by Alex Kershaw
While Verdi’s Aida played to packed audiences at the grand Opera House in the heart of the city, grotesque characters roamed from the rubble-strewn streets, where posters warned that anyone caught helping Jews would be shot on the spot, to the fetid courtyards, where horse carcasses lay rotting, to the Danube embankments, where hundreds of Jews were slaughtered at dawn, their bodies dumped into the river to be washed away into oblivion. Each day now, between fifty and sixty bodies of Jews who had been shot through the base of the skull—executionstyle—were brought to a central hospital.14 One twenty-three-year-old Hungarian woman, Wilmos Salzer, had a penchant for burning naked Jewish women with candles. Another Hungarian sociopath, Kurt Rettman, delighted in shooting Jews on sight. “It’s a pity to go through all the bother of deportations and closing the Jews into ghettos,” Rettman had said in November. “If we just shoot every Jew, the problem is solved.”15
Perhaps the most notorious figure was Father Andreas Kun, a Minorite monk who wore a black cassock and carried a giant crucifix and snub-nosed revolver. By his own admission, Kun personally killed more than five hundred Jews that winter. He would also order his mostly teenaged followers to line up Jews on the banks of the Danube, and then, as they took aim, he would cry out: “In the holy name of Jesus, fire!”
All that the Jews who Wallenberg had saved could do was hope and pray. At his main office in Ulloi Street, almost two hundred protected Jews waited for the Russians, desperately willing them to arrive before the Arrow Cross decided to raid the protected building and kill them all. Among those living in the cramped conditions, squeezing into the basement shelter each night, were Marianne Lowy and her husband, Pista; Janos Beer and several of his fellow Schutzling Protokoll volunteers; and Erwin Koranyi’s sister, Marta.
The question on everyone’s mind on Christmas Day of 1944 was not if but when the Arrow Cross would try to break into safe houses. On Christmas Eve, Arrow Cross gunmen had entered a Red Cross children’s home and shot children, some of them toddlers, in an act of unimaginable cruelty that stunned even Wallenberg and his fellow rescuers. Christmas had only made the Arrow Cross more determined, it appeared, to murder the surviving Jews in Budapest who were most vulnerable.
Twenty-year-old Janos Beer was heartened to see that the German Wehrmacht still respected Swedish neutrality, but he was under no such illusions about the Arrow Cross. “A German Wehrmacht unit came to Ulloi Street and put a machine gun on the balcony,” he recalled. “They were told that this was a Swedish Embassy, and they took the machine gun down and walked out. Very soon, several of them were found dead. But it still showed that some Germans would honor international law.”16 The Germans knew that there had to be some rules or chaos and anarchy would make the defense of Budapest all the harder. But the Arrow Cross didn’t appear to care.
At 1 Jokai Street, where Erwin and Alice Koranyi had taken sanctuary, the fear was the same: that drunken gangs of teenage killers would force their way into the building and begin firing. The street fighting outside was now so intense that only those who craved nicotine ventured out of the fetid basement, where smoking was not allowed. “The Russians closed the ring around Budapest on Christmas Day,” recalled Erwin. “We could hear the sound of artillery, a constant rumbling. Then came an attempt at a truce. The Russians sent four men with a white flag, asking for the German surrender [the terms were excellent]. There was no point carrying on the killing. The answer from the Arrow Cross and the SS was to shoot all four of them. Not long after, there was total silence, not one shot was fired. The elite troops were withdrawn, and the Russians sent in their garbage. It came from a huge criminal jail. Murderers, thieves—they volunteered for frontline duty. The deal was that they would be in the front line until the end of the war, but whoever survived would be a free man.”
The hellish noise of war began again. “There was an enormous shelling and then airplanes strafed the streets at low level, dropping stick bombs chained together.” Now the fighting was not house to house but room to room, with Germans on one floor, Russians on another, and so on through building after building. It could take two days to clear a house.
Movement around Pest was extremely dangerous, especially for Jews, even if they had valid papers. The Arrow Cross no longer accepted any form of identification papers, maintaining that they were all forged, and had come up with a brutally simple method of checking to see if young men like Erwin were Jews.
“Pull down your zipper and show your cock,” they ordered.
If a man or boy was circumcised, recalled Erwin, “that was it . . . brrrrppppp . . . You were finished right there and then, no questions asked.”17
14
The Inferno
THE RIVER FLOWED, gray and imperious, through the increasingly shell-shattered city that Europeans had once called the Queen of the Danube. Along the banks of the Danube, ice formed, bloodstained in places from the Jews who had been shot and thrown into the river.
On January 6, 1945, from the top of Castle Hill in Buda, photographer Tom Veres and Wallenberg watched the Soviet artillery fire light up the horizon above the Danube. With them were three heavily armed Budapest policemen, who had been assigned to them for their protection.
“How long do you think it will be now?” asked Wallenberg.
Veres wasn’t sure, but he knew it could be a matter of only days, not weeks, before the Soviets arrived. He would later remember that Wallenberg looked exhausted, his face pale and haggard. He was sleeping very little.
Mortars and shrapnel fell close by. They decided to return to their car in case they were caught in the open. Langfelder pulled away. In the backseat, Wallenberg sat beside Veres, squeezed between the policemen, whose guns poked out the window.
“This reminds me of the time I was kidnapped by bandits in the States,” Wallenberg told Veres. “I had been hitchhiking from Chicago back to school in Ann Arbor, and these four guys picked me up, drove me into the forest, and pulled guns. They robbed me of about fifteen dollars.”
Wallenberg smiled.
“Although my life was in less danger then,” he added.1
A few days later, Veres was called to the phone at the Swedish Legation offices on Ulloi Street. A man who managed the Gerbeau Palace, the apartment building where Veres’s parents lived, was on the line. He told Veres that his parents had been seized by the Arrow Cross. Veres begged the man to tell him precisely what had happened to his parents, but the man could not. Thankfully, Veres knew where Wallenberg was now in hiding—in a vault at the Hazai Bank in Pest. It took him two days to cross Pest, through the ruined streets, and get to the bank on Harmincad Street, where he found Wallenberg.
Wallenberg sympathized but said there was nothing he could now do. It was too late. It would be six months before Veres discovered what had happened to his parents. Like thousands of others that winter, they had been shot and their bodies dumped into the swirling Danube.2 Veres himself would survive that winter and eventually establish himself as a successful commercial photographer in New York after the war.
Fighting back his dismay at the slaughter of more and more of the Jews he had saved and protected, Wallenberg continued to work tirelessly in the first days of 1945, snatching only a few hours’ sleep each night, rolled up in his sleeping bag on the floor of a bank vault, in a basement of some protected house, or in some other hideaway that only Langfelder and Wallenberg’s closest aides knew about.
Knowing that many Arrow Cross commanders had fled Budapest along with Eichmann, Wallenberg reportedly ventured one morning into the Arrow Cross headquarters in Budapest’s central town hall. He took a translator, Laszlo Hajmal, with him, having learned that the remaining Arrow Cross members had seized Dr. Peter Sugar, one of his most effective aides in Section C. Langfelder drove Wallenberg and Hajmal to the building, where Wallenberg came across Gyula Sedey, the city’s chief of police, taking refuge in the hall’s air-raid shelter.
Wallenberg took the opportunity to confront Chief Constable Sedey about t
he lack of food supplies to the Jews in the central ghetto, where acute starvation was now widespread.3
Sedey had recently declared that the Jews there were to receive rations of just nine hundred calories a day. And even this small amount was usually stolen by the Arrow Cross.
Wallenberg angrily accused Sedey of sentencing to death the Jews of the central ghetto. They had barely enough food to last a day. If Sedey refused to supply them, they would die. According to Hajmal, who took notes as Wallenberg spoke, Sedey tried to defend his actions, saying he was unable “to allocate more food to any of Budapest’s inhabitants.”
“The other people in Budapest are not in the same position as the Jews!” shouted Wallenberg. “You have a special obligation to the Jews because you’ve imprisoned them in a ghetto. Jailors have a moral responsibility to feed their prisoners. I demand that you tell me now exactly how you propose to supply food to the ghetto.”
Sedey was taken aback. He apparently stuttered an incomprehensible answer. Wallenberg had Sedey on the defensive, so he pushed one of Sedey’s aides out of a chair and began to type an order on Sedey’s official stationery. He then read out what he had typed to Sedey. It was an order from Sedey commanding the rationing board to provide adequate food to the ghetto. If anyone died of starvation in the ghetto, the rationing board would be to blame. Wallenberg ordered Sedey to sign it and then grabbed the paper.
“As soon as I leave here, I plan to go to Arrow Cross military headquarters at Varoshaz Street to inquire about [Sugar]. If I don’t return here afterward, you’ll know that they’ve taken me prisoner as well.”4
“But how could you possibly think that they’d harm you, a neutral diplomat?”
“Arrow Cross men struck [Carl Lutz,] the Swiss charge d’affaires,” replied Wallenberg. “Now you know where I’m going, and if I don’t return, my government will hold you responsible.”5
Wallenberg soon arrived at the Varoshaz Street headquarters. Arrow Cross guards stopped him. He showed his papers but they were not impressed. “You’ll have to show us a written authorization from [Imre] Nidosi [the Arrow Cross commandant] if you want to leave the building alive,” he was warned. Wallenberg and Hajmal headed to the basement anyway. They heard screams. Arrow Cross teenagers were torturing Jews in nearby cellars. The torture had started in the building’s laundry, but its drain had become blocked with clotted blood.6
Wallenberg searched in vain for Nidosi and then quickly left with Hajmal, fearing that they would be killed if they stayed any longer in the bloodstained basement, where the continuous torture, rape, and disfigurement were harrowing evidence of the limits of his power to intervene.
Wallenberg had not found Sugar, and he felt the failure acutely.
“Everything was in vain,” he reportedly told Hajmal. “I’ve failed, and I’m afraid we’ll never see him again.”7
Wallenberg was right. Sugar was one of several of Wallenberg’s aides who would be seized in the coming weeks by the Arrow Cross and, in all likelihood, tortured in the Varoshaz cellars and then murdered, their corpses thrown into the Danube so they would disappear without a trace.
There was no need for crematoria in Budapest.
“YOU SHOULD DISAPPEAR AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.”
This was the unequivocal warning given by Arrow Cross official Pal Szalai to Wallenberg on January 7, 1945. In recent weeks, Szalai had become an important source of information for Wallenberg. The Arrow Cross’s liaison with the city police, Szalai now met with Wallenberg almost daily to provide warnings and briefings on what the Arrow Cross planned next. Uniquely, it seemed, he was no anti-Semite and had become disillusioned with the Arrow Cross leaders, most of whom had fled Budapest and set up camp far from the Soviets’ guns.
“The Arrow Cross leaders who might have kept order have fled or gone underground,” explained Szalai. “The worst elements have taken over, and Vajna is under their influence. They’ve also taken over the Foreign Ministry. If you go there to make diplomatic protests, you may never come out alive. You can also anticipate that the Arrow Cross will now attack individual members of the Swedish Legation; they’ll send even more violent search parties to the Swedish houses.”8
Wallenberg’s greatest fear now was not for his own safety but that his work could be undone overnight in some savage pogrom. The Germans might repeat what they had done in Warsaw, destroying the ghetto and tens of thousands of lives. When Wallenberg learned from Szalai that this indeed seemed imminent, he acted quickly, making sure the Germans knew exactly what would happen if they attempted such an atrocity.
Pal Szalai later claimed, while on trial for his life, that he passed on a note from Wallenberg to German General August Schmidhuber, now in command of German forces in Budapest. The note promised that Schmidhuber would be held personally responsible for any massacre and hanged as a war criminal when the war was over.
Szalai gave the following testimony at a postwar trial of Arrow Cross murderers:Two days before the liberation of the ghetto, late one afternoon, a police officer came hurrying into my office in the town hall and told me that five hundred German soldiers and twenty-five Arrow Cross men had assembled in the Hotel Royal building. Together with another two hundred policemen, they intended to commit mass murder of all the inhabitants [of the ghetto] with machine guns that night . . . At the town hall air-raid shelter there was an SS general, commander of the Feldherrnhalle division. His name was Schmidhuber. I immediately asked for an audience with him. I warned him: “According to Wallenberg’s statement, unless he prevents this vile act, he will be held responsible and will be held accountable not as a soldier but as a murderer.”9
Wallenberg’s warning may have influenced Schmidhuber’s decision to forbid the liquidation of the ghetto. In Szalai’s case, his cooperation with Wallenberg undoubtedly saved his neck: He was the only Arrow Cross senior official who was set free, in 1946, in recognition of his work with Wallenberg. His fascist colleagues were hanged in public before massive crowds.
THE JEWISH CENTRAL HOSPITAL, where Erwin and Alice Koranyi worked, was by January 7 overflowing with the sick, dying, and severely wounded, some of whom had been shot and then miraculously fished out of the Danube by Wallenberg’s volunteers. The fact that some Jews survived the shootings along the Danube irked the Arrow Cross, one of whose officers remarked: “The trouble is not that this was done but that some were left alive, because so long as they aren’t completely exterminated, they’ll all turn into vindictive swine.”10
In the maternity ward of one hospital, motherless babies began to starve to death. According to one account: “In despair, the nurses clutched the babies to their breasts so they might enjoy the comfort of a warm human body before fading away. After a while, the nurses found themselves producing milk, and the babies were saved from starving to death.”11
The streets were now strewn with stiff corpses, turning Pest into a veritable charnel house. So many dead Jews were dumped on benches in the once beautiful Varosliget Park that it took several days to remove them.12 All the morgues in the city were full, so hundreds of bodies were soon stacked up like cordwood in the courtyard of the Central Synagogue. 13
ERWIN KORANYI NOW SLEPT EACH NIGHT facing the door so that he could respond more quickly if the Arrow Cross stormed the protected building where he and Alice were now living, at 1 Jokai Street. It was in the early hours of Friday, January 7, when they were both suddenly woken by shouting and the sound of gunshots. An Arrow Cross gang was threatening to throw a hand grenade at the closed front door of No. 1 Jokai Street. A terrified man opened the door, and the thugs ran into the building. Within minutes, they disarmed the police, who had been ordered to defend the building in case of just such an attack. The Arrow Cross then ordered everyone into a courtyard “within three minutes.” They shot a few people who could not move fast enough, including a man in a wheelchair. Then they began a systematic search of the building.14
Erwin’s sister and mother were able to sneak away and hide in a cabinet
in an office. There they prayed in the darkness. Erwin was still in a fourth-floor apartment with Alice, desperately looking for some hiding place, when the Arrow Cross began to clear the building floor by floor, shooting anyone they found. He and Alice crawled out a bathroom window that led to an outside light shaft. A thin metal crossbar served as their only foothold above a hundred-foot drop.
Erwin would vividly recall, with the precision of a doctor, what happened next, during perhaps the most intense hours of an extraordinarily dramatic life: “We heard yelling and occasional revolver shots. Our hands were numb from the strain and the January cold as we clung to the edge of the windowsill with white knuckles. Our hands froze, but sweat was running down our backs and our mouths were parched. We could hear each other’s heartbeats in that undertow of anxiety. Who was the one just killed? . . . The palpitation became the marker of time.”15
The hours crawled by, as if time had slowed down just to taunt them. Still they clung to life. Erwin needed to wipe his nose but could not. His muscles ached, sinews stretched taut. They tried not to think of the dark drop below them. “Good that I used to be a gymnast,” Erwin told himself. But he had only so much strength, and he had to give more and more of it to support Alice. Small pieces of cement began to crumble from the edge of the metal foothold, plunging down. How much longer could it hold? Then Erwin realized that the Arrow Cross had departed—the building was silent.
Alice and Erwin crawled back inside the protected house. To their amazement and profound relief, they found Erwin’s father, who had been hiding in a folded bed. Then they discovered Erwin’s mother and his sister, Marta.16 In all, 20 people had succeeded in hiding in the building. The rest, a total of 266, had been taken away. Most would be killed. “Marta’s fiancée was among those seized,” recalled Erwin. “He was taken to the Danube to be shot. But at the last minute, one of the Arrow Cross asked for strong men to chop wood. One of the strong men chosen was Marta’s fiancée.”17 Instead of chopping wood, he was told to pick up the dead Jewish bodies all around him and throw them into the Danube. But at least he had been spared.
