by Alex Kershaw
The cruelty and suffering was soon on a scale that even some of Eichmann’s colleagues had not experienced. “The foot march [Eichmann] organized was pure murder,” SS Colonel Kurt Becher recalled.2 Hungarian guards whipped the Jews as they staggered toward the border, some dying on their feet, most as they lay on the ground having collapsed from exposure and hypothermia. If they slowed, they were killed. The Hungarian police and Arrow Cross youths were trigger happy, hungry it appeared to kill Jews on any pretext. One seventy-four-year-old woman, Bertha Schwartz, reached out to a guard for support and was shot dead before her hand touched him.
“This is cruel,” one Hungarian guard complained. “Why don’t they shoot them and toss them into the Danube instead of making them drag themselves miserably like this?”3
According to a young schoolgirl, Susan Tabor, when her column of forced marchers reached the outskirts of Budapest one day early that November, it was herded into a brick factory in Obuda. “Some people fell and were trampled over because the guards hurried us mercilessly into the building,” she recalled. “Once we were all in, there was hardly room on the floor for everyone to sit. There was no light, no water, no food, no doctors, no first aid, and no sanitary facilities. No one was allowed outside. Armed [guards] walked around stepping on people, abusing them, cursing, and shooting . . . Our spirit was broken. We didn’t talk to each other. We were treated like animals and we felt like animals. One Nazi couldn’t stand the screams of a woman who had a broken foot and couldn’t move, so he stamped on her head. Her brains came out. We still didn’t talk to each other.”
The next morning, Tabor heard SS guards barking orders. Then she saw a man silhouetted in the entrance to the building. He was a “frail-looking man with a sensitive face.” Tabor stared at Wallenberg. She did not realize at first that he was talking to her and the others. “He was telling us he had negotiated with the Nazis for the release of those with Schutzpasses. When the Germans weren’t looking, he slipped extra passes to some women. He also gave us food and medical supplies.” But above all, he brought hope. “He gave us back our dignity, our humanity,” recalled Tabor. “Here was someone who thought we were human beings worth saving.”4
A few hours later, as the forced march began again, Susan and her mother gave their coats, marked with yellow stars, to friends who were freezing to death. As guards tried to organize columns, Tabor and her mother slipped away from the death march. “We didn’t know if we were going to be shot in the back or not. Nazi soldiers were all around. No one stopped us and we just kept walking back to Budapest.”5 There, they managed to find some Christian friends who would hide them until the war was over.
It is thought that Wallenberg was able to save two hundred Jews that morning.6 Thousands of others had to keep walking toward a town on the border called Hegyeshalom, where Eichmann’s deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, and sometimes Eichmann himself would oversee their transfer to Reich authorities across the border. According to a Red Cross official: “Endless columns of deported persons were marched along—ragged and starving people, mortally tired, among them old and wizened creatures who could barely crawl. Hungarian police were driving them with the butt end of their rifles, with sticks and with whips.”
Seventeen-year-old Miriam Herzog traipsed no less than twenty-five miles a day in sleet and freezing rain. She saw police beating those who could not keep up and leaving others to die slowly of exposure and exhaustion in ditches. The older women suffered most. Sometimes at night, they lay without blankets out in the open, shivering, without anything to eat or drink.
One night, Miriam and the other women in her group stopped in a square in the middle of a village. They lay down on the ground to rest—there was no shelter. In the morning, many of the older women were dead, their corpses frozen to the ground.
Miriam’s thirst was even worse than her hunger. Weak from dysentery, wretched from the dirt and the lice that infested her, all she could do the next night was find a space on the floor of a barn and lie down. She didn’t know how much later it was—maybe days—but suddenly she heard a great commotion among the women near her.
“It’s Wallenberg.”
Miriam didn’t know this name, but someone told her he was a Swedish diplomat who had saved many Jews already. She didn’t think he would really help her, and anyway she was now too weak to move, so she lay there on the dirt floor as dozens of women clustered around him.
“Please, you must forgive me,” Wallenberg told them. “I cannot help all of you. I can only provide certificates for a hundred of you.”
Wallenberg looked around the room and began putting names down on a list. He saw Miriam lying on the floor and moved over to her. He asked her name and added it to the list. After a day or two, the women whose names he had taken were placed in a cattle truck on a train bound for Budapest. Because the railway lines had been bombed, the journey took three days, instead of three or four hours. Miriam and the others Wallenberg had rescued were close to death when they arrived. “There were a lot more dangers and hardships ahead of us, but we were alive,” she recalled in a 1980 interview with the BBC, “and it was thanks entirely to Wallenberg.”7
THE MAIN HIGHWAY FROM BUDAPEST to the border was soon littered with so many bodies that even hardened SS veterans were revolted. On November 16, 1944, silver-haired and bespectacled fifty-year-old SS General Hans Juettner and Rudolf Hess, the commandant of Auschwitz, drove from Vienna to Budapest and encountered scenes along the road that, in Juettner’s words, left a “truly terrifying impression.”8
When Juettner and Hess arrived in Budapest, they were told that Eichmann was not in the city. “I spoke to an SS Sturmbannfuhrer whose name I have forgotten [Theo Dannecker] and gave him a piece of my mind,” recalled Juettner.
At Hegyeshalom, Juettner met Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann’s porcine aid, who told him that Eichmann had “instructed him to pay no attention to illness, age, or protective passes.”9
Juettner later claimed that he ordered a halt to the marches, and several thousand Jews were returned to the city.10 But a few days after Juettner returned to Berlin, the death marches resumed. “On November 21, Eichmann immediately gave orders to continue the foot march,” recalled Rudolf Kasztner of the Jewish Council. “He believed that the order to stop the foot marches had been issued on the strength of the mistaken impression of a ‘few’ gentlemen, who had no way of judging whether people who had been on the march for seven or eight days could or could not be regarded as fit for labor.”
Eichmann also told Kasztner that he had had enough of Wallenberg and other diplomats’ interference. “He went on about the abuse of the safe conducts,” recalled Kasztner. “He said he would hold the Swiss consul, Lutz, and Raoul Wallenberg responsible for this outrage. But he had one suggestion: He would close his eyes to the holders of these safe conducts if we voluntarily provided him with twenty thousand pick and shovel Jews.”11
Kasztner declined the offer.
THE LIGHT WAS FADING. Cold rain lashed across the empty avenues of central Pest. It was November 22, 1944. Raoul Wallenberg sat in the back of his Studebaker as his Hungarian Jewish driver, quiet and dependable Vilmos Langfelder, pulled away from the sidewalk and headed north, toward the border town of Hegyeshalom. In the long weeks since the Arrow Cross had taken power, Wallenberg and the twenty-two-year-old engineer, with red-blond hair and a round, amiable face, had become inseparable.12
Seated beside Wallenberg were his diplomatic colleague, thirty-year-old fellow Swede Per Anger, and twenty-one-year-old Johnny Moser. Moser was a blond-haired Jewish assistant chosen to work with Wallenberg because he could pass himself off as an Aryan.
Behind the Studebaker followed three wagons, loaded to capacity with medicine and food.13 Tailing these trucks was another car carrying doctors and nurses who worked for Wallenberg’s fast-growing relief organization, which now employed more than 550 Jews to administer dozens of Swedish safe houses, an orphanage, a hospital, forty doctors, and numerous soup kitchens
, all funded and supervised by Wallenberg.
Wallenberg and his relief party were to be joined on their way to the Austrian border by volunteers from the International Red Cross and Swiss Legation.14 It was a pitiful journey, one that would never be forgotten by those who accompanied Wallenberg. As the headlights of the Studebaker stabbed the darkness that night, they witnessed soul-destroying suffering. There were gray-faced children with bare, bleeding feet, dressed in thin rags. There were old men trying to hold up their wives, hysterical or numbed, shivering with the cold and the horror of it all, clearly close to dying.
Langfelder often put his foot to the brake to avoid hitting the marchers. Some of them recognized Wallenberg and cried out. But Wallenberg could not stop now to help them. There were far more people to save further on, at the head of the endless columns of people crying out for help.
Wallenberg and his aides knew they had to reach the border town of Hegyeshalom by daylight. It would mean driving through the night to get there, but they had no choice. At 9 a.m., another two thousand Jews would be lost to Eichmann’s men and deported across the border to Austria.15
En route to Hegyeshalom, Red Cross representatives stopped in Gonyu, where marchers were being kept on barges in the Danube. According to their subsequent report, “deportees were driven on board the ships anchored in the Danube. Many—in their great distress—committed suicide. In the still of the night, one scream followed another. The doomed people were jumping into the Danube, which was covered with drifting ice. They could not stand the tortures any longer . . . With our own eyes we saw the police driving the Jews, who arrived in pitch darkness, over the narrow gangways covered with ice, so that scores of them slipped and fell into the icy river.”16
Per Anger arrived that night with Wallenberg and the other aides in Gonyu. As they began to hand out food, they too heard the screams of Jews who could take no more and were leaping to their deaths in the icy river. When they resumed their journey along the road heading to the border, they passed “masses of unfortunates, more dead than alive. Ashen-faced, they staggered forward under proddings and blows from the soldiers’ rifle butts. The road was edged with bodies.”17
Langfelder again put his foot to the pedal, the Studebaker passing through the central European darkness, past silent, frosted vineyards and abandoned farms. Wallenberg arrived at Hegyeshalom at 7 a.m., just after dawn. Arrow Cross guards were busy lining up marchers at the town’s station. The Swiss Red Cross later reported that some of them were “in the worst imaginable condition. The endless labor of the foot march, the almost total lack of food, made worse by the torturing, steady fear that they were being taken to the extermination chambers in Germany, brought these pitiful deportees to such a state that all human appearances and all human dignity completely left them.”18
A train stood waiting to take these Jews to Austria, where they would be worked to death building fortifications around Vienna—Stalin’s next objective after Budapest. One of the Jews who stood waiting on the platform at Hegyeshalom later recalled: “For me that train meant one thing—death. I was positive that if I climbed onto that train I would die. Just as I was about to get on board and everyone was crying, I saw a handsome man, as if in a dream, who was trying to take people away. And I asked, ‘Who is this gentleman?’ because I thought that everyone, the whole world, was against us.”
Wallenberg worked fast.
“Why, I just gave you a pass several days ago,” Wallenberg told one Jew. “Off you go, now.”
Hands rose in the air.
“I want to save you all, but they will let me take only a few. So please forgive me, but I must save the young ones.”
According to Per Anger, Eichmann was also at the station that morning. Eichmann apparently stood, dressed in his customary silver-gray uniform, counting off the Jews as if they were cattle. “Four hundred eighty-nine—check!”19
Many of the boxcars standing in the sidings at Hegyeshalom were already crammed with Jews. In a few minutes, the train was due to leave. According to one account, Wallenberg reportedly pleaded with Eichmann, who turned his back on the Swede and walked away, leaving his deputy, Wisliceny, to deal with the infuriating diplomat.20
Per Anger also recalled seeing Wallenberg approach hundreds of Jews gathered on a platform. He shouted that those with Swedish passes should join him. But several heavily armed Arrow Cross guards stepped into his path, placing bayonets to his chest. Wallenberg walked away. A few minutes later, he returned with a group of Hungarian soldiers and a gendarme officer whom he’d earlier bribed with cigarettes and several bottles of rum.
Wallenberg set up a table, opened his briefcase, and then took out what he called his “black book of life”—a register of protected Jews.21 He called out the most common Jewish names and handed out replacement passes as quickly as he could. His young assistant Johnny Moser, meanwhile, moved among the Jews, whispering under his breath: “Raise your hands.”22
It has been claimed that Wallenberg saved three hundred of the three thousand Jews assembled at Hegyeshalom that day, November 23, 1944. Most had never been issued a Schutzpass. But they had the strength and wits to respond when Wallenberg called out or walked among them. Wallenberg’s helpers then unloaded the food and medicine from their three trucks, helped the Jews aboard, and drove them away. Wallenberg had bribed the Hungarian officer in control of Hegyeshalom into distributing the food to those he could not rescue.23
Wallenberg did not want to hand out the food to the condemned himself. He could not bear to see the looks on the faces of the people he could not save, their tears and pathetic sobs of gratitude. Instead, he walked away and watched from a distance as the food was given to marchers whose “death pale” faces “swam with tears.”24
It was broad daylight by the time Wallenberg left Hegyeshalom. The scenes he encountered on the return journey along the road to Budapest were perhaps the most harrowing during all his time in Hungary. As Langfelder drove along the main highway, every twenty miles Wallenberg saw a column of Jews: “sick, unfortunate people, from twelve-year-old children to seventy-four-year-old matrons . . . ragged and dirty.” The car continued, soon passing a group of men from the Bor copper mines. They were starving to death and were “half-naked and insane with hunger.”
On they drove, through villages where some peasants had earlier laughed and mocked the marchers, especially the young, pretty Jewish women, walking in heels, their coats stolen, as they had staggered past the snarling faces of their fellow Hungarians.
“Kill those Jewish whores now!”25
Wallenberg stopped time and time again. It was always the children who had to be saved first. According to one particularly moving account, he pulled toddlers and babies from the thin, pale arms of their dying mothers, and then placed some of these children on the floor of his car.
Soon, Wallenberg’s convoy could carry no more.
“The trucks are full,” a tearful Wallenberg reportedly told one of his helpers, “and these people don’t have the strength to walk back to Budapest even if the guards permitted it. They’re all going to die.”26
THE MAN WHO HAD ORDERED the death marches, Adolf Eichmann, also travelled back to Budapest on “the road of death” on November 23, 1944. As far as Eichmann was concerned, the marches had been a great success. That night, when Eichmann reached his headquarters in Buda, General Winkelmann, Himmler’s representative in Hungary, and the Hungarian fascist Laszlo Endre, the Arrow Cross undersecretary of state in the Ministry of the Interior, held a soiree in honor of Eichmann. In three weeks, Eichmann had sent 50,000 Jews out of the country. That left just 175,000 in Budapest. They could be quickly liquidated by December. 27 There was plenty to celebrate.
Eichmann enjoyed the party. “I was so happy to be in the company of prominent Hungarian government members,” he said later. “Winkelmann congratulated me on the ‘elegant performance’ [of the march]. So did Veesenmayer. So did Endre. We even toasted it, and for the first time in my life I dr
ank mare’s milk alcohol [brandy and milk].”28
But the performance was about to end. Just days later, the Arrow Cross premier, Szalasi, under intensifying pressure from Wallenberg and his fellow diplomats, halted his government’s participation in the marches. The forty-year-old Edmund Veesenmayer, the most senior Nazi official in Hungary, cabled RSHA offices in Berlin: “Szalasi’s edict is practically equivalent to canceling deportation.”29
There was another reason why the death marches could not continue: The SS in Austria were reportedly unable to cope with the large numbers of Jews arriving every day. And they could not put the starved human wrecks that reached them to work because many were too weak even to lift a shovel.30
THERE WAS CHAOS AND CONFUSION. The partisans now operating in the forests near Sarvar had become more and more daring, perhaps buoyed by the rapid Soviet advance across the central plains of Hungary. This time, they managed to damage the camp’s gates, and some prisoners, including the Hermans, seized their chance and escaped. Most were recaptured, but the Hermans were by now expert at fleeing the Nazis, and somehow had the strength to get clear of the camp.31
So began a painstaking journey across the mostly flat, deforested countryside, toward Budapest. Finally, after three weeks, they got to the city and found friends who would harbor them.32 They discovered that the name ‘Raoul Wallenberg’ was on everyone’s lips. His actions after October 15 had become widely known, and his success, according to one of his workers, Janos Beer, had created a “positive feedback.” His example became a powerful tonic and spur to others—Jews, his aides, and fellow diplomats alike.
