which would have grave consequences for Spanish-Hungarian relations and cause damage to the career of the Hungarian officer in charge. The ploy worked, and all those assembled were released and allowed to return to the Spanish-protected house from which they had been taken to what had been intended to be their deaths.’54

  On December 10, Wallenberg went for the third time to Jozsefvaros railway station with protective documents for those who were about to be deported to Austria by train.

  In the second week of December, Pastor Sztehlo learned that there would be a raid on his homes in a few days’ time, on December 18. ‘I rushed to the homes in Buda,’ he later recalled, ‘and tried to doctor the records. We prepared false school reports and certificates of baptism.’ Other documents were written out on Red Cross writing paper. ‘The most difficult thing’, Sztehlo wrote, ‘was to teach the small children their new names and what they were to say about their parents. It took a lot of time to make a frightened small child memorise who he or she was supposed to be. And even then we couldn’t be sure they would give the right answer if interrogated. How much fear and terror these little ones had behind them and how much more they were still to endure! These days were disheartening, all homes were seized by panic. I repeated everywhere that it was already a sign of the love of God that we had been spared so far.’

  He was grateful, Sztehlo added, ‘to the nurses who cherished hope and faith in God and transplanted it to the children. The young people were brave and calm, the big boys the same as the girls. When I got telephone calls on the morning of December 18 that there were blue-coated municipal policemen standing at the gates of the homes, I tried to encourage those who called, saying in a fearless voice that God was with us. I expected a miracle to happen. The most frightened were those whom I had not been able to inform in detail previously, namely the people of the small homes with only five or six children and a few adults. I tried to prepare them for the approaching raid. Strangely, everybody reported that the policemen did not want to enter the houses or flats, but asked for chairs and sat down outside.’ And there was a miracle: the Arrow Cross never arrived.55

  On December 22, with Soviet forces drawing nearer, Eichmann left Budapest by air. On the following day all the neutral diplomats left the city, with the exception of Rotta, Wallenberg, Perlasca, Lutz, and Lutz’s Vice-Consul, Peter Zürcher. Two days later Wallenberg went to Jozsefvaros railway station for a fourth time with protective documents. It was the last deportation train from Budapest to Austria. Wallenberg managed to have it halted after it had left the platform, and to get people off it. On the following day—Christmas Day—Budapest was surrounded by the Russians and besieged.

  On December 27 the Arrow Cross executed two Hungarian Christian women, Sister Sara Salkhazi and Vilma Bernovits, who had hidden Jews. Three days later, having entered the hitherto protective confines of the International Ghetto, they marched 170 Jews to the Danube, and killed fifty of them. On the following day they attacked the Glass House, killing three Jews. A Hungarian military unit then intervened, and the remaining Jews were saved.

  On 3 January 1945, as Russian troops drew closer to Budapest, and the sound of artillery could be heard throughout the city, a German officer entered one of Pastor Sztehlo’s Good Shepherd homes, a hilltop villa in Buda, and told the deaconess house-mother to vacate the villa at once: it was needed as a heavy gun position. Paul Friedlaender, one of the oldest boys in the home, later recalled: ‘We arranged by telephone to go to Pastor Sztehlo’s house. We woke the younger children and filled up our pockets with sugar cubes. The nurses packed some first aid equipment in case of c
asualties. About thirty children and ten adults, we walked silently through deep snow in single file. In front and at the back German soldiers, guns at the ready, escorted us, helping to carry sleeping Jewish toddlers. At the door Pastor Sztehlo and his young wife were waiting for us. In their flat we sat where we could. After a short time Mrs Ilona Sztehlo served us steaming hot caraway-seed soup, and we ate up all her family’s reserve food that morning.’ Many years later, recalling his rescuer, he reflected: ‘Ilona Sztehlo was a heroine as well.’56

  Paul Friedlaender noted in his testimony on the Pastor’s behalf that the Sztehlos had two young children of their own, and that in addition ‘their flat already sheltered the fat doorman and his wife, as well as a Communist writer on the wanted list of the Arrow Cross. Days passed and the firing got closer, but the proximity of the Sztehlos gave me a secure feeling that I could only perish by accident of war like any other person.’57

  One of the youngsters who was transferred to the Sztehlos’ villa recalled: ‘We did a lot of singing, and several times, we, a bunch of Jewish children, sang German songs to the German officers visiting in the basement, where wartime conditions were forcing us to live. We were lucky. The commander of that section of the front was a major who became very friendly with the Sztehlos.’58 In his memoirs (written in the third person), Sztehlo described the major as ‘sad and resigned, fully aware of the futility of war’ he once revealed ‘that he knew who these children were, but he hated any form of racism and wished Pastor Sztehlo and all of us well. Before being transferred, he warned Sztehlo about an SS lieutenant whose major preoccupation was the hunting down and killing of Jews.’59.