The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II
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Marianne Lowy recalled how fortunate she was not to be gang-raped as so many of her peers were. A fellow Jewish survivor from the Ukraine had warned her that the liberating Russian soldiers would rape every woman, but if Marianne said she was klapetz—pregnant—she might be left alone.12 “Russian foot soldiers started to trample into our basement,” she remembered, “and everybody was lined up. I noticed that the Russians were just sorting out women and taking them into another room.”13
“You, come here!” a Soviet ordered Marianne.14
Marianne said she was klapetz and was passed over. She then slipped away to a nearby cubicle, where she hid under a cot for more than twenty-four hours until the Russians had finished raping the other women. Finally, she crept out of the basement and up steps until she was outside, able to at least breathe fresh air. “The streets were an incredible sight,” she recalled. “There were dead horses, probably from the cavalry, literally piled up on street corners. And people were tiptoeing out from corners and basements, sneaking up to the dead horses, cutting off hunks of horsemeat to feed themselves.”15 More than thirty thousand horses had been left behind in the city during the siege and killed. Without their meat, thousands would no doubt have starved to death.
Marianne made her way through the shattered streets of Pest toward her childhood home, hoping her relatives might do the same, if any had survived. She finally reached the elegant apartment building where she had grown up. Her parents were there. After an intensely emotional reunion, when things had calmed down a little, Marianne noticed that an oil painting of her, aged six, still hung on a wall. “All around the frame were bullet holes—soldiers had taken aim at it,” she recalled. “I had been their bull’s-eye but, amazingly, the painting had not been touched. All their bullets had missed. To me, it would always symbolize survival.”16
WOMEN EVERYWHERE IN LIBERATED PEST now lived in terror of the Russians. Vera Herman would later recall that a teenage girl in her own cellar was killed shortly after their liberation. “The Russian youth who did it was drunk. I don’t know how he killed her, but he killed her.”17 Thankfully, Vera’s father, Emil, was clever enough to make sure his wife and daughter, after enduring so much, did not now join the tens of thousands of women who became victims of Soviet soldiers’ sexual aggression—an estimated ten percent of all females in Budapest, aged as young as ten and as old as ninety, some of whom were raped more than twenty times. “My father found some jelly and he smeared me and my mother with it,” Vera remembered, “and then he found some bandages and bandaged us. The Russians—even when drunk—could be warm and sympathetic by nature. They looked at me and my mother and said ‘balnia, balnia’—she’s sick, she’s sick. So they left us alone, stayed away.”18
Vera’s father Emil was the only Slav in the cellar. All the other survivors were Hungarians. When the Russians asked for someone to interpret for them, Emil decided to volunteer, but after just a day working with the new masters of Eastern Europe, he had had enough.
“We have to get out of here,” Emil told Vera and Margit.19 “I did not survive this hell to become a Russian undercover agent.”20
EMIL HAD SEEN what the Russians were doing—rounding up civilians and sending them to holding prisons; the NKVD picked up off the street many ordinary Hungarians, even postmen, simply because they were wearing a uniform. General Malinovsky had reported erroneously that he had taken some 110,000 prisoners and therefore now ordered that at least 50,000 men be seized so that he could deliver the correct number.21
Emil Herman was right to be wary of the green-uniformed NKVD, who had now replaced the Arrow Cross and Gestapo as agents of repression and terror in Hungary. It is estimated that only a third of those arrested would survive the Soviet gulags, where as many as 2.3 million people languished in 1945.22
Erwin Koranyi was lucky to escape the dragnet. “I was ‘officially invited’ to visit the northern Soviet Union twice but I declined,” he recalled with bittersweet humor. “The Russians declared the number of German POWs to the Red Cross, but then they killed them, so they decided they needed to get the numbers back up. They didn’t care who it was—they picked up people on street corners: postmen, bus conductors, anyone in a uniform.”
Erwin was seized on a street one day along with a score of other men. “They gathered us in an inner courtyard,” he remembered. “They brought more and more people in. I saw one man go over to a guard and give him a bottle of some kind of alcohol. The guard told him he could leave, and then I saw the guard hide the bottle among some rubble. When he turned his back, I stole it. A while later, I offered him the bottle and he took it, let me go, and then I ran for my life.”23
But it wasn’t long before Erwin was again caught out on the streets and herded with hundreds of others to the central railway station, from where he was certain he would be shipped to Siberia. He had escaped deportation to Auschwitz during the Holocaust thanks to Raoul Wallenberg, but now there was no one to rescue him. “I felt really hopeless. We were about to be taken away. Then I saw a Russian officer. The Russian had curly hair and looked like a Jew.”
Erwin approached the officer.
“Do you speak Yiddish?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The officer realized that he was talking to a fellow Jew and allowed Erwin to leave the station.
Erwin was fortunate indeed. An estimated seventy-five thousand of his fellow Hungarian civilians would be arrested, sent to camps in Hungary and then to the wilds of the vast Soviet gulag archipelago. Hundreds were Jews who had survived Eichmann’s attempts to kill them only to perish in a Soviet death camp. Added to these innocents were the hundreds of thousands of already captured Hungarian troops. The reasons for arrest were usually not given and were sometimes simply ridiculous: one sixteen-year-old, George Bien, was picked up with his father because he owned a radio.24
ALTHOUGH MOST OF PEST had now been liberated, it felt no safer to survivors—especially the women—than when the Nazis and Arrow Cross had controlled the city. Bishop Jozef Grosz would later describe conditions as “hell on earth. Women, from girls of twelve to mothers in the ninth month of pregnancy, raped; most men deported; every home looted; the city and its churches in ruins; in the restaurants and stores, horses; in the streets, cemeteries . . . thousands of unburied bodies . . . This is how things must have been in Jerusalem when the prophet Jeremiah uttered his laments.”25
Everyone who could leave what was, after all, still a war zone now tried to do so. When Vera Herman and her parents were sure that the Germans were not going to counterattack and retake the area of Pest where they had hidden, they started walking toward the countryside, away from the bullet-riddled, Russian-patrolled streets of the destroyed city. They did so despite fierce fighting and terrible weather. “It was snowing and hailing,” recalled Vera. “The bullets were flying all around us. But we kept on going.”26
They were headed toward the past, back to Czechoslovakia, which they had fled in 1939, almost six years before.
ERWIN AND ALICE KORANYI STAYED in Budapest for a week after their liberation and then decided, like the Hermans, to leave the city, where fighting had only intensified as the Soviets finally reached the Danube; the siege, ever bloodier, would continue for another month as the Germans fought to the bitter end in Buda.
In all, 80,026 Soviet soldiers died to take Budapest—one in two of all those who fought in Hungary. In the defense of the city, 48,000 Hungarian and German soldiers also lost their lives.27 Less than 1,000 German troops managed to break out of the besieged city and reach their own lines, but at enormous cost—an estimated 17,000 German troops were massacred as they tried to escape by forewarned Soviets. “The escape routes showed an apocalyptic picture,” Hungarian military historian Christian Ungvary has written, “with mountains of bodies, human remains carved by Soviet tanks, and paving stones covered in blood and pieces of flesh. Bodies were piled up in pyres several meters high.”28
To escape such hellish scenes, Erwin and Al
ice walked through the bitter winter weather toward the town of Szeged, a hundred miles to the south, to a medical school they had attended before the Nazis had occupied Hungary. They were both determined to return to their studies so they could become qualified doctors.29 Erwin would later recall that it was around this time that they heard that Wallenberg had been killed, shot by the Germans just before the Soviets arrived. Then Erwin heard another rumor—the Soviets had arrested Wallenberg.
Alice and Erwin kept walking, along the iced roads and through snow-storms. They passed many Russian soldiers along the road to Szeged, but Alice was not molested.
“Thankfully, nobody wanted me,” she recalled.30
“Righteous Gentile”—Raoul Wallenberg at work in Budapest, 1944. (Thomas Veres; courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
The Envoy—Wallenberg’s passport photograph, June 1944.
Adolf Eichmann—Architect of the Final Solution, in uniform (left); and receiving justice on trial in Israel, 1961. (Courtesy Israeli Security Agency)
Eichmann’s victims—Some of Budapest’s last surviving Jews being rounded up in October 1944 after the Arrow Cross had come to power. (Bundesarchiv)
Eichmann’s villa in Buda, as seen in this photograph taken in November 2008. The terrace overlooked the international ghetto in Pest. (John Snowdon)
View of Budapest from Eichmann’s villa in Buda. (Author photo)
Hitler’s envoy to Hungary, SS diplomat Edward Veensenmayer, served only two years of a twenty-year sentence for his direct involvement in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Eichmann’s aides—SS captain Dieter Wisliceny (below left), hanged in 1948 for his role in the Final Solution; and the man who pointed a pistol at Wallenberg, SS captain Theodor Dannecker (below right), arguably Eichmann’s most ruthless aide. He later committed suicide in American custody in 1945.
Jewish women being herded through the streets of Budapest, October 1944. Many would soon be sent on death marches to Austria. (Bundesarchiv)
The infamous selection process, often presided over by Dr. Josef Mengele, at Auschwitz. Over 450,000 Hungarian Jews were killed at the death camp in just six weeks during the summer of 1944. (National Archives)
Jewish women and children from a Hungarian transport just arrived at Auschwitz. (Yad Vashem)
Prison laborers in the quarry at Mauthausen, the camp in Austria where Eichmann gathered his men before setting up his final operation in Hungary. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Some of the many thousands of Jews killed by the fascist Arrow Cross along the banks of the Danube during the winter of 1944-45.
Some of the hundreds of Jewish corpses dumped by the Arrow Cross near Budapest’s Dohanyi Street synagogue.
Wallenberg’s close friend and colleague, diplomat Per Anger, on the roof terrace of the Swedish legation in Budapest. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Carl Lutz, the formidable Swiss diplomat who worked closely with Wallenberg and himself saved tens of thousands of lives. (Swiss Archives of Contemporary History)
Wallenberg meets with some of his 400-odd staff in Section C of the Swedish Embassy. (Thomas Veres; courtesy of U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Schutzpass issued by Wallenberg, July 1944. Wallenberg would issue thousands of these protective passes. (Courtesy Erwin Koranyi)
Some say he saved over 100,000 lives—Raoul Wallenberg at his desk, in Section C, 1944. (Thomas Veres; courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Wallenberg’s address book, seized by Soviets in 1945. Note the three contact numbers for Eichmann. (John Snowdon)
Wallenberg’s day-book, 1944. On Saturday, August 5, Wallenberg met with Erwin Koranyi at 4 pm. On Monday, August 7, at 10 am, he had a meeting to negotiate the release of five prisoners, including Erwin’s wife, Alice. (Courtesy Erwin Koranyi)
A famous photograph, taken secretly, by Thomas Veres. Wallenberg negotiates with Arrow Cross officials for the release of Jewish forced laborers in Budapest in November 1944. Wallenberg has his hands clasped behind his back. (Thomas Veres; courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Jewish forced laborers saved by Wallenberg, November 1944, Budapest. (Thomas Veres; courtesy U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Alice Breuer, aged 18, April 1944, just after the Nazis occupied Budapest. (Courtesy Erwin Koranyi)
One of 100,000—Holocaust survivor Alice Breuer, rescued twice by Wallenberg, seated in her home in July 2009, Stockholm. (John Snowdon)
Alice Breuer and Erwin Koranyi graduate with medical degrees, Innsbruck, 1950. Both have since enjoyed long and distinguished medical careers. (Courtesy Erwin Koranyi)
Erwin Koranyi, Alice Breuer’s first husband, at his home in Ottawa, February 2010. (Tony Eprile)
Aspiring actress and dancer Marianne Lowy practices her pirouette in her Budapest home. (Courtesy Marianne Lowy)
Marianne Lowy, aged 14, in Budapest. (Courtesy Marianne Lowy)
Susan Tabor, saved by Raoul Wallenberg during the death marches of November 1944. (Author collection)
Alive because of a young Swede—Margit Herman, mother of Vera Herman, in New Jersey after her family had settled in the United States. (Courtesy Vera Goodkin)
Vera Herman was Margit’s only child. (Courtesy Vera Goodkin)
Raoul Wallenberg’s parents, Fredrik and Maj von Dardel, in Stockholm in the 1970s after having searched for their son for over three decades. (Courtesy Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren)
The siblings—Wallenberg’s half-brother and half-sister, Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren, continued the quest for their long lost brother after their parents’ deaths. (Courtesy Guy von Dardel and Nina Lagergren)
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The Fall
BERLIN HAD CHANGED since Eichmann had last worked there. It was now a fast-spreading ruin, bombed day and night by the Allies. Jittery Berliners who could still manage moments of gallows humor joked about learning Russian. Amid the fields of rubble, posters warned: “Looters will be punished with death.” The entire population, it seemed, had taken to shelters. News on all fronts was grim. Hardly anyone now believed Goebbels’s increasingly surreal propaganda.
Only die-hard Nazis such as Eichmann and some of his men placed any hope in Hitler’s miracle weapons arriving in time to prevent total Gottedammerung. Theodor Dannecker, who had threatened to kill Wallenberg, was as fervent a Nazi as ever, and now blamed the German Volk—people—for failing to stop the Red Army’s advance. “I believe in the eternal Germany and the higher mission of our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler,” he blustered, echoing the beliefs of Eichmann and others who still refused to accept that their world was falling apart.1 Dannecker would commit suicide in an American prison camp in Bad Tolz before the year was out.2
That January of 1945, Eichmann met in Berlin with his Gestapo boss, forty-four-year-old Bavarian Heinrich Muller, still one of the most feared men in Nazi Germany.
Like many other SS officials, Eichmann had just been given a certificate stating that he had worked the last few years for a civilian firm, not as history’s most efficient “desk murderer.” Apparently, Eichmann was outraged by the attempt to whitewash his time with the RSHA and the years he had dedicated to implementing the Final Solution, and had requested a meeting with Muller to air his grievances.
Muller was a small man with thin lips and piercing eyes, utterly devoted to the Fuhrer.3
“Well, Eichmann, what’s the matter with you?” the Gestapo chief asked.
“General, I don’t need these papers.”
Eichmann reportedly patted a Steyr army pistol, holstered at his waist. “This is my certificate,” said Eichmann. “When I see no other way out, it will be my last remedy. I have no need for anything else.”4
After his meeting with Muller, Eichmann spoke in person with Heinrich Himmler, whom he found in an optimistic mood.
“We’ll get a treaty,” Himmler told him, slapping his thigh. “We’ll lose a few feathers, but it will be a good one.”
Eichmann
later recalled his last days in Berlin: “Serious work was out of the question. Uninterrupted air raids were creating greater and greater devastation. I spent more time looking around in the ruins than at my desk. I was only interested in . . . building a defense line that would cost the enemy as much blood as possible. That was all I thought about. I had the field of rubble around my office on Kurfursten Street transformed into a defense position, with streetcar tracks, tank traps, and nests of sharpshooters.”5
As the Soviets began to surround Berlin, Eichmann also met with forty-two-year-old SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, his chief in the RSHA. Kaltenbrunner was the embodiment of the perverted, Nazi brute: a hulking Austrian with small eyes set back in an inscrutable, scarred face that rarely showed any emotion other than anger. His nicotine-stained hands reminded one of his colleagues, the SS Intelligence Chief Walter Schellenberg, of a gorilla’s.6
Kaltenbrunner made it clear that he had little time for Eichmann. In fact, Eichmann’s fellow mass murderers in the Gestapo wanted nothing to do with him. He was now an “apocalyptic memento of their own sins.”7 “The department heads and Kaltenbrunner,” recalled Eichmann bitterly, “took to eating lunch every day in our building. I was never invited.”
In late March, Eichmann received an order to destroy all his files and records, including documents showing the origins of the Final Solution. “That took several days,” Eichmann remembered. “At about that time, I said to officers under me, who were sitting around dozing dejectedly, that in my opinion the war was definitely lost, and that I was looking forward to the battle for Berlin. If death didn’t come to me, I’d go looking for it.”