The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II

by Alex Kershaw

  Eichmann also complained to Rudolph Kasztner about Lutz and Wallenberg’s actions, and the rapid increase in forged Schutzpasses. “Lutz and Wallenberg will pay for this damned mess,” Eichmann threatened.39

  At some point during his stay in Budapest, according to several credible sources, a German armored car rammed Wallenberg’s official limousine at high speed. Fortunately, Wallenberg was not in the car and his driver was not hurt.40 Some have claimed that Eichmann was behind the so-called accident and that his aide Dannecker was also involved. The collision may have been intended as a warning rather than an attempt to murder the Swede.41

  FIFTEEN MILES NORTH of Budapest, the conditions in Kistarcsa deteriorated quickly that July. Vera Herman was one of many children there who now suffered from malnutrition. Disease in the prison was rampant. Then one morning, all children and their mothers were told to assemble in the prison’s courtyard. The prison commander explained that three men, who represented the Swedish Red Cross, had come to collect children under fourteen and take them to a Red Cross children’s home. Margit and the other mothers were told that they could hand over their children if they wanted to.

  Margit Herman faced the most difficult decision of her life. But nothing mattered more now than the survival of her only child. So Margit pushed twelve-year-old Vera into the arms of one of the Swedish Red Cross officials. If her daughter could eat a real meal and sleep in a bed that night, it would be worth it, even if she never saw her again. But suddenly, realizing the enormity of what she had done, Margit fainted.

  Vera rushed toward her mother, who was lying unconscious in the courtyard. In the commotion, two strange men in suits grabbed her, lifting her off her feet, and took her out of the courtyard to a car waiting outside the prison.42 Kistarcsa’s gates closed behind them. The car pulled away. One of the men in the car, Dr. Alexander Kasser, told Vera that he was working with a Swedish diplomat called Raoul Wallenberg, who was trying to save as many children as he could.43

  They reached the outskirts of Budapest and headed into the city, where they stopped outside the Swedish Red Cross Children’s Home. Then Dr. Kasser took Vera inside, where she joined twenty-six other children whose mothers had done as Margit Herman had done.

  Vera was bereft: “I can’t even find words to describe it—my whole world was gone, everything I knew,” she later explained. “I tried to stay strong because I knew that was what my mother would want.”44 Vera began to care for the other children, some as young as five. But one of the smaller children had scarlet fever, and soon Vera had contracted such a severe case that she was taken to a hospital.

  “What hurts?” asked a nurse.

  “Life.”45

  Vera was quarantined in the hospital for six weeks. One Sunday afternoon during her stay there, a mob of drunken Hungarian Arrow Cross men attacked the Swedish Children’s Home and then, in a stunning act of barbarity, murdered all twenty-six of the children who had earlier been saved and whose mothers had so agonizingly given them up to Wallenberg’s protection. Vera was not told of her friends’ fate; when she left the hospital, she was placed in an orphanage also run by the Swedish Red Cross. She now believed that she was an orphan, that she would never see her parents again.46

  Meanwhile, back in Kistarcsa, Vera’s mother was selected for deportation to Auschwitz and placed in a cattle truck on a train. It left one morning, bound for the death camp. Earlier, she had hidden poison, and now, as the train headed toward Auschwitz, she was tempted to take it. The only reason she didn’t was the thought that someone in her wagon might survive and tell her daughter, Vera, that she had taken her life.47

  Some of the women in the cattle truck who still had the strength to stand were gathered near a small grill and looking outside. To their surprise, they saw that the train was heading down a sidetrack. They passed through gates and entered what was clearly another prison.48 It was Sarvar, a holding camp similar to Kistarcsa, on the Austro-Hungarian border. Guards ordered the women off the train.49

  Vera’s mother managed to get out of the boxcar. Then she saw a man who looked familiar. She stared at him. The man had a face just like her husband, Emil. Was she hallucinating?

  It was Emil. Incredibly, he too had been sent to Sarvar and now worked there as a doctor. Emil spotted Margit and walked toward her. But he suddenly turned away and was gone. A few minutes later, he was back. He brushed lightly against Margit. “Take this!” he whispered as he slipped her a vial.

  Margit took the vial, swallowed its contents, and collapsed. Emil rushed over and placed her on a stretcher. As he began to carry her toward the sick bay in the prison, an angry SS guard decided Margit would have to be put back on the train bound for Auschwitz. He ran after Emil, shouting, “I have to deliver two thousand bodies. I don’t care whether they’re dead or alive.”

  Before he could reach Emil, however, the guard was called to the telephone. Someone was on the line from SS headquarters.

  “Don’t bother bringing them anymore,” the guard was ordered. “Just take them outside the prison and machine-gun them.”50

  The SS guard did as he was told.

  According to Vera: “There were only [three] survivors from that transport of two thousand: my mother and two resourceful souls who must have hidden somewhere. They remained in this facility, in this last holding prison on Hungarian soil.”51

  Margit had avoided Auschwitz. For the time being, she learned, she would stay in Sarvar and join other women making uniforms for the SS.52 As she sewed the black jackets of her would-be murderers, she must have wondered if she would see her husband again, let alone her only child, Vera, the daughter she had pushed into the arms of strangers.

  ALICE BREUER LOOKED AT HER WATCH, a beautiful Swiss-made Longines that Erwin had bought for her.53 It was past 11 a.m., just after the curfew for Jews, as she walked along a street in Pest on a shopping errand. Two Arrow Cross men saw her yellow star and approached her.

  “It’s not eleven o’clock and you are not allowed to be in the street,” one of them said.

  Alice checked her watch again. It was after 11 a.m., she protested. But the Arrow Cross men took her away and placed her in a Budapest detention center.

  Somehow, Erwin managed to track her down and smuggled her some food. His father tried, without luck, to bribe officials into releasing Alice.

  In the detention center, Alice soon befriended an old woman, who was later transferred to the sick ward in the prison, where she tried to commit suicide by jumping out a window. She had told Alice that she simply could not live with the shame of being in prison. Alice also shared a cell with talkative, “fascinating” street prostitutes, who cared for her and tried to lift her spirits.54

  But the attempted bribe by her father-in-law was discovered, and a guard took Alice to a cell to be punished. She stared back defiantly at the guard, who told her he would “push out” her eyes. Instead, he beat her until she blacked out. “I was unconscious, lying on the floor,” she later recalled. “The next thing I remember is that I looked up, and the guard was standing with a gun. I didn’t know what happened but I was conscious. ‘Everything is alright,’ I thought. ‘I see stars.’”55

  At some point that July, Alice was transferred to Kistarcsa, the holding camp for Auschwitz. “It was not a nice place, but it wasn’t Auschwitz,” she recalled. “I was so confused. But I was very lucky because there were people who helped me, who gave me a little bread and some soup. I could not manage on my own. There always seemed to be someone who helped me, took care of me, maybe because I looked like I didn’t want to live.”56

  Meanwhile, Erwin tried once more to find Alice. He succeeded in tracking her down at Kistarcsa, where he again tried to bribe officials into releasing her.57 He had no luck. “Some officials could be bribed,” he remembered, “but in Jewish matters it was very difficult because the officials knew they could be caught easily and would be in big trouble.”58 Then Erwin heard about a young Swedish diplomat who had just arrived in Budapest an
d was trying his best to help Jews. “This sounded quite unlikely,” recalled Erwin, “but I understood that the help consisted of putting them under the protection of the Swedish embassy ‘until their immigration to Sweden.’ Thus, they were no longer Hungarian citizens and, as such, they became exempt from all the anti-Jewish laws, including wearing the yellow star and being subjected to forced labor.”59

  Erwin thought the young Swede and his passes sounded too good to be true. Perhaps it was another SS myth, propagated to give Jews a grain of hope. Nevertheless, he set out as soon as he could for the Swedish Embassy on Gellert Hill and was amazed to discover that the rumors about Wallenberg had substance.60 All he had to do to get Schutzpasses for himself, his family, and Alice was prove some kind of connection to Sweden. That was easily accomplished. For many years, Erwin’s father had conducted business with a Swedish firm; Erwin found the papers establishing this among his family’s few belongings and rushed back to the Swedish Embassy.

  It was just after 4 p.m. on Saturday, August 5, 1944, when Erwin met with Wallenberg—a “young, intense, and energetic man, clearly driven by some deep inner force.”61 He gave Erwin a Schutzpass, which he signed in the lower-left corner.62 It bore the serial number 0176. “The number was very low,” recalled Erwin. “Wallenberg had just begun his work because only a week later there was a tremendous number of people with Schutzpasses. I remember that he was very busy, tense, organized, very fast thinking. His phone was ringing and he was making notes and giving instructions in fluent German. He seemed to have all kinds of tricks up his sleeve.”63

  Wallenberg also promised to do what he could to find Alice, although there was no guaranteeing that she was still alive. She could have been sent to Auschwitz, in which case he could do nothing. But he would try to find her. Wallenberg was true to his word. On Monday, August 7, at 10 a.m., he kept an appointment, according to his diary, to discuss the fate of Alice and four other prisoners—5 Fanger.64

  Later that same day, a guard approached Alice in Kistarcsa.

  “You are a Swedish citizen,” the guard said, to her utter surprise. “The consul is here for you.” This man must be mad, she thought. She didn’t believe him. But then, when she got to the camp exit, she saw a car and Hungarian police waiting. “I was taken,” she recalled, “together with others, to the Swedish Embassy in Budapest. There I met Raoul Wallenberg for the first time.”65

  Wallenberg offered her chocolate, handed her a Schutzpass, and explained that she was now a Swedish citizen with nothing to fear from the Germans and the Hungarian Nazis.

  “Remember that your connection with Sweden is [the business] AB Kanthal Hallstahammar,” Wallenberg stressed. “This is important. Don’t forget it. Now hurry home to your husband and his parents. They are waiting for you.”66

  It was an intensely emotional reunion later that day with Erwin, who had also been able to obtain safe passes for his parents and sister, as well as for Alice’s brother, George, who was in a forced labor camp. That night, a dazed Alice celebrated her release with Erwin. Thanks to the Schutzpasses from Wallenberg, they did not have to wear yellow stars and went for dinner at Gundel, a famous restaurant in the wooded City Park area. There, surrounded by gold leaf-framed mirrors, below elegant crystal chandeliers, they toasted what felt like a miracle. Alice had been saved from deportation. Erwin no longer had to work in the forced labor battalion, digging the bunker near Eichmann’s headquarters. The evening was “out of this world,” he remembered.67 Alice also would never forget it: “Erwin wanted to do something for me, and invited me to a very good restaurant. So I went from one extreme to another. I remember thinking: ‘This can’t be true. I must be in a dream.’”68

  BY AUGUST 1944, it was increasingly clear that the Germans were losing the war. The Soviets had crossed the Hungarian border, and the Red Army was massing for a final push across the Hungarian plain toward Budapest. Emboldened by the Soviet advance, Alice and Erwin joined an underground group, whose members were given a typed document, signed by three Auschwitz escapees, including Alfred Wetzler, who had escaped with Vrba on April 10. The document included their eyewitness accounts of the killings in Auschwitz. The underground organization, based in the Jewish General Hospital, was committed to trying to rescue or gain the release of imprisoned Jews.

  One day, Alice and Erwin took a train to the countryside near the Austrian border, intent on trying to locate Alice’s brother George, who was still working in a forced labor camp. They managed to get a Schutzpass to George, but on their return to Budapest, while waiting for a train, there was an air raid. They lost sight of each other. Gendarmes patrolled the station. Agonizing minutes passed as they tried to find each other again. Erwin realized just how dangerous leaving Budapest had been. Then he saw Alice. “I thought the embrace would never end,” he recalled. “We took a crazy chance by undertaking such a dangerous trip . . . but in the end, the document saved George’s life.”

  Back in Budapest, Erwin and Alice rented a room in leafy Buda and began to help out at the Jewish General Hospital, where they assisted in several operations. Like the rest of Budapest, they waited for the Soviets to arrive or the Germans to leave. In the evenings, they read aloud from Roger Martin du Gard’s Family Thibault, an epic saga about the collapse of French society on the eve of the First World War.69 “I cannot die before I finish reading this hefty book,” Erwin told himself.

  The book must have made for particularly fitting reading late that summer as the Americans and British began to bomb Budapest in earnest. Hungary, like France in 1914, now confronted imminent ruin and defeat. The Allied bombing was particularly ominous, setting all of Budapest on edge as people fled to cellars and shelters, where many would remain, night after night, until liberation by the Soviets. “Sometimes, houses came apart like sand castles in the waves of an angry sea,” remembered Erwin, “emitting a peculiar smell of cooking gas, dust, death, and incinerated, acrid wood.”70

  It would be only a matter of weeks, Alice and Erwin thought, before the lightning Soviet advance reached Budapest and the war for all Hungarians would finally be over. Then on August 23, the Romanians made peace with the Soviets, thereby speeding the Red Army’s advance. Realizing full well that the Axis was doomed, Horthy resolved to do the same as Romania before Stalin crushed Hungary in a prolonged and bloody occupation. As a precursor to ending Hungary’s involvement in the war, he reasserted his power, calling the Nazis’ most senior diplomat in Budapest, Veensenmayer, to Buda Castle. Among other demands, Horthy insisted that Eichmann and his special commando—Sonderkommando—be withdrawn from Budapest.71

  During a tense meeting, Laszlo Ferenczy, the head of the Hungarian gendarmerie, made it clear to Eichmann that nineteen thousand men were loyal to the Horthy regime and would resist any attempt by the SS to resume the deportations. It was the greatest setback in Eichmann’s career and he was enraged. According to Ferenczy, Eichmann shouted: “In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me before . . . That won’t do . . . This is contrary to our agreement . . . It cannot be tolerated . . .”72

  Eichmann contacted Berlin and asked for instructions. Himmler sent orders on August 24, confirming that Eichmann’s mission in Hungary was suspended until the political situation changed.73 Eichmann, according to several accounts, was inconsolable. He had been so close to completing his mission—the liquidation of the last Jews of Europe. Now recognition by the Fuhrer was unlikely. “The greatest thing he wanted,” recalled Eichmann’s SS colleague Wilhelm Hottl, “was to be received just once by Hitler, for Hitler to thank him for the extermination. That was his dream.”74

  A twenty-nine-year-old Austrian doctor of history, the pudgy-faced Hottl had enjoyed a rapid rise through the ranks of RSHA agents. As acting head of intelligence and counterespionage in central and southeast Europe, he was now in charge of a spy network that ran from inside Russia to Hungary and Romania. Before the German occupation on March 19, it had been his job to draw up lists of Jews and opposition fig
ures to be arrested and sent to Auschwitz.75 This “minor aide in the most evil intelligence service in the world” was not particularly close to Eichmann—only perhaps Wisliceny enjoyed that privilege—but he had known him for some time, having first met him in Vienna in 1939 when Eichmann had run a so-called Central Office for Jewish Emigration from the appropriated palace of the Jewish banker Louis von Rothschild.

  Late that August, Eichmann visited Hottl at his apartment. “He was wearing battledress, not his dress uniform, which he had worn on his other visits to me,” recalled Hottl. “He gave the impression of being very nervous, and this became even more marked when I told him about the disastrous situation on the German front. Doubtless I, too, was very dejected at the time, because I was afraid that there was nothing that could stop the Russian advance through Hungary to my native Austria.”

  For the next hour, Eichmann drank at least four glasses of brandy, so much that Hottl suggested he not drive.

  Eichmann got up to leave.

  “We shall probably never see each other again.”

  Eichmann then told Hottl that he knew his days were numbered if the Germans were defeated, which now looked inevitable. “When I asked him why he thought this,” recalled Hottl, “Eichmann said that, in view of his role in the program to exterminate the Jews, he was considered by the Allies to be a top war criminal. When he made this comment, I immediately grasped the opportunity to say that I had always wanted to hear reliable information about the extermination program, and particularly about the number of Jews exterminated.”76

  According to Hottl, Eichmann “said that the number of murdered Jews was a very great Reich secret, but with the situation in which he, Eichmann, found himself today, he still could tell me something about it, particularly since I was an historian. Eichmann then told me that, according to his information, some six million Jews had perished . . . , four million in extermination camps and the remaining two million through shooting by the Operations Units and other causes, such as disease.”77