The ‘Hungarista’ Horror:

Still inspired by the obsession of ultimate German victory, the reign of terror inflicted by the Arrow-Cross Party caused immense suffering to the people of ‘Hungaria United Ancient Lands’, as the new masters chose to call the country, practically confined to the capital and Transdanubia. Adolf Eichmann returned, and the Jewish population were now exposed to being systematically exterminated; despite acts of international and Hungarian solidarity, nearly half of the 200,000 Jews of the capital fell victim to horrible mass murder and few of the fifty thousand driven westwards in labour battalions survived. Among the Hungarian civilian population, in early November, armed Arrow Cross men, supporting the ‘Hungarista’ Szalási government, had begun murdering Jews from Budapest who had been sent to forced labour details in and surrounding the capital, on the roads into the city. In addition, large numbers of women and girls were assembled and systematically robbed, beaten and kicked in public.

A Child Alone:

‘Daisy’ Birnbaum was just ten years old at the beginning of November 1944 when she wound up – alone – in a feather depot in Budapest. Her mother had had to report to the Óbuda brick factory, so she ‘placed’ Daisy with her uncle Dezső, because her father was away in the forced labour camp. Very soon, however, her uncle and his wife, Aunt Ida, sent her with an unfamiliar woman to the cellar of a pillow and duvet factory owned by one of their female friends. This woman was obviously Christian and she left a small basketful of food with Daisy and told her not to turn on the light since the cellar could be seen into from the street. The tiny windows did indeed look out into the street, showing the pavement under the feet of the people passing by. Her uncle and aunt were supposed to come by the evening, but they did not show up. As she later wrote:

Instead, there were innumerable rats, frolicking among the sacks and in the bales of feather. I was terribly scared and knew that I could not spend another night there. I decided to take my chances … and try to get back to my uncle’s apartment … to learn what had happened.

… My only worry was a possible air raid, because without Christian documents I would not have been permitted to enter the raid shelter, whereas no-one was supposed to be outside during a raid. There was no alarm, but – even worse – I suddenly spied a group of Arrow Cross thugs conducting a roundup, rather far away, but still on the next corner.

There was no way out. I had to continue. As if a miracle, an officer in uniform stepped out from a house. Without giving it a second thought, I walked up to him and asked if I could walk with him, because I was scared of a possible air raid. … I… mumbled something about having to pick up that basket, to give him a reason for my being in the street. He took my hand and told me that he was on a furlough from the front where he would return in a week and that he too had a wife and children in Debrecen, to which he could no longer travel, and therefore he too had been staying with relatives in Pest. By then we reached the group of Arrow Crossers. My new friend simply waved and we were immediately let through. At the next corner he said, “Well, good luck to you” and leaving me, turned into the side street.

I will never know whether he believed that I was really close to my destination, or saw through my ploy and decided to save me. I was ten years old … and, … in that fateful second, albeit rashly, I made one of the smartest decisions of my entire life.

Daisy, as named on her letter of protection

Meanwhile, Daisy’s mother and other Jewish forced labourers at the brickworks were enduring appalling conditions. In his confidential two-page report to Geneva dated 11 November, the Red Cross delegate Friedrich Born described the Óbuda-Újlak brickworks, from his on-the-spot experiences, as a concentration camp. He said that the conditions beggared description, finding a crowd of five or six thousand starving Jewish prisoners in the open works yard, soaked to the skin and frozen to the marrow, in a totally apathetic and desperate condition. Some who had committed suicide lay on the ground. He asked where the group of people including twelve to fourteen-year-old boys were was being taken, and received a shocking reply from the Arrow-Cross guard: They’re going to be boiled down for soap!

Vice-consul Lutz, attempting to release Swiss protégés, witnessed similar heart-rending scenes. He was profoundly shaken by the way in which many pleaded to be saved, and he saw the final flickerings of the will to live being snuffed out. Those who pushed forward were beaten with dog-whips until they lay with bleeding faces on the ground. Lutz and his wife, horrified at what they saw, could not help at all and were themselves threatened with weapons. In mid-November, Daisy’s mother returned to Pest and the two of them ended up in what had been a placement centre for housemaids, but whose function had changed to being a ‘refugee’ centre for women and children fleeing from the Germans, the Arrow-Cross and the Russians. Daisy and her mother had false Christian papers with false names that they had memorised, but none of the other new ‘tenants’ asked about the details of these ‘refugees from Nyírbátor’, a village or small town in north-eastern Hungary. A couple of days later, an elderly lady arrived and was assigned a bed and nightstand in the same room. She introduced herself, telling them that she had recently arrived from Nyírbátor, fleeing from the Russians. She also asked if there was a chapel in the building because she wanted to say her prayers. Daisy’s mother,

… with a knowing smile on her face, advised the woman that there was indeed a chapel in the basement, and that we too were from Nyírbátor. The poor woman turned pale, staggered slightly, and had to hold on to the iron rail of her bed. But she pulled herself together and said that my mother looked familiar, that they must have seen each other at home, perhaps in church. Even I found this statement silly, since even I knew that Nyírbátor was a village where, most probably, everybody knew one another. … Soon we were given dinner in the common dining hall, and after the meal, the lady went down to pray in the chapel. She returned shortly before the lights went out. … a soft but audible voice from her bed began to chant, “Shma Yisrael, Adonai elochenu…”

A few days after their arrival, a kindly woman began a conversation with Daisy, asking her questions about Nyírbátor and her family. Her mother had told her always to say that they used to live behind the Reformed Church, that her father was at the front and that they had left in order to escape the Russians. However, when it came to further details, she should always tell the truth about her life, to avoid contradicting herself. So, when the woman asked what she missed most from her old home, she mentioned her dolls’ house:

I supposed she thought it would make me feel good to talk about it and urged me to describe it. Slowly, I began telling her that the house had four rooms, a bedroom, a dining room, a living room and a nursery, describing the furniture … In the end, she exclaimed, “Then, this was like a genuine house.” I responded, “Indeed, I even placed the yellow star over the entrance.” I immediately realised what I had done and wished the earth would open and swallow me up. I was ashamed, and afraid of the danger I had brought upon us. But the woman did not say a word, as if she had not heard the last sentence. … It turned that she too was Jewish…

A week later, they became homeless again; we urgently abandoned the house, because someone denounced the manager, claiming that she was hiding Jews in the building, It took a long time, much after the war, until her mother was able to convince Daisy that the manager of the house was not denounced because of her description of the dolls’ house, complete with its yellow star.       

As a novel form of murder, the party servicemen carried out group executions on the Danube embankment in the night. Incidents of the slaughter of Jews had occurred in October, but from the end of November, they became daily occurrences. People were murdered in the party houses, in the streets and squares of the city, occasionally in hospitals and flats, as well as on the banks of the Danube. It is almost inconceivable that while all this was happening, trams ran, cinema and places of entertainment opened and sporting events were reported in the papers, while in public parks, half-naked corpses could be seen and people were hanged with abusive placards around their necks. This latest form of group killing went on as long as the circumstances of the Soviet siege of Budapest permitted the banks of the river to be approached. At a cautious estimate, between 3,600 and 4,000 people were shot into the Danube.

Daisy Birnbaum had a narrow escape from this fate, as recorded in an earlier article in this series. As her book recounts, she was accidentally thrown into a column of about thirty people marching toward the lower embankment of the Danube under the guns of two young Arrow Cross hoodlums. With the exception of her parents, she never mentioned this episode to anyone, but in 1996, when the Historical Atlas of the Holocaust first appeared (published by the Holocaust Memorial Museum of Washington), she found an annotated map showing the two spots on the Danube where the Jews were shot into the Danube (see map above). One was close to the Lánchíd (Chain Bridge), where the exhibit of shoes can be seen today, and the other was in Szent István Park, in the vicinity of the houses under international protection.

The ‘Opposition’:

On 13 November, Edmund Veesenmayer, the ‘agent’ of the Reich in Budapest, reported to Berlin that around 27,000 Jews of both sexes, capable of walking and fit for work, had left on foot. He reckoned to be able to hand over further forty thousand for German purposes and would send them off in daily batches of two to four thousand. After that, it was estimated, 120,000 Jews would be left in Budapest, and their eventual fate would depend on the availability of transport. On 17 November, Danielsson and Angelo Rotta held talks with Szálasi. In a sharp tone, the Papal Nuncio enumerated staggering facts in defence of the Jews who were being forced onto such marches. The Prime Minister and Head of State denied the atrocities but was finally forced to promise to investigate them.

The Cardinal Primate of Hungary, Archbishop Jusztinián Serédi of Esztergom, a member of the upper house of parliament, repeatedly protested to Szálasi about the terror and the constant acts of cruelty. On 20 November, Szálasi – faced with a loud outcry – stopped the deportation of women on foot. If after that a lorry had been sent on an embassy errand and its load had not been confiscated by the Arrow-Cross, it may have helped the Jews of Budapest somewhat as they trudged towards the frontier. On 1 December, however, when Archbishop Serédi raised an objection to the taking of hostages and to the atrocities perpetrated on Jewish citizens, his intervention was brushed aside.

Meanwhile, the Swedish Embassy had continued to play an important part in gathering together the forced labourers in possession of foreign protective passports or exemptions from the government. Colonel József Herbeck, whose name is preserved in Raoul Wallenberg’s extant notebook, generously arranged the matter. Wallenberg travelled by embassy car round the camps that were digging trenches outside the capital to ‘extricate’ the Jewish forced labourers, the number of whom grew rapidly. These ‘companies’ were under the protection of the Swedish, Swiss, Portuguese and Vatican embassies. Company 701 was attached to the Budapest army corps. Diplomatic notes were also used in the life-saving missions. In a ‘note verbale’ of 26 November to the Hungarian Foreign Ministry, the Swiss Embassy considered it important that…

… persons holding genuine emigration documents should not be taken to the Buda brickworks, and unauthorised persons should not be admitted to those houses which are under Swiss protection. 

The note made it clear, in diplomatic language, that directions on this subject to the Arrow-Cross Party would be most helpful. By then, however, the Germans needed every able-bodied man and Eichmann’s staff cared nothing for their protected status, simply grabbing them off the streets, with the aid once more of the Hungarian gendarmerie. The Óbuda-Újlak brick-works on Bécsi út served as a mustering point for the November deportation march to Hegyeshalom and the fortifications ordered by the Germans in western Hungary and on the frontier. The Arrow-Cross used several buildings on Teleki tér for the same purpose. From there, the forced labourers were quickly and frequently transported from nearby Józsefváros station. At the station, Veres took photographs from Wallenberg’s car. Meanwhile, Wallenberg himself would extract people one by one from the crowd. Wallenberg’s mobility by car in Budapest, and his appearance on the highway and at Hegyeshalom, also gave courage and endurance to Foreign Service officials charged with rescuing Jews.

Wallenberg on the Road to Hegyeshalom:

On the road between Budapest and Hegyeshalom, he came to the aid of those forced on the deportation march and extricated holders of the Swedish protective document. In his book, Lévai tells of how, on the way, the Swedish secretary carried sacks and tinned food, unloading medicine for the sick and dying. At Mosonmagyaróvár he set up a first-aid post and a field kitchen. At Hegyeshalom he confronted the Arrow-Cross men, who terrorised even the gendarmes. The appearance on the road of foreign diplomats and their activity in helping Jews and rescuing them were reported to SS Obergruppenführer Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Sicherheitspolizei and SD in Berlin. He was also informed that escorting units of the Hungarian army had respected letters of protection issued by the Swiss. In his compilation of documentary evidence regarding several actions, Árje Bresslauer has written:

Without the help and, most of all, the personal courage of Raoul Wallenberg we would not have been able to save the lives of so many of our fellow men. The same goes for our own work.

One woman who constantly took an active part in the humanitarian work of the Swedish Embassy recalls: Swift decision, lightning action, coupled with keen perception and incredible stamina – such was Wallenberg. Likewise, some of the reports in Lévai’s book of Wallenberg’s activities are rather romanticised and exaggerated. The extant documents of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry contain a more believable account of the movements of Wallenberg and Per Anger on the road to Hegyeshalom on the 23rd-24th November. These are based on a memorandum that they themselves wrote for Baron Kemény, the Foreign Minister. It’s clear from their lines that they observed keenly the shocking sight of the deportation march, including the clothing, physical and spiritual conditions of the Jewish men, military labourers and displaced citizens of Budapest, mostly women, as they were led towards the frontier of the Reich. They refer to Gönyü, Mosonmagyaróvár and Hegyeshalom. It was at these sojourns that they were able to gather information on the circumstances of the eight-day November march. They stated that neither in Budapest nor at the hand-over at Hegyeshalom is 100% respect shown to foreign documents. In the context of an objective but no less shocking description of exhausted people reduced almost to a line of animals, they wrote that:

When the Commission tried to distribute among them some of its own provisions for the journey the crowd simply laid siege to them, people fought just to get the little packet of sandwiches. (It) was repeatedly denied permission to send lorries to feed the people, which only two days previously had been officially permissable.

The motorised life-saving on the Hegyeshalom road was in the historic trial of Adolf Eichmann, which took place in Jerusalem in April 1961. When the mass-murderer was called to account the charge stated that this relief operation in the autumn of 1944 had seriously irritated Eichmann, who had planned and organised the march. I’ll kill Wallenberg, this dog of the Jews, he had burst out, and the Foreign Ministry in Berlin had declared that the Swedish Embassy’s intervention in Jewish affairs is in all respects unlawful. On Wallenberg’s commission, Captain Gábor Alapy travelled a Steyr car with diplomatic markings and performed valuable and very risky life-saving work. In his reminiscences, he recalled how in Hegyeshalom they had managed, with Wallenberg’s help, to extricate another group and sent them back to Budapest. Wallenberg’s colleague Dr Iván Székely used an embassy car with Swedish markings in his rescue activity. In this, he went to workplaces and camps in the provinces and brought back to Budapest Jewish men who qualified as Swedish-protected in some way.  He went into several Arrow-Cross houses, and courageously appeared at the Józsefváros station, at Gestapo HQ on Svábhegy and elsewhere on behalf of protégés.

Rescuing the Jews of Budapest:

The rescue of Jews, or persons considered Jews, from deportation, known as ‘lending’ in the Szálasi period, was a hard and complex task. We can read in the registers of survivors made in 1945 that ‘sending them back’ unescorted was occasionally an exercise in futility. For example, Ferenc Weiss, who had been arrested in hiding, suffered imprisonment in the Csillag fortress at Komárom with a group of two hundred Jews. It members had been rescued from the deportation to Hegyeshalom by means of letters of protection, the arrested by the Arrow-Cross on the way back to Budapest. After they had been robbed they were deported as a ‘transport’ of the Sicherheitspolizei. Weiss and his companions reached Dachau camp by train on 28 November.

At dawn on 28 and 29 November, Hungarian Military Police with fixed bayonets appeared at the Jewish forced labourers’ barracks in Budapest and replaced the companies’ commanders. This was a tried and tested procedure, and without hindrance, the MPs escorted the companies of forced labourers, mostly two hundred strong, to be handed over to the SS at Ferencváros station. Among them now were those under Swedish ‘protection’. According to Jenő Lévai, Wallenberg somehow found out about this unexpected action, followed them in his little car and struggled all day to save them. His agents spent the time reading lists of names and identifying holders of Swedish documents torn up by the Arrow-Cross. He himself looked up the names in the embassy Schutz-Pass registers that were taken to the station. Those destined for deportation who were rescued that day were estimated at 411, while the number of ‘genuine Swedes’ came to 283, the remainder being ‘protégés’ of other embassies. This was reported to Theodor Dannecker, the very experienced officer of the Eichmann-Kommando, who had directed the mass transportation. He threatened Wallenberg with having his car smashed into. Wallenberg continued to drive out early in the morning to the Óbuda brick-works, in addition to appearing constantly on the Pest side and at Teleki tér on rescue missions.

By early December, Wallenberg had been in Budapest for six months and had a range of acquaintances and useful connections. His notebook was full of the names, addresses and telephone numbers of embassies and international aid organisations, and sometimes the contact details of those in charge of them, including Veesenmayer, the Reich’s representative, as well as Hungarian government leaders and high-ranking officials, leaders in public administration and the military, but not the names of leaders of the Hungarian churches. These last, with some notable exceptions, were incapable of responsibly assessing the inhuman, even murderous atmosphere in which they lived, which rejected the basic message of Christianity. Despite this, the spreading terror menaced the churches and their leaders in Budapest and the provinces just as it had the Jews.

Among Wallenberg’s new acquaintances were well-known journalists and newspaper leaders. His military contacts were mainly with those concerned with the Jewish forced labourers, some of which were in some way his ‘partners’ in matters to do with life-saving. Of those listed in his notebook, Lt. Col. Ferenczy frequently played a key role. Talks and negotiations with him and his immediate subordinates required a good deal of patience on the part of Wallenberg and his colleagues. He also noted down a number of the members of the Szálasi government. In addition, he listed numerous Jewish leaders and institutions. He included the telephone numbers of hospitals since he considered the assistance of these among his tasks, especially during the reign of the Arrow-Cross. In his memorandum of 1 December, he set out the unvarnished reality of the Arrow-Cross hegemony:

He sees his task rendered more difficult … he has to state with sincere regret that members of staff of the Royal Swedish Embassy and its protégés alike are constantly subjected a variety of atrocities. 

Even in the case of protected Jews, the threat was immediate, and for that reason, new protective passports were being distributed to those who had not yet received them and to persons of Jewish origin to whom Swedish interests are linked. He reported, without reference to previous talks or limits, the embassy has issued altogether 7,500 protective passports in this way.

The Battle for Zugló:

In the Zugló district of Budapest, a number of startling cases of persecution and rescued occurred. In the winter of 1944, several dozen Jews were hidden in the corner building of the Sisters of Social Service, with its tower, everywhere from the cellar to the attic. Raoul Wallenberg saved the convent, led by Margit Schlachta, and those hidden there. He arrived by car during an Arrow-Cross raid in response to a telephone request, accompanied by a man in army uniform. The convent was surrounded by the Arrow-Cross who had established their district headquarters on the opposite side of Thököly út. An eye-witness reported that Wallenberg glanced across at the convent and then hurried into the Arrow-Cross house:

We don’t know what was said in there, because then Wallenberg came out, got in his car and was immediately driven away. But all the Arrow-Cross men left the convent straight away…     

But other holders of Swedish letters of protection in the district were arrested by the Arrow-Cross, taken to the Danube Embankment and shot. The local Arrow-Cross chief László Szelepcsényi ordered the party servicemen to deny ‘the action’ should there be an enquiry from the embassy. In fact, when the embassy official protested on another occasion, Szelepcsényi ordered sanctioned the massacre of a group of Swedish-protected persons with a gesture of dismissal, maintaining his original position that all who held protective documents had succeeded in obtaining such protection either with their wealth or by conspiring with the enemy. The murderous intent of the Arrow-Cross in Zugló was proved by the fact that shortly afterwards, on the night of 28 November, they hung the bodies of ten Jews who had been shot after interrogation under torture in the party house cellar, head downwards on the convent fence. This appalling sight evoked horror in passers-by. Seventeen Jews were taken from a ‘protected house’ to the party house. The armed party servicemen did not regard the Jews being driven to their deaths as human beings and when tried twelve years later, they admitted to between a thousand and twelve hundred murders.

In Zugló, a mass life-saving action took place under the leadership of Captain László Ocskay, who had been re-activated from the retired list. The veteran First World War officer, aged fifty-one and closely connected to Wallenberg (with whom he had a meeting on 8 December) sheltered his protégés in an area which constituted a battle-ground between the bloodthirsty Arrow-Cross and the opposition facing them. At the request of his Jewish friends, Ocskay undertook the command of a Jewish labour company, whose ‘cover’ activity was the collection of clothing. This was a front for the Veterans’ Commission (HB), an active association of Jews who had fought in the First World War and when Hungary entered the second had begun collecting clothing for those in the labour corps, who served in their own civilian clothes. After the German occupation, its work extended to the Jews carrying out military work designated by the Hungarian and German authorities. Through the use of Captain Ocskay’s connections members of this unit had avoided deportation and were moved from Dohány utca in central Pest to Zugló, to the building of the Pest Israelite Faith Community Boys and Girls School, which had surrendered its premises to the International Red Cross in November in return for a guarantee of protection.

During the new wave of persecution, the manufacture of small items of military equipment, including clothing, the making and mending of boots, the collecting of worn equipment and its renovation offered many people a more or less secure refuge. They hoped that in the workshops in the Jewish school they would escape the fate intended for them, despatch to the death-camps. The workers were mainly those of the wives and female relatives of the forced labourers. Captain Ocskay authorised their employment, and by these means legalised the residence in the Zugló area of many famous Hungarian artists, musicians, dramatists, writers, translators and journalists. Many from the world of sport also found shelter. Members of the world-famous Hungarian water-polo team were forced into hiding, as was the three-times Olympic fencing champion Endre Kabos. In the immediate neighbourhood of Ocskay’s house in central Budapest, a ‘foreign worker’ company was established in early November. A Red Cross depot also moved into Benczúr utca, where a flag and a wooden plaque indicated the presence and ownership of the International Red Cross. In these ways, a base was established for the ‘protected’ Jewish forced labourers who had been extricated from deportation and to legalise the presence and movement of those in hiding or working in the collection and repair of clothing.

The development of tricks and tactics of survival were essential because the Arrow-Cross men spurned all legality and the admonitions of their superiors and engaged in widespread man and woman hunts. They picked people up at will and murdered them, putting several of their victims on public display in the squares and streets in order to intimidate.  At the end of November and in early December the Zugló detachment of the Arrow-Cross made an attempt to settle accounts with the Red Cross refuge in the Jewish School. They stormed the building and swarmed over it, though those living there were able to telephone Ocskay. He appeared after half an hour with a German Army motor-cycle escort which succeeded in driving off the ‘trouble-makers’. After that, a German guard ensured that ‘war-production’ was undisturbed. During these difficult, tragic weeks, fifteen hundred people lived in the school in fear of daily air-raids and Arrow-Cross massacres. Ocskay’s tactics were ultimately successful. Under the Arrow-Cross régime deportations by cattle-truck continued until Budapest was surrounded by the Soviets, but Ocskay’s protégés and members of the Labour Company 101/359, hidden in the ‘war factory’, escaped.

The Establishment of the Ghettoes:

But during Advent, the ‘Hungarista’ authorities continued to be unrestrainable and arrogant. On 10 December, on Szálasi’s orders, designated streets of central Pest, mostly occupied by Jews, became in their entirety Europe’s last Jewish ghetto. The quarter was marked off by wooden barricades and comprised 0.3 square km of the 207 square km of the capital. It was divided into zones, and the four gates were guarded by uniformed police and armed Arrow-Cross men. The Jews forced into the ghetto, officially 52,688, including 5,730 children, at the beginning of 1945, led a miserable existence, struggling to survive and crammed together in 243 apartment houses, including the cellars and wood-stores. Two of the leaders of the ghetto, Miksa Domonkos and Zoltán Rónai, displayed a Swedish Embassy work permit, according to which they had been on the permanent staff there since 30 November and a repatriation section of the Swedish Red Cross. With Wallenberg’s license, they saved numerous lives. On 2 December, Rónai acted successfully on behalf of the Olympic champion Alfréd Hajós, his family and close relations. Hajós later testified how Rónai had appeared in the central ghetto, as a man of authority. He had the Hajós family assembled by roll-call in the courtyard of the apartment house and marched them off with loud words of command:

He fooled the police and the Arrow-Cross guards by turning up unexpectedly and behaving like a policeman. That’s how he pulled off our escape.

The protection of the international, or ‘foreign’ ghetto, which had already come into being in mid-November, meant a new task for the Hungarian gendarme detachment under Captain Parádi, who had assisted Wallenberg from early November in his confrontations with the Arrow-Cross. Jews holding protective documents or passports or protection from the neutral nations had had to move there, but they had little peace, as they quickly became the targets of Arrow-Cross thefts and murders. Police or gendarme activity resulted in the saving of many lives every evening, but there were also unsuccessful actions. At the end of November, Parádi was unable to get into Józsefváros station to perform a rescue because, on this occasion, the Germans would not let him in. He aided the protection of Jewish orphanages and refuges and also provided protection for Raoul Wallenberg on his ever more hazardous car journeys. Another outstanding personality in the Hungarian resistance was Staff-Captain Zoltán Mikó, who was later shot by the Soviet terror authorities. He placed at Wallenberg’s disposal gendarmes who provided food and medicines. Before Christmas, he deposited certain papers in bank vaults, including documents on the underground resistance organisations in Poland.

The Rescuers:

In the winter of 1944, Per Anger was also involved in various risky affairs. In racing against time to save life hesitation and delay were out of the question. One night the attaché, responding to a call from Wallenberg’s secretary, undertook to see to the rescue of seven people who had been snatched in Buda:

At the time I had a Steyr car, and she and I went in that. I went into the robbers’ den and began talking to the chief. He was the sort of man that it didn’t do to shout at. Instead I behaved very courteously …

The terrifying conversation was not without its psychological elements and was successful. In the end, the Arrow-Cross man handed over the Swedish protégés – absolutely shattered, injured, bleeding and terrified – against an embassy acknowledgement of receipt. Anger continued his report:

I stood them in line. ‘Quick march,’ I gave the order, and out we went past the lads at the door with their sub-machine guns. I don’t know how, but we squeezed all seven into the car and drove off. I remember having to drive in first gear to Wallenberg’s house otherwise the car wouldn’t have stood the weight.

In stories of Wallenberg’s appearances on the spot and rescue operations, the name of Vilmos Langfelder (above) often crops up in recollections from mid-December on. The situation of the time and the courageous nature of the rescue operations were graphically summarised by Nina Langlet:

We discovered that the Arrow-Cross were out to get us.Wallenberg, my husband and I therefore became persecuted, and could have reckoned on being snatched on the pretext of questioning and shot in the back of the head. We tried not to think about it and did our best to go on working.

Wallenberg’s intimate associate Hugó Wohl related the events of a rescue on the night of 13 December when at two in the morning, they were informed by telephone that there was trouble at the Swedish Red Cross:

I immediately informed Wallenberg at his home in Buda. Half an hour later he appeared in his car, escorted by his driver Vilmos Langfelder, that loyal, decent engineer, who was for weeks his conscientious tool in the hard work of rescuing people day and night.

Wohl went with Wallenberg and on his orders, he and the driver stayed in the car. When he came back he told them what he had done and told Langfelder to take the car a little further and ‘hide with it’ so that they could tell whether the Arrow-Cross would keep their word. He recalled:

The engine started up quietly, and we waited on the corner of Revicky utca. Suddenly we saw a group of men come out, get into a big police car that was standing waiting outside the house, and drive off. On Wallenberg’s orders we began to follow them, hanging as far back as possible, to see if they were taking the protected persons to the international ghetto in Pozsonyi út.

György Libik refers to the combination of caution and courage shown by the Swedish Secretary when assisting the occupants of a protected house which was being stormed by the Arrow-Cross. Langfelder was out on another mission so that Per Anger took Wallenberg over Andrássy út into Benczúr utca in his DKW at the time of the nocturnal rescue. Wallenberg did not allow Libik near the building, sending him a hundred metres further on:

He asked me to wait outside; there would be nothing I could do to help, but if anything were to happen  I would at least be able to take back word; we shall get nowhere in this by force, only get myself and them in trouble; I was to take it easy, he would sort it out. 

Decades later, the Hungarian resistance activist continued to admire Wallenberg’s intervention, finding it embarrassing that a foreigner, a Swede, could be a more humane person and a better Hungarian than we. The Calvinist minister József Éliás, who made an important contribution to the rescue of the Jews of Budapest, also spoke of Wallenberg’s cautious nature. On one occasion he arrived unannounced to meet the pastor since he did not want to use the telephone in case it was tapped.

The Swiss and the Swedes under attack:

Vice-consul Carl Lutz wrote in a situation report dated 8 December that he had had to stop his car on a busy bridge. It was immediately surrounded by an unruly, hostile, whistling crowd. He had to endure his country and its embassy being abused. Curses were hurled, including Jew-loving Swiss rubbish, get out of Budapest! The Swiss diplomat Harald Feller also suffered the depravity and blood-lust of the Arrow-Cross. His movements were watched and he was threatened, and on 29 December was stopped on Rákoczi út. The diplomat produced his authority from Lt. General Vitéz Iván Hindy, permitting him to travel without restriction. This official document made no impression as Feller, Baroness Katalin Perényi and an embassy employee were marched off to Arrow-Cross house on Andrássy út amid furious shouts, heated cries of “Jews” and curses. Feller was stripped “to check whether he was a Jew” and beaten up. They were told that they would soon be done for and were locked in an ice-cold larder for five hours and finally taken out into the courtyard and again threatened with being shot. Humiliated and tormented, they were eventually released.

While violence raged unchecked, Gábor Vajna, Minister for the Interior, called on Himmler. The minutes for 10 December show that on most points the head of the SS in the Reich urged one of the leaders of grave atrocities and organised massacres to even harsher measures. Vajna gave a detailed account of the solution of the Jewish question in Hungary. He drew up a list of the Jews still to be found in Hungary:

Approximately 120,000 Jews in the (central) ghetto.

18,000 in the ‘foreign’ ghetto.

There were still protected Jews, against whom – even before they went to Germany – measures had been instituted.

Jews in hiding in the provinces, number unknown.

Jews granted exemption, approximately 1,000.

Half- and quarter- Jews, numbers unknown.

Seventy-eight Jewish labour companies, each 200 strong, were on their way to the Reich.

Vajna pointed out to the head of the SS in the Reich that recently the Germans, especially Veesenmayer, had not been accepting old and young Jews for labour. In contrast, the Szálasi government was working towards the total removal of Jews from the country. According to the record, Himmler agreed that, on his intervention, that a new chapter would open. In February 1946, Vajna lied to a Hungarian court that he had discussed, in Berlin, the transportation of Jews with Swiss and Swedish letters of protection to Sweden and Switzerland. The Hungarian Jews “could be grateful” to him for not letting the Germans take them out of the country.

At the end of December, a howling Arrow-Cross mob drove the Swedish diplomat Yngve Ekmark, together with the female employees Bauer and Nilsson, into the Radetzky Barracks in Buda. For hours they stood facing the wall, to make them give away the whereabouts of ambassador Danielsson’s home. As they did not know, the two women were dragged over to the central Pest ghetto from where Friedrich Born, the International Red Cross representative, released them. Neither were personalities in the churches spared this sort of intimidation. Jews were hunted day and night and faith organisations were raided more and more often. On 27 December, Sára Salkaházi, a member of the Sisters of Social Service, was shot into the Danube together with her three denounced protégés and the religious teacher Vilma Bernovits.

Protecting the Children:

The survival of children was, of course, a top priority for the rescuers, and deserves more attention from historians. Daisy Birnbaum’s eye-witness accounts provide a useful primary source in this respect. Wallenberg himself kept a watchful eye on the fate of the orphaned, abused Jewish children. His appearance by car and decisive measures that he took to rescue them are gratefully remembered to this day. Eleven-year-old Vera Kardós and her family had been evicted from their Buda home and were crowded with relatives in the starred house at Csáki utca 14. Her father László Kardos and her family had been kidnapped by the Arrow-Cross on 21 October and was never seen again. They had moved the little girl with her mother and uncle, a forced labourer who enjoyed Swedish protection, over the Danube to work at the notorious Óbuda brickworks. They were enabled, however, to return and find refuge in the Swedish protected house at Katona József utca 21. But they were not left in peace there either, for in an Arrow-Cross raid late at night on 30 December all the occupants, 170 in all, were ordered out into the street, made to undress and shot in groups into the Danube. According to the memoir Wallenberg was informed, and after he arrived the killing stopped. Vera and her mother escaped, but her uncle was killed. After that, they huddled together on an iron bed in a Swiss protected house in Hollán utca. Even there, an Arrow-Cross attack and line-up took place, but by that time Vera was in a Red Cross children’s home. Her mother and two other women escaped as the group was marched off, and after that, she had to find a new refuge every evening. Mother and daughter were eventually reunited under Swedish protection when a heating failure caused the children’s home to be evacuated.

Another memoir, that of Naomi Gur, tells us how their large family was split up in December 1944. Her father was taken to a labour camp and one of his friends obtained a Swiss letter of protection, so the five of them were camping on the floor of a crowded flat in a Swiss ‘protected house’. But an identity check by the SS and Arrow-Cross and all of their letters of protection were declared as forgeries. The little girl was left alone in the house as the other four members of the family were taken outside. She rushed weeping into the street and ran along the long column of Jews, calling out and looking for her mother, who was expecting the worst and so told the policeman escorting the column, this little girl’s gone mad: She thinks I’m her mother, but I’m not… Shoo her off! The policeman ‘obliged’ and the girl made her way back to the flat. The next day there was another raid, this time conducted only by the Arrow-Cross who wasted no time on another identity check but drove everybody into the courtyard and from there into the street. The assembled people were led to the Danube bank. Naomi recalled:

There were a lot of people, there was shoving and noise and it was freezing cold. I was standing there all by myself when a tall man appeared wearing a coat with the collar turned up. He was different from the others. He called out for any with Swedish letters of protection to say so. I knew that one of my aunts, Klára, had one, so I went up to him and told him her name.

I meant to say that I was talking about my aunt, but I couldn’t. The man looked at a piece of paper that he was holding , and said “That’s you.” He didn’t ask, just announced, and I answered ‘Yes’. I was a skinny little thing with pigtails, but my aunt was a married woman. The Arrow-Cross man by him asked for my papers. I hadn’t got them any more, but I looked in my bag. Then the Arrow-Cross man’s name must have been called on the loud-hailer, because he went away. First he said to me, ‘Find your papers. I’ll be back’.

As he turned, … Wallenberg almost grabbed me and rushed with me to the car. He pushed in and off we went straight away. 

I later found out that everybody on the riverside that time was either shot into the Danube or deported. … I’m sure that a miracle happened to me. There was a man who risked his life for me. Since then I’ve believed that everybody can do something of value, and that’s what makes life worthwhile.

It’ll always cause me pain that I did nothing to save Wallenberg.

In the final weeks of December, the armed Arrow-Cross mercilessly and pitilessly assaulted even the children’s homes maintained by the Swedish Red Cross. Wallenberg’s colleagues intervened several times in defence of the children and their carers, rescuing them all over the city. At midday on the 23rd, he tried personally to discover the whereabouts of the children that had been taken from the Swedish children’s home at Szent István körút 29 and of the Swedish Red Cross official Ferenc Schiller who had vanished with them. Per Anger, Vilmos Langfelder and the Swedish Secretary himself set off in Wallenberg’s car, with Langfelder driving. They first called in the Castle District in Buda, at the Foreign Ministry and then went on to see Péter Hain at ‘the Majestic’ on Svábhegy. Hain’s deputy, detective superintendent László Koltay met them there. They also went to the Papal Nuncio’s office, then back to the Foreign Ministry and on to the Buda home of Carl Lutz before going via Wallenberg’s home to the Arrow-Cross bases and the National Unit for Accountability HQ. He stepped unhesitatingly into the lions’ den, a risky business nonetheless. What happened was detailed by a colleague:

Afterwards Wallenberg actually confessed to me in the car that Lutz had told him beforehand that … the Arrow-Cross wanted to have action taken against foreign diplomats by the staff at the National Unit for Accountability HQ.

Both the Swedish Embassy and the International Red Cross were firmly opposed to orphaned children in care being moved from suburban children’s homes into the central ghetto. The Spanish Embassy too had a Hungarian organisation for extricating minors, which continued to function. They used their cars for unofficial rescue work, especially that conducted by their chargé d’affaires, Ángel Sanz-Briz (who left Budapest on 29 November) and his Italian assistant Giorgio Perlasca, together with a few courageous Hungarian Jews, the most zealous of whom was the legal advisor, Dr Zoltán Farkas. Perlasca and Farkas discussed what lies should be told to the Arrow-Cross about personal connections with Spain and how the Spanish-protected houses were to be supplied and supervised. In order to deceive the Arrow-Cross, Perlasca, who worked as a food salesman, became Spanish on paper and used the tactic of driving several times each day to see his protégés. In his notes, he wrote that:

To make my visits even more noticeable I go in the big Ford, on which there is, naturally, a Spanish flag. I chat with the officers on duty and give them presents.

In the ‘nick of time’:

Perlasca and his colleagues drove a five-seater American Buick with CD plates. His active assistant in rescue operations, Frenchman Gaston Tourne, regarded that as an essential means not just of transport but also of offsetting personal risk. On 31 December, just after delivering food, the Buick was damaged beyond repair by the blast from a bomb. Perlasca had some luck on his rescue missions and those whom he supported were certain that he would appear in his car in the nick of time and save those that needed help. By the end of 1944, the Arrow-Cross were hunting him too, and he required the protection of the gendarmerie. Four well-armed gendarmes guarded the embassy building and others defended him from possible attacks whether he went on foot or by car.

A certain distance had been developing between Wallenberg and the Swedish embassy organisation by mid-December. Giorgio Perlasca had noted that on 14 December he could scarcely contact the Swedish diplomats. He repeatedly had the same answer to telephone calls, that either there was no-one in the building or that they were terribly busy. He criticised Danielsson severely, as in his view when so many people expected him to free them he could not just run away, but added that doesn’t apply to Wallenberg, who’s been trying to do everything possible and impossible to help the unfortunate. On 24 December, a Sunday, the Arrow-Cross attacked the Jewish boys and girls orphanage, the children’s refuge.  The International Red Cross flag and the sign indicating protection meant nothing to them. They plundered it on the pretext of an identity check. Several, including children, were shot in the rooms, the courtyard and in the street, by way of intimidation. The desperate but inventive Jewish manager ran down the street with a Christmas tree on his shoulder, in order somehow to inform Wallenberg, who had left the embassy for the Déli (Southern) station because he had heard that a deportation train was being dispatched.

The rescue operations were also affected by the fact that from 24 December the Hungarian capital was completely surrounded by Soviet forces. The fighting in the air and on the streets was becoming increasingly intense adding to the many sufferings that afflicted the civilian population both in physical and spiritual terms. At this period, during the siege, air-raids and shelling presented a constant danger to traffic. It cannot be ruled out that the security forces would if given the order, have performed a ‘professional’ liquidation of Wallenberg and Langfelder while they were driving around the capital. One of the driving assistants, Tivadar Jobbágy, became a victory of military activity, though not while driving. From Gábor Forgacs’s memoirs we can read:

On 24 December 1944 I was in the Swedish embassy office at Üllői út 2-4 from half past three to half past five. Then the red Studebaker, driven by Tivadar Jobbágy, took Vilmos Forgács, Hugó Wohl and their wives to the Hazai Bank premises at Harmincad utca 6. As Jobbágy’s wife was pregnant, Langfelder took the car over. The Jobbágyes were staying there with other people in hiding. Nine days later shrapnel penetrated the drawn blind  and Jobbágy, who was standing nearby, received fatal injuries. 

Some of the children that had been turned out of the orphanage were shot the next day by the Arrow-Cross on the Danube embankment in Lipótváros or Újpest. By this time, they were having to conserve ammunition, so they stood several children one behind the other in order to use fewer bullets. Several of the children were not hit or jumped into the river before being shot and swam down the river to the bank by the Parliament building where they climbed out and survived. On the same day, Christmas Day, the Arrow-Cross attacked the Finnish and Swedish embassies. The rabble that went with them vented their spleen in unrestrained acts of robbery and destruction. One of the embassy drivers turned out to be a traitor to the rescue work, a snivelling, low-down type, as he was described by Nina Langlet. She claimed that he was in touch with the German secret police as an undercover informant. On 25 December, after the Arrow-Cross attack on the Swedish mission, he smiled with satisfaction at the sight of the plundered offices. Her feeling was that he was playing along with the SS and the Arrow-Cross and had stolen property deposited with the embassy.

Christmas Present:

Wallenberg’s Hungarian colleagues expressed their affection and regard for him with a Christmas present. They had made a hand-painted coloured album for him entitled, in German, The Schutzpass in the History of Art, a Collection of Reproductions. When Wallenberg appeared in his storm-coat and boots he was surprised to receive the forty-five-page compilation with lively drawings of the Schutzpass in historical settings. The gift contained nineteen full-page illustrations in colour and, as an endpiece, there was a Christmas elegy by Dr Péter Sugár about the Swedish letter of protection, written in excellent, erudite German. In the final section it expressed the hopes of Wallenberg’s protégés:

Though dark our heaven, the star gleams there above.

Now let us cheer him, the man who has brought peace 

To us, and has defended us.

There are many records of the last days of 1944 in the archives of the German Embassy in Budapest. On 28 December, counsellor Gerhart Feine, one of the embassy staff sent from Budapest to Szombathely, telegraphed to Berlin. He gave an account of the advance of the Soviet motorised units and the capture of the Danube bend at Esztergom by the enemy. Also, he provided details of the Soviet encirclement of the capital. The military attaché at the embassy informed Berlin of German counter-attacks, their purpose, according to the reports, being to maintain contact with Budapest “in all circumstances”. He stated that the Japanese chargé d’affaires had been trapped in the siege and was delayed and that the whereabouts of the Turkish embassy secretary was, for the time being, unknown. He was also aware that Szálasi’s Foreign Minister, Gábor Vajna, had left the city ‘in good time’.

Gerhart Feine had received information that the Swedish ambassador had gone into hiding in Budapest, his whereabouts unknown. He had also learnt that Wallenberg had placed himself under the protection of the Waffen SS, in connection with certain actions of the Hungarian police and the Arrow-Cross. Wallenberg and Langfelder were spending most of their nights at Captain Ocskay’s apartment. The company commander who had saved 1,500 Jews in Abonyi utca had German military credentials. On 30 December, Wallenberg took part in an official inspection with Dr Pál Hegedűs in the Jewish Council office in the big ghetto, together with police officers and representatives of the local government. Pál Szalai, who had offered Wallenberg secret and effective assistance in preventing any more Arrow-Cross atrocities, was also present. He proposed that Wallenberg should have food and raw materials delivered to the occupants of the ghetto as well as to the public kitchens of the city. On leaving the ghetto, the two men went to inspect the food stocks accumulated by the Swedish Embassy in the warehouse of the Stühmer chocolate factory. This stock, together with that of the Red Cross, helped to provide the two ghettoes with enough food to survive the siege.

The Hungarian staff of the Swedish Embassy’s humanitarian mission were, by now, almost all on the Pest side of the city and their offices had moved to Üllői út, one of the main roads into the city centre. But Wallenberg had also rented a number and variety of properties, parts of apartment houses, offices and flats in a number of places. In the ‘pressure cooker’ atmosphere created by the Arrow-Cross Terror and the Soviet Siege, the embassy staff were now exposed to even greater danger and, to a greater extent, to the vagueries of a war on two ‘fronts’ within the city. This was further complicated by the contrasting cowardice of the Hungarian political élite and the treachery of the Hungarian military staff as well as the stupid expectation of a miracle in which the Szálasi government persisted to the end and in parallel with Hitler, all of which led to the downfall, pillaging and devastation of Hungary.

Sources:

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Marianna D. Birnbaum (2015), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity: Raoul Wallenberg and his Aides in Budapest. Budapest: Corvina.

 

Raoul Wallenberg’s Protective Passports:

After a month in the Hungarian capital, the Secretary of the Swedish Embassy there, Raoul Wallenberg, had to decide quickly on the form of Schutz Pass, or ‘protective passport’ (‘SP’) he would use in his humanitarian relief work with the Jews of Budapest. He attached a specimen to his report to Stockholm of 16 August. It was an important part of his assignment to provide 1,500 Hungarians with temporary passports as protective documents. These could be persons with very close family links with Sweden, or who had been for a long time closely connected to Swedish commercial life, a number that rose later to 4,500. The issue of the new Swedish protective document came with a structure:  a long-term Swedish connection had to be proved documentarily, while the Schutzbrief issued by Langlet had no such condition attached. Wallenberg quickly perceived the scope of humanitarian action. He was a good organiser and had numerous Hungarian colleagues in the accomplishment of tasks. He soon appreciated the unreliability of the Hungarian political élite and its tendency to vacillate, experiencing the many ways in which responsibility could be evaded. Most of his Hungarian acquaintances were ashamed of what was happening to the Jews but insisted that the brutality was exclusively the work of the Germans. Unlike them, he saw clearly what could be described as the Hungarian hara-kiri, and stressed the responsibility of Hungarians, making it clear that anti-Semitism is deeply rooted in Hungary. He pointed out that Jews on forced labour were not allowed to take shelter during air-raids, leading him to the conclusion that the Christian population evinced only a very luke-warm sympathy, and that it would be very difficult for the Jews to avoid their doom by flight.

The Swedish protective passport in Hungarian and German, with the holder’s photograph, was not acknowledged in international law and had no force. Nonetheless, its influence could not be underestimated. In the summer of 1944, it commanded a certain respect and carried a message. In the presence of immediate lethal danger, many saw in it the chance of escape, of organised defence and the embodiment of their hopes of survival. In August more and more groups of Jews in fear of deportation came to him. The news of his protective passport spread like wildfire and long queues waited on Gellérthegy outside the Humanitarian Section of the Swedish Embassy. From 16 August, a further building was rented and applicants were received from 4 p.m., with questionnaires filled in and six photographs. These were the conditions imposed by the Hungarian government for asylum documents. On the 22nd, the Ministry produced an order on the subject of the exemption of individuals from the regulations relating to Jews. By mid-September, the strength of Wallenberg’s Hungarian apparatus was approaching a hundred. He provided extra accommodation for them at Gellérthegy and also on Naphegy, where ten rooms and a cellar were rented, and round-the-clock shift-work was instituted.

The taking on of colleagues, the formation of an effective organisation and the thorough checking of the data submitted in applications for the Swedish document all took time. The apparatus required for this grew constantly. On 29 September, he reported to the Swedish Foreign Ministry that the entire staff including families number about three hundred persons and are exempt from wearing stars and forced labour. By that time 2,700 letters of protection had been issued and the numbers of those who had gained exemptions from wearing stars exceeded the original 4,500 by a further 1,100. For the first four months of the humanitarian action, it would have been impossible for the Swedish passport of protection to be handed out as a gift to those who did not have clear Swedish connections. That came later when the Arrow Cross reign of terror meant that people were in fear for their lives in an imminent sense. Then, resourceful Jews would copy names (similar to their own) and addresses from the Swedish telephone directories held in the Budapest head post office and send a ‘reply paid’ telegram. Kind-hearted Swedes, realising that the sender was pleading for his or her life, would then confirm the ‘relationship’ by return telegram. Wallenberg’s biographer, Jenő Lévai, has concluded that very many obtained protective passports and escaped through letters or reply telegrams from complete strangers.

The embassy’s work offered reasonable security against the constant threat of deportation. Those employed on humanitarian work received a legitimising card from the Embassy of the Kingdom of Sweden in Budapest and a special personal card from the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior. This exempted them from wearing the yellow Star of David and from the ever-more widespread duties of forced labour within the army. Wallenberg had essentially established a system of dual nationality, and this repeatedly aroused the suspicion of both the SS and the Hungarian authorities. According to a German Embassy note of 29 September, the director of the Budapest political section of the Hungarian Foreign Ministry was thinking that the Swedish Embassy should be called to order in a responsible, clear and sharp tone.

By mid-October, Vilmos Langfelder’s family had come under the protection of the Swedish Embassy and he moved to the central office of the Humanitarian Section at Űllői út on the Pest side of the city. Langfelder probably came into contact with Wallenberg because of his knowledge of German and his ability to drive. Within a short time, he had become the Swedish diplomat’s close associate as his chauffeur. His SP had been issued on 20 August, when he had belonged to a forced labour unit under Swedish protection. Langfelder took charge of Elek Kelecsényi’s Steyr car for the purpose of life-saving work. According to Lévai, Wallenberg sent out an Instruction which set out what had to be done to save holders of Swedish protective documents from the clutches of armed bandits, potentially a lethal undertaking. This summed up the dramatic essence of the immediate life-saving work:

Members of this section must be on constant duty day and night. There are no days off. If anyone is arrested, let them hope for much help, and if they do good work let them not expect thanks.

Langfelder frequently found himself driving Wallenberg, at night, to someplace where people needed his protection. Among the couriers and agents, disappearances were frequent, especially when they went into one of the Arrow Cross houses to inquire about a missing person, exposing themselves to a world of pain and indescribable horrors. Increasingly, abductions and murders were carried out in broad daylight. László Hollós and Ödön Ullman were on their way to inform Wallenberg of an Arrow Cross assault on a hospital when they were arrested and murdered.  In the countryside, the role of the Hungarian actress Vali Rácz has also been recognised by Israel. She hid many families from Budapest in her home in the countryside after the initial deportations but was denounced to the invading Red Army for fraternising with German soldiers (in order to protect her ‘guests’) and almost shot as a collaborator. A Red Army Colonel intervened to stop this and she was exonerated. There were also some members of the army and police who saved people (Pál Szalai, Károly Szabó, and other officers who took Jews out from camps with fake papers) as well as some local church institutions and personalities.

Rudolph Kasztner also deserves special attention because of his enduring negotiations with Eichmann to prevent deportations to Auschwitz, succeeding only minimally, by sending Jews to still horrific labour battalions in Austria and ultimately saving 1,680 Jews on what became known as ‘Kastner’s train’, which by the beginning of August had left Bergen-Belsen with its human ‘cargo’ bound for Palestine.

Those left in the ‘Jewish houses’ and the ghettoes were increasingly targeted for forced labour gangs. They were lined up in the streets, marched off, ceaselessly shouted at, trudging off to Óbuda in broad daylight. Klára Tüdős’ recollection draws a concise picture for posterity:

Dreadful rumours circulated about Jews interned at brick-works and cattle-trucks with barbed wire on them, and as dawn broke processions of people wearing stars would set off in the streets of Pest. These things are mixed up inside me together with the wailing of sirens, like a delirious dream.

The Extreme Right’s Reign of Terror begins:

The coming to power of Ferenc Szálasi and his followers on 15 October through the armed intervention of the SS was the nadir of the Horthy régime, its bloodstained final act. Under the Arrow Cross Party, terror became the tool of the totalitarianism of the extreme Right. Its ranks were swelled in particular by the lumpen elements of the underworld and misguided youth that could recognise the chance for unrestrained robbery and violence. On 15 October, Daisy Lászlo’s father, the tallest man in the apartment block, removed the yellow star from the front door. By the afternoon, however, he realised that with this act he had risked his life again. Since he was aware of the politics of the janitor’s wife, he secretly left the house in the dark, but before the doors would have been locked. She must have said something to the Arrow Cross thugs, however, because the following evening a heavily intoxicated young man, wearing the party uniform, kept banging on the Lászlo family’s door, looking for Mr Lászlo. The story continues below, in Daisy’s own words:

He searched every room, causing terrible alarm among the families placed there because he pushed and shoved everybody, shouted and took whatever he laid his eyes on. He was brandishing his revolver, and we were scared that he would start shooting. There was a large table in the entrance hall of the apartment, around which we took our meals, mostly together. He dragged off the tablecloth and packed in it the stuff he had collected from the various rooms. It seemed that he had forgotten why he had come and we were hoping that he would take the bundle and leave. He was proceeding toward the front door when he changed his mind, returned and demanded a drink. Jews were not permitted to purchase alcohol, but somebody must have had something stashed away, because after a short discussion, a bottle appeared on the table. While he was sipping from the bottle, he … informed us that he was an actor. He jumped on the dining room table, and began reciting Petőfi’s poem, ‘The Lunatic’. 

He got totally carried away, stomping with his feet, his face distorted; he seemed in a trance. I do not know how much of the poem he had recited, whether he knew it by heart, or made mistakes, but when he finished there was a thunderous applause and … bows on the table, surrounded by his terrified public. … He told us that he would go home … but would return the following day and continue the recital. He threw the bundle over his shoulder and staggered out the front door. … stumbling toward the street corner. He did not return, neither the following day, nor ever. We did not know what had happened to him, but for days we feared that he would reappear. 

After Szálasi and his men took over the government a rapid series of changes of personnel took place in the organisations providing the protection of the regime. New organisations were formed including, on 17 October, the State Security Police, the Hungarian Gestapo, was re-formed. Its activity extended to all opponents of the Germans and the Arrow Cross, irrespective of rank or status. On the 26th, the ‘National Unit for Accountability’ came into being, responsible for extinguishing the lives of many civilians. In the implementation of its laws, decrees and orders, the régime could rely on the gendarmerie, the police and the armed formations of the Arrow Cross Party. In what followed, those that belonged to the service slaughtered a large number of army deserters, Jewish forced labourers and people arrested during raids, increasingly and frequently on the spot. Apart from the scale of the violence, the deluge of accompanying decrees, renewed orders and contradictory instructions increased the turmoil. A wholesale breakdown occurred in the army, the police and public administration. From 28 October, Arrow Cross members received regular payments from the state to carry out robbery and murder on a grand scale. They not only had the right to bear arms but also formed the local detective, investigative, interrogation and enquiry squads. They could act on their own authority to create the ever more tragic and corrupt conditions which they considered ‘order’. In the practice of totalitarian dictatorship, the paramilitary members of the Party knew no bounds.

A typical element of the Hungarista programme was the widespread persecution and terrorising of the Jews. Following the assumption of power, party terrorists attacked starred houses in Budapest and Jewish forced labour barracks. For example, one of Daisy’s schoolfriends, Marika, lived with her mother in what became a ‘Jewish house’ after 19 March. Marika’s biological father was not Jewish but he refused to marry Marika’s Jewish mother because he was a close crony of Miklós Horthy, entitled as vitéz (‘man of valour’), a title he would have lost if he had been known to have married a ‘Jewess’. In June, Marika had been sent to a summer camp in Balatonboglár, run by Sisters in the Catholic Church. She was given a fictitious name and false papers, along with two other girls. One night they were awakened by gendarmes and pulled out of bed. She was so traumatised by this that thereafter she frequently peed herself. She ‘escaped’ and left for Budapest on foot, where she eventually returned to her house where she fell into the arms of her mother, kissed and cried, and ate sausage in the pantry. Her return lasted until 15 October, when her mother greeted Horthy’s abortive proclamation by opening a bottle of champagne. Happiness lasted a very short time. Marika’s mother helped to forge documents, while her mother was placed in one of the ‘protected houses’. Once, when Marika was visiting her with her aunt Duncy, Arrow Cross soldiers raided the area. Her aunt yelled at one of them, outraged that he had dared to ask for her papers.

Meanwhile, Marika’s mother became seriously ill with meningitis, and her sister arranged for her to be taken (with false papers) to the Szent István Kórház. Marika could still visit her there, where she eventually died. One night her uncle urged them to leave their new house in Benczúr utca, and they found refuge in the cellar of a nearby pharmacy owned by a relative. Next day the Arrow Cross raided the house, ordered everyone in it down to the courtyard and shot them all dead. When the siege of Budapest began, Marika, her aunt and her grandmother did not dare go down to the air-raid shelter. By that time, they were living in hiding alongside Polish and Czech refugees. One day the Arrow Cross soldiers marched the refugees down to the bank of the Danube and shot them into the river. Daisy herself narrowly escaped a similar fate during that autumn, when she spent several days wandering alone, stealing her food from outside grocery stores. She found herself in Szent István Park and was thrown into a column of thirty people being marched towards the lower embankment of the Danube under the guns of two young Arrow Cross hoodlums. She recalled:

We progressed silently, adults and children, without anyone protesting or crying. But when we reached the small underpass, and I was hit by the familiar stench of urine, without thinking about the consequences, I simply turned right and left the group.

Nothing happened and no one called out. I turned around the corner … Only after the Liberation did I hear that Jews had been shot into the Danube from the lower embankment of the Pest side … I never mentioned this episode to anyone fearing that people would think I had made it up out of a need to create a heroic story; that I was ashamed that while so many from our family had been murdered, I had not come close enough to death.    

Another of Daisy’s friends, Vera S, had already lost her relatives in the countryside to Auschwitz in the summer, but she still lived in Budapest with her parents and grandparents, where their apartment building had become a ‘Jewish house’ and their apartment filled up with strangers. The residents were ordered down into the courtyard several times and were threatened with deportation. On one such occasion, when they were permitted to return to their apartment, they found the rooms ransacked and most of their belongings missing, even Vera’s dolls were gone. Then, shortly after 15 October, the men in the house were rounded up. Running to the balcony, Vera and her mother tried to see where the group was being taken, but Vera’s father, looking up and fearing for their safety, motioned with his hand, urging them to go back inside. That was the last time they saw him. A postcard arrived from Valkó, where they had been taken on foot. From there, Vera’s father was deported to a concentration camp. They knew nothing more of his fate.

Shortly after that, Vera’s mother had to report to the Óbuda brick factory and the children were placed in a Jewish orphanage. Vera escaped and rejoined her brother when their grandparents found shelter in a Swedish ‘protected house’. Their mother escaped from the brick factory, bought false papers from their former janitor, and went into hiding. The following day, the Arrow Cross took the orphans from the ghetto and shot them all into the Danube. Thereafter, Vera and her brother stayed with their grandparents where they lived with twenty other surviving children, in one room. These children knew nothing of their parents and were starving. One day, Vera’s mother arrived at the ‘protected house’ but Vera couldn’t recognise her because she had dyed her hair to fit her false papers. Vera later recalled:

She said that when the Russians fully surround the city, and we will have to die, she will return that we should die together. She did come back, but fortunately we did not die.

On 30 October, German soldiers arrived in the house on the Pest side of the Danube where Iván lived with his family. They entered their apartment in the company of Miki, the janitor’s son who was wearing his Arrow Cross uniform. Although Miki had been Iván’s friend and playmate for the past decade, that did not prevent him from handing him over to the Nazis. Requiring additional labourers, the Germans had the help of the Arrow Cross in collecting men over sixty and boys under sixteen from the surrounding ‘starred houses’. By then Iván’s father had been away for years in a forced labour camp, and after their paint shop had been closed under anti-Jewish legislation, his mother had supported their two boys, her mother and herself by making artificial flower arrangements. Iván and his group of conscripted labourers were taken to Lepsény in western Hungary where they were made by the Wehrmacht to organise a military depot next to the local railroad station. They worked there throughout November, emptying trains that carried military supplies and filling military trucks with winter clothing for soldiers. Iván later learned that his brother Ervin, who had a weaker constitution, had also been sent to Transdanubia and had died while digging ditches. He was buried in a mass grave near Győr. Iván was the only survivor from those who were taken from his apartment house.

Ágnes B, another of Daisy’s friends was just ten years old when her father was drafted as a forced labourer. Soon after 15 October, Arrow Cross soldiers came to their apartment house, where they lived with her mother’s sister’s family. They rounded up all the women under forty, including her mother, who did not resist, despite being only weeks away from her fortieth birthday. Ági recalled her leaving:

My mother put on a fur-lined coat because it had been very cold. I followed her across the yard until the gate and I watched as she joined the group of Jewish women. She wrote one card from the road to Austria, telling me that they had been placed in a pigsty overnight. I never saw her again…

Life for all the remaining Jews in Budapest became increasingly difficult, but the access to Swiss and Swedish protection documents could provide some amelioration. Daisy’s friend’s mother was able to procure copies of the ‘protection documents’ Wallenberg had been handing out, but it was too late to use them because the Germans occupied their house and transported both sets of grandparents to the ghetto. Kati was sent to live with distant relatives, where she got false papers and a new name to learn, along with the names of her seven new ‘sisters and brothers’. She was with relatives, but still felt ‘terribly alone’. Although she looked ‘Aryan’ (see the picture below), she was not allowed out on the street. Another friend, Tomi, was twelve in 1944, by which time his entirely assimilated family had decided to convert to Catholicism, mainly to avoid the increasing restrictions placed upon Jews. In June, they had been forced to leave their apartment on the first floor of a Rózsadomb villa and moved to a ‘Jewish house’. By this time, Tomi’s father was in a forced labour camp and after 15 October, all three had to report to the brick family of Óbuda, from where they were supposed to be deported. Tomi’s father was able to provide them with Swiss protection documents and, therefore, three days later, they were moved to the overcrowded ghetto.

Wallenberg’s Responses and Reports:

The sudden turn of events took the Swedish embassy organisation by surprise, as it did the humanitarian activists too. Wallenberg himself had been expecting Hungary to pull out of the war, which had been much talked about in Budapest social circles as the government’s intention. He was also calculating when the Red Army would reach Budapest, and was thinking of going back to Stockholm a few days before it happened. Up to 15 October, the Swedish Embassy had received eight thousand applications and 3,500 had been granted the SP. A week after Szálasi’s rise to power Wallenberg reported that armed bandits have attacked those in possession of protective passports and torn them up. The Hungarian staff had reacted to this unexpected turn of events by going into hiding, as he noted:

The events have had a catastrophic effect on the section, the entire staff has absented itself, and a car which was placed at our disposal free of charge, together with the keys of various locked places and cupboards etc., have vanished.

In order to put some spirit and courage back into his dismayed colleagues, Wallenberg cycled through the bandit-infested streets in order to pick up the threads of his work again, a procedure which was fraught with risks. Instead of the peace that many had yearned and hoped for a fresh wave of destruction began. On 16 October the head of the Arrow Cross Party staff decreed that Jews were not to leave their homes until further notice. Buildings designated by stars of David were to be kept shut day and night. Until further notice, only non-Jews might go in and out. Non-Jews were not allowed to visit Jews. On 18 October, one of his Swedish officers reported that the new government had introduced strict anti-Jewish regulations and that the entire Jewish staff of the Embassy was in mortal danger. A crowd of Jews seeking revenge was besieging the embassy, which was incapable of accommodating them.

In the course of renewed the renewed persecutions, the previous forms of protection lost their usefulness. Beginning on 20 October, armed Arrow Cross men lined up tens of thousands of men aged between sixteen and sixty, on two trotting-tracks, dividing them into labour-companies and took them off. The one suburban sports ground, in Zugló, became the mustering place for Jewish women, as directed on posters. The assigned Jews of the city were made to work on fortifications, digging defensive ditches. Renewed talks with the black-uniformed, green-shirted Arrow Cross leaders were required, as were new methods of saving people. Wallenberg quickly made contact with Szálasi’s Foreign Minister, Baron Gábor Kemény. In matters of the “Jewish Question” and other ‘Jew-related’ topics he later had to deal with the Foreign Ministry. On 21st, he reached an agreement with Kemény that the Hungarian authorities would give the staff of the Royal Swedish Embassy and members of their families exceptional treatment. They were exempted from wearing the yellow star; from all kinds of forced labour; they were not obliged to live in starred houses, and allowed to go out onto the streets without curfew. This rapid agreement gave hope to several hundred people by officially extending the scope of Swedish protection. It also gave Wallenberg the room to prevent the complete destruction of the Budapest Jews.

This became known, along with the change of régime in Budapest, on 24 October in Bern, Washington and New York (World Jewish Congress), at the Red Cross International Council centre in Geneva and elsewhere. However, the Szálasi government quickly realised its mistake, and drastically reduced the scope of the exemption by the end of October. On 29th, it restricted the circle of those exempted by a ‘variation of decree’. For his part, Wallenberg worked at adding to the exemption that had been obtained and at retaining the greater and lesser fruits of the talks. Protection from the embassy was, in reality, frequently nothing more than a thread of hope. The ‘protected’ houses offered an unstable, relative refuge. Security and day-to-day survival were unpredictable and depended on luck and the movements and whims of the armed Arrow Cross men. Exactly a year later, on 24 October 1945, Béla Zsedenyi, President of the Provisional National Assembly, meeting in Debrecen, thanked King Gustav V of Sweden, the Swedish people and the Swedish diplomatic mission in the name of the Hungarian nation for their help in the humanitarian activity in 1944. He described the defensive stand taken by embassy secretary Wallenberg as “invaluable service”, emphasising that…

… he had taken a selfless and heroic part of decisive significance in warding off the acts of mass muder planned against innocent and defenceless citizens, and by his resolve had succeeded in saving the good name of the Hungarian people from further stain.

By that time, Wallenberg had disappeared at the end of a bitter winter during which he and his staff at the Swedish Embassy Annex had succeeded in saving the lives of thousands more, enabling them to survive the war and the terror in Budapest.

Return to Auschwitz:

Those already deported from the Hungarian countryside to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau had no means of protection, of course, and continued to face ‘extermination’ in the camps. Daisy Lászlo’s Uncle Samu and his family had been deported to Auschwitz from Dunaszerdahely in the summer. His wife, Aunt Berta was his second cousin, a fact which was constantly mentioned on the fringes of family visits and gatherings because both of their boys had disabilities. The older son, Nándi, had a speech impediment, and the younger one, Ármin, was almost totally deaf. All that was learnt of the family in 1945 was that they were among the hundreds of thousands of victims, but neither the place nor the time of their deaths was known. In 2010, an Israeli relative found the story of Ármin’s last months among the files of the International Tracing Service in Germany. This showed that on 25 October, he was transferred from Dachau back to Auschwitz.

During the last months of the war, thousands of Jews were returned to Auschwitz for extermination because they were considered too weak to work. As is shown below, Ármin’s physical description (including height, eye colour, the shape of mouth and ears) accompanied the transfer. His mother’s maiden name, his permanent domicile were also recorded. His signature at the bottom of this document led Daisy to believe that Ármin’s had been a special case, perhaps because of his deafness. However, she then found out that during the autumn of 1944, over five hundred inmates were returned to Auschwitz within a few weeks, accompanied by the exact same documents. Clearly, the Nazi coup in Budapest had had indirect effects in quickening the death machine of Auschwitz.

Sources:

Andrew J Chandler (2012), As the Land Remembers Them. Kecskemét: self-published, http://www.chandlerozconsultants.wordpress.com.

Anna Porter (2007), Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust. London: Constable (2008).

Nóra Szekér, Domokos Szent-Iványi and His Book, Part I, in Hungarian Review, Volume IV, No. 6. Budapest, November 2013

Domokos Szent-Iványi, The Hungarian Independence Movement, Excerpts, Descent into the Maelstrom, Hungarian Review, loc.cit.

Gyula Kodolányi & Nóra Szekér (2013), Domokos Szent-Iványi: The Hungarian Independence Movement, 1939-1946. Budapest: Hungarian Review Books.

James C Bennett & Michael J Lotus, America, England, Europe – Why do we differ? Hungarian Review, loc.cit.

Marc J Susser (ed.) (2007), The United States & Hungary; Paths of Diplomacy, 1848-2006. Washington: US Department of State.

István Lázár, (1989), The History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina.

Szabolcs Szita (2012), The Power of Humanity. Budapest: Corvina.

Marianna D. Birnbaum & Judith Flesch Rose (ed.)(2016), 1944: A Year Without Goodbyes. Budapest: Corvina.

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