by Sam Staggs
Patai devotes several pages to what he calls “a relatively unknown chapter of the history of the Jews in Hungary during World War II. It is the story of the Polish Jews who were given refuge in Hungary, and thereby got a brief lease on life until the Nazi fury overtook them.” After the German army crushed all Polish resistance in the fall of 1939, many civilian refugees, along with the soldiers already mentioned, streamed into Hungary. They were able to do so because the Soviet Union, in an attempt to stop Hitler, had occupied eastern Poland on September 17, 1939. An estimated 20,000 refugees, Jews and non-Jews, fled eastern Poland, crossed into Soviet Ukraine, and from there into Hungary and Romania. Others took a more direct route through Slovakia, which had achieved brief status as an independent state. The journey was perilous; many did not survive it. According to Patai, “The German Embassy [in Budapest] demanded that the Polish Jews be intercepted at the border and sent back to German-occupied Poland, but the Hungarian border guards were instructed by József Antall, of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, to register all Polish refugees as Christians, with the exception of those who insisted on registering their non-Christian religious affiliation.”
Roman Catholic clergy in Hungary were also instructed by Cardinal Serédy to issue Christian papers to all Jews applying for them. Printed copies of basic Catholic prayers were distributed to Polish Jews so that they could pass as Christians if tested by Germans attempting to trip them up. Patai concludes his discussion of Polish Jews in Hungary with this melancholy statement: “All these efforts came to naught with the German occupation, after which only a few of the Jews under Christian protection were saved.”
Perhaps Magda Gabor’s silence had to do with a sense of failure on her part that so many of those she had rescued were soon caught and killed when the Nazis overran Hungary. Then, too, she herself was increasingly under suspicion: Jewish by ethnicity if not by religion; the ex-wife of a Pole who, until his death in May 1944, was a fighter in Britain’s Royal Air Force; and not without local enemies whom the Gabors had snubbed or insulted in years past with their high-flown habits, pretensions, and superior airs.
Or perhaps Magda remained silent because the Gabors did not trumpet their good works. While Zsa Zsa and Jolie boasted about their amorous conquests, their jewels, their couturier gowns, their success at every level whether real or imagined, Eva and Magda, by contrast, veered in the opposite direction. Yet the charitable acts of all four remained largely unheralded, and no doubt that was their wish. After all, glamour girls and glamour moms in the public eye of the 1950s worked hard to maintain the image of femme fatales. Neither the studios nor the media wanted nobility; leave that to Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller.
* * *
Whatever Magda’s level of secrecy, she was observed. The daughter of the jewelry Gabors driving a truck; entering and leaving the British embassy and then after its closure taking a job in the embassy of a neutral country—Portugal—that was perhaps not so neutral after all. Whispers circulated in the Jewish community, then spread across Budapest, reaching the ears of the Arrow Cross Party, Hitler’s Hungarian subsidiary. An invisible question hung over Magda’s head: Had this un-Jewish Jewess now become a total Jew? She never found out when, but her name appeared on a list.
And then Magda met the ambassador. Her timing could not have been more exquisite, for it was he, and others at the Portuguese embassy, who saved her life, along with the lives of her parents and hundreds of others, as well.
Chapter 11
Inferno
In 1940 Jolie Gabor was approaching fifty, although few people could say from which direction. All three daughters having married and dispersed, Jolie’s time to be fabulous had arrived. After long negotiation with Vilmos over furniture, Oriental rugs, gewgaws, and cash settlements, she obtained the divorce she had coveted since her wedding day. From that time forward, in the typical Alice in Wonderland trajectory of Gabor lives, Jolie and Vilmos became inseparable. “After the divorce,” she said, “we not only had lunch together but Vilmos would take me to the theatre and he would take me to dinner and then he would escort me home and sometimes we would even sleep together. I was happy with him for the first time.”
In 1941 Magda took a job as secretary to Carlos Sampaio Garrido, the Portuguese ambassador to Hungary. (Appointed in 1939, he served until 1944.) After Pearl Harbor, when Allied nations closed their embassies in Budapest, their remaining affairs were conducted through the embassies of neutral nations such as Sweden, Switzerland, and Portugal, such procedures being a normal diplomatic function during extraordinary times. The embassy of Portugal handled communications and other minimal business between Hungary and the United States.
Ambassador Garrido, fifty-eight when he met Magda, soon became her lover and, according to some accounts, her fiancé. Given Magda’s underground activities, it is possible that her job at the Portuguese embassy served as a front, with the collaboration of the ambassador and other embassy staff. Although Portugal’s dictator, António Salazar, ran an authoritarian right-wing government, he seems to have approved the humanitarian efforts of his diplomats in Hungary and elsewhere.
Jolie, leaving aside her usual flightiness, recalled daily life in Hungary from 1942 until March 1944. “We were still relatively unharmed in Budapest,” she said, “but everyone knew it was just a matter of time.” Once a week during those years, the Tillemann family gathered for a dinner party, sometimes at the home of Franceska, the matriarch, at other times at Jolie’s, at one of Jolie’s sisters, or at the home of their brother, Sebestyn. “Some of our rapid-fire compulsive talking was from nerves,” Jolie admitted, though she delighted to regale her family with every particle of Eva’s work in Hollywood and of Zsa Zsa’s marital triumph. Many years later Jolie remembered a small detail from the last family dinner before catastrophe. Overcome by nerves to the point of near hysteria, she drank her own champagne, reached for her sisters’, then her brother’s, until finally someone at the table complained she was acting like a silly child and she slumped in her chair and fell silent. A week later everyone seated at that table wore a yellow star pinned on their clothing each time they went into the street.
The arrival of Nazi invaders turned life upside down for the Tillemanns, the Gabors, and for virtually everyone else in Hungary. “Everybody was afraid,” Jolie said. “Nobody could trust anybody. There was no food, no water. It became apparent that we, too, were in danger. Vilmos because he was known as anti-Nazi, Magda was marked because of her work for the underground.” Whether Vilmos had spoken out against the Nazis was really beside the point. Jolie was disingenuous. Whatever else might count against them, the family was in grave danger because they were Jews. Nazis did not distinguish between observant and secular, assimilated or not.
For a time the Jews of Budapest lived on a knife edge of worry, desperation, and near panic. Then they fell over the edge.
* * *
In California, no news from Hungary had reached Zsa Zsa and Eva for several months. For a time after the Portuguese embassy took over U.S. interests, Magda sent letters from herself, Jolie, and others in the Gabor and Tillemann families. These letters left Budapest in diplomatic pouches and carried Lisbon postmarks. And then the letters stopped.
Zsa Zsa’s imagination ran haywire. Reading newspapers, she broke into sobs at the thought of gunfire in the streets and bombs from the sky dropped by German planes and allied fighters with no thought for those below in Budapest. Conrad offered comfort. “Now, Georgia,” he said, “It isn’t as bad as you think, it can’t be.” But Zsa Zsa knew that he knew: it was worse than she thought. She couldn’t rest, she couldn’t sleep. She chewed her nails to the quick and they bled. Her face was drawn and often she left off the elaborate beauty rituals of earlier days. On some mornings she merely ran a comb through her hair. Zsa Zsa’s only comfort was Ranger, who snuggled with her and seemed to understand better than any human the distress of this new friend.
Conrad Hilton worried about her when he had
time, but his empire seemed to add a new hotel every week or two, an enterprise that left only time for prayer. Eva, the little sister that the older ones bossed, had turned into a tough young woman despite a faltering career and more lean years than otherwise. She watched as Zsa Zsa’s emotions ricocheted from crying spells to hand wringing, then panic that sent her flying from room to room, and speaking faster than an auctioneer.
Never a heavy drinker, Zsa Zsa did not resort to alcohol. In those days no effective tranquilizers existed, and so her condition deteriorated. Eva and Conrad conferred. She announced to Zsa Zsa, “You and I will fly to Washington. Connie has contacts there, you know some people at the Turkish embassy, and we won’t leave until we see President Roosevelt!”
In cases of nervous exhaustion, a change of scene often helps. Zsa Zsa had acquaintances from Ankara now on staff at the Turkish embassy; they would offer help, or so she thought. As it turned out, several embassy employees knew people back in Turkey who remembered Zsa Zsa, but these leads produced nothing. Next, she and Eva visited the Portuguese embassy. “We conferred with Dr. Vasco Garin, First Secretary of the embassy,” Zsa Zsa recalled two decades later. “Could he not be of help since Portugal represented foreign interests in Hungary? Early in the war I had been able to communicate with my family through the Portuguese embassy in Budapest. Dr. Garin explained that it was a most difficult matter. Portugal accepted war refugees only if the United States guaranteed their admission into this country. But this was impossible in the case of enemy aliens. He shook his head.”
For two months in the summer of 1944 Zsa Zsa and Eva knocked on doors in the vast labyrinth of the Capitol. Senators, congressmen, wannabe politicians, con men—anyone who might offer a shred of help. Meanwhile, Conrad seemed to have given up. “Your parents and Magda are enemy aliens,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do.” Charles Isaacs had joined them in Washington, and he and Eva toured the city, sightseeing in the afternoon and in the evening enjoying restaurants and nightclubs. Zsa Zsa recalled Burhan’s ominous predictions that everyone in Europe would be killed by Hitler or Stalin. So remote his dark words had seemed; now reality threw them in her face.
One night, having declined Eva’s invitation to join her and Charles on the town, Zsa Zsa lay brooding in her hotel room. On the radio, soothing music. Eventually she closed her eyes. A few quiet moments of rest, then abruptly the music stopped.
“We interrupt this broadcast with a news bulletin. A famous Bel Air showplace was gutted by fire tonight. The residence of Mr. and Mrs. Conrad Hilton on Bellagio Road . . .” After a moment of paralyzed shock, she screamed. The news felt like death. Her wing of the estate was completely destroyed: clothes, possessions, family photographs, letters, her diary, the contents of the many suitcases she had brought from Turkey—her past turned to ashes.
The news continued. Zsa Zsa writhed in torment, for Ranger had died in the fire. Gaining a measure of control, she telephoned Ouida Rathbone, wife of the actor Basil Rathbone. The radio announcement had informed that Mrs. Rathbone, a near neighbor, first saw flames and called the firemen.
“Zsa Zsa, it was frightful,” Ouida Rathbone said, in tears herself. “I stood in front of your burning house and heard Ranger howling and I couldn’t do a thing. She was trapped in your room. I begged the firemen, save the dog! But they were too late.”
All night, Zsa Zsa imagined Ranger lost, confused, whimpering. “I could not believe my poor, sensitive, frightened Ranger burned to death. Had she run to my room thinking I would save her?” Throughout that night, visions of the fire blazed in Zsa Zsa’s mind. All over America, and across the ocean, the world she saw was on fire, with her mother, her father, her sister, grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins howling in the European flames, and she herself trapped and unable to cry out.
Chapter 12
The Hour of Lead
On these grievous days, Zsa Zsa could not imagine that still darker hours lay before her. In advance of that coming debacle, however, her luck shifted, as it did so often throughout her long life. George Sanders said she had guts; he might have added that good luck invariably sought her out.
A few days before she and Eva were scheduled to return in defeat to Los Angeles, a phone call came from the office of Secretary of State Cordell Hull. (Born in 1871, Hull served under President Roosevelt from 1933 to 1944. A year after leaving office, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in establishing the United Nations. Hull died in 1955.) No one left a record of who arranged that interview with the extremely busy wartime secretary, though it is reasonable to assume that calls from Conrad Hilton to influential friends in government helped secure the appointment. In response to an email query to the Library of Congress, where the secretary’s papers are stored, I received this information: “I am unable to locate an entry in the index indicating correspondence to or from anyone with the last name ‘Gabor’ or the name ‘Conrad Hilton.’ ”
“We were escorted into a small office,” Zsa Zsa recalled, “and behind a large desk a slender, gray-haired man rose. We begged him to help. I remember that I opened my mouth and for nearly a moment I could not utter a word. Whether it was the courtliness of his manner, the understanding in his deep-set gray eyes, or the knowledge that at last we were in the presence of a man who had the power to help, I do not know, but for the first time in my life I could not speak. Mr. Hull was very kind; he brought a chair, gave me a glass of water, and presently I was myself. Our conversation was brief. He would look into the matter. He could promise nothing. A great deal depended on my parents’ papers. He repeated, he would look into the matter.”
J. Randy Taraborelli, in The Hiltons, adds the important information that Secretary Hull urged Zsa Zsa and Eva to continue on to New York, since Conrad Hilton was there, and to rest. This pointed advice he offered for Zsa Zsa’s benefit because “he was alarmed by her appearance; she looked unwell and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
Eva returned to her husband in Hollywood, and when Zsa Zsa arrived in Manhattan, still highly agitated, she found Connie in bed with the flu in the suite they were to share for a week or so. Zsa Zsa’s attempts to wait on her sick husband resembled an operatic mad scene, for she dashed about, running in with glasses of water, then flying to the phone to order cocktails and pungent food from room service, the smell of which made Conrad feel even worse. He buried his head under the bedclothes.
The view outside their windows enthralled her. She would gaze over Central Park, turning to her husband with sad eyes overbrimmed with tears. “Oh Connie, I am trying to see Mamuska. Will Papuska and my darling Magduska—will they come soon? Did the President find them alive? Call the White House now, I demand it!”
Followed by hysterical laughter and snatches of old songs from the Danube, waltz steps and whirling Gypsy leaps from room to room, then sudden imperatives, “Get up! We are late to tea. They expect us at the Plaza.”
“But Georgia, we are at the Plaza.”
“Then I must put on more jewelry. Mamuska, hurry with the necklace.” Conrad groaned and rubbed his head, which made Zsa Zsa angry. She snatched off her earrings and threw them against the nearest large mirror. “Love me!” she demanded. “You never have, you know. Before dinner, let us go to St. Patrick’s and become really married. I am always a Catholic in my heart!”
* * *
Days passed, Zsa Zsa’s mania calmed and Conrad recovered from the flu, though still he felt weak and hardly knew what treatment to seek for his wife, who assured him she felt brand new after breathing the air of New York and shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue, Henri Bendel, and Hattie Carnegie. They returned to Los Angeles, where Zsa Zsa stared at the charred remains of their uninhabitable home. She looked more than twice her actual age. Conrad took a suite in the Town House, the apartment-hotel on Wilshire Boulevard that he had acquired in 1942. He installed Zsa Zsa in a suite of her own. Summer lapsed into autumn, and after consultations with several doctors, Zsa Zsa fell into the pattern of prescription barbit
urates for sleep and amphetamines to energize her when overcome by worry and depression. She read every grim word in every newspaper at hand to learn the situation in Budapest. On December 26, 1944, the Red Army encircled the city. Thousands died—Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Romanians who had joined their Soviet comrades. Zsa Zsa read of block-to-block fighting in the streets where she had spent her youth, but not a word from family. In spite of sleeping pills, “I could not sleep,” she said. “At night each time I opened my eyes I saw myself multiplied a hundred times in the mirrored walls. My insomnia took over completely. I stayed awake until my imagination began to play tricks on me. I no longer knew which was dream or reality. I saw Mother and Father killed, I saw Magda struggling in the arms of soldiers—were they Nazis, were they Russians? I saw every member of my family tortured.”
All of this in Zsa Zsa’s mind, while in Budapest these nightmares, and unspeakable others, struck down thousands, including people that Zsa Zsa knew, although her closest loved ones so far were spared the very worst. With several horrifying exceptions.
* * *
In The Battle for Budapest, 1944–1945, Anthony Tucker-Jones concludes his text with these staggering statistics: “In June 1944 Budapest had a population of 1.2 million; by April 1945 it had shrunk to 830,000. Some 24,000 civilians perished as a result of starvation and disease and another 13,000 were killed by military action. Allowing for executions and deportation of the Jewish community, the total dead amounted to 76,000 people. Hungarian military losses defending the city totaled 28,500. The damage to Budapest was extensive, with over 13,500 houses destroyed and another 18,800 rendered uninhabitable.”
Among the images in Tucker-Jones’s book are some that Zsa Zsa would have seen in newspapers and magazines at the time. She would have witnessed similar destruction in newsreels when Conrad, Nicky and Barron Hilton, Eva, Bundy Solt, or other friends coaxed her to the movies: all Danube bridges connecting Buda and Pest blown up by retreating Nazis; Buda Castle reduced to ruins; piles of rubble in the streets on the Pest side of the Danube; abandoned cars riddled with bullet holes; street signs now in Russian as well as Hungarian; dead bodies piled in the snow. From the point of view of Eva and Zsa Zsa, the Red Army’s defeat of the Germans in Hungary offered little comfort. Their family, if alive, had escaped the swastika only to fall captive to the hammer and sickle.
