When the marchers reached the frontier, trains were waiting to take them to the camps. Miriam managed to slip away to a barn where hundreds of women claiming Swedish protection were being held.
‘I didn’t have a Swedish passport, but I thought it was worth a try and I had this tremendous will to survive, even though I was so weak from dysentery and wretched from the dirt and the lice that infested me, that all I could do was find a space on the floor and lie down. I don’t know how much later it was – maybe days – but suddenly I heard a great commotion among the women. “It’s Wallenberg,” they said. I didn’t know this name, but somebody told me he was a Swedish diplomat who had saved many Jews already. I didn’t think he could really help me, and anyway I was now too weak to move, so I lay there on the floor as dozens of women clustered around him crying “Save us, save us.” I remember being struck by how handsome he looked – and how clean – in his leather coat and fur hat, just like a being from another world, and I thought, Why does he bother with such wretched creatures as we? As the women clustered around him he said to them: “Please, you must forgive me, but I cannot help all of you. I can only provide certificates for a hundred of you.” Then he said something which really surprised me. He said: “I feel I have a mission to save the Jewish nation and so I must rescue the young ones first.” I had never heard of the idea of a Jewish nation before. Jewish people, of course, but not a Jewish nation. Later I was to think about this quite a lot. Anyway, he looked around the room and began putting names down on a list, and when he saw me lying on the floor he came over to me. He asked my name and added it to the list. After a day or two, the hundred of us whose names had been taken were moved out and put into a cattle truck on a train bound for Budapest. We were warned to keep quiet en route, because if we were discovered we might all be sent back to Auschwitz. I don’t know how Wallenberg managed it; I suppose he must have bribed the railway officials and guards. Because the railway lines had been bombed the journey back to Budapest took three days, instead of three or four hours, and we were in a terrible state when we arrived. There were a lot more dangers and hardships ahead of us, but we were alive – and it was thanks entirely to Wallenberg.’
Wallenberg, his colleague Per Anger, and others travelled tirelessly up and down the road between Budapest and Hegyeshalom during those terrible November days, taking vanloads of food, medicine, and warm clothing with them, Wallenberg clutching his ‘book of life’ listing the names of Jews to whom passports had been issued, and carrying fresh passports to be filled in and issued on the spot. This period is recalled in Per Anger’s memoirs, published in 1979 after his retirement as Sweden’s ambassador to Ottawa.
On one of the first days of December 1944, Wallenberg and I went for a drive along the road on which the Jews were being marched away. We passed these groups of unfortunate people, who were more dead than alive. Grey-faced they tottered while the soldiers were urging them along with their rifle butts. The road was edged with corpses. Our car was loaded with food, which we distributed in spite of the prohibition against doing so; but we did not have enough for everybody. At Hegyeshalom we saw how those who had arrived were handed over to a German SS command headed by Eichmann, who counted them one by one as if they had been cattle. ‘Four hundred and eighty-nine – right’ (‘Vierhundertneunundachtzig – stimmt, gut!’). The Hungarian officer was given a receipt stating that everything was in order.
Before this handing over, we succeeded in rescuing about a hundred Jews. Some of them had Swedish protection passports, others we got out by sheer bluff. Wallenberg did not give up and made repeated trips, during which he succeeded, again bringing a number of Jews back to Budapest.
With the co-operation of the International Red Cross, lorries for the distribution of food were organized. At Wallenberg’s initiative, controls were placed on the main roads leading out of Budapest and at the border station in order to prevent the deportation of Jews holding protection passports. It was estimated that in this way about 1500 Jews were rescued and brought back to Budapest.*
Zvi Eres, one of the founders of a now-flourishing kibbutz in southern Israel, remembers how as a fourteen-year-old he, his mother, an aunt, and a girl cousin were saved by Wallenberg.
‘As we approached Hegyeshalom at the end of the march, we saw two men standing by the side of the road. One of them, wearing a long leather coat and a fur hat, told us he was from the Swedish legation and asked if we had Swedish passports. If we hadn’t, he said, perhaps they had been taken away from us or torn up by the Arrow Cross men. We were on our last legs, but alert enough to take the hint and we said, yes, that was exactly what had happened, though in fact none of us had ever had a Swedish Schutzpass. He put our names down on a list and we walked on. At the station later we again saw Wallenberg and some of his assistants, among them – as I learned only later – some members of the Zionist youth movement, posing as Red Cross officials, and representatives of the papal nuncio. A group of Hungarian officers and Germans in SS uniforms were there, too. Wallenberg was brandishing his list, obviously demanding that everybody on it should be allowed to go. Voices were raised and they were shouting at each other in German. It was too far away for me to hear exactly what was being said, but clearly there was a tremendous argument going on. In the end, to our amazement, Wallenberg won his point and between 280 and 300 of us were allowed to go back to Budapest.’
Between dashing up and down the road to Hegyeshalom, Wallenberg found time for more conventional but equally essential kinds of diplomatic activity. On 16 November, as secretary of the Diplomatic Humanitarian Committee, he convened a meeting which agreed to send a stiff joint note to the Hungarian government, protesting at the ‘ruthless severity’ of the deportations and ‘the acts of inhumanity the whole world is witnessing.’ Szálasi rejected the protest. Jews who had been ‘loaned’ to the German government and were ‘fit to work’ would continue to be deported, he replied. Having drafted this answer for delivery through the Foreign Ministry, he scrawled petulantly at the bottom of the page, ‘I do not wish to discuss the subject with anyone again!’
In a report to Stockholm on the marches, Wallenberg had written: ‘The sights that we witnessed moved even some of the grim-visaged, bloodthirsty gendarmes. More than one remarked that he would prefer being in the firing line…We saw that in many places the corpses of people who had died or been murdered by the Arrow Cross men covered the roadside. Nobody had thought of burying them.’ Wallenberg had also received a confidential report from a senior Hungarian police officer saying that he estimated some ten thousand death marchers had already crossed the frontier, with another thirteen thousand en route. ‘In addition, ten thousand Jews have disappeared on the highway, some having escaped but most having died or been killed by their guards.’ At one point, the officer reported, he saw people hanging from trees and he ‘had the impression that these people had committed suicide.’
Those women, children, and old men who survived as far as Hegyeshalom were joined there by the younger men of the labour battalions. These men had been sent from Budapest at an earlier date to dig trenches in the path of the Soviet advance. Now they had been marched to the frontier by different routes to be handed over to the Germans for similar work. Diplomats from the Swiss legation who saw a group of two thousand of these labour battalion men reported: ‘They arrived at Hegyeshalom barefoot, half naked, in the worst state of demoralization imaginable. On the way they were not fed, but received many beatings. Many of them died of exhaustion en route.’ As for the women and children, the Swiss reported that ‘the endless ordeal of the marches, the almost complete lack of nourishment, the constant dread that in Germany they were to be taken to annihilation in the gas chambers, have brought about such a condition…that they no longer possess human shape and lack all human dignity.’
A group of observers from the International Red Cross reported on a night-stop by marchers aboard barges moored on the Danube. ‘Many of the people in this dreadful situation commit
ted suicide. Scream after scream pierced the night. People resigned to death threw themselves in the freezing waters of the Danube rather than endure further suffering.’ The IRC team mentioned that they had taken 4000 metres of film of conditions on the march on behalf of the papal nuncio.* ‘Every frame testifies to the terrible treatment that group of the capital’s Jewry suffered which, according to the Szálasi decree, were handed over to the Germans as “loan Jews” so that they should work for “Hungary’s welfare in exchange for war material.” ’ This phrase, said the Red Cross report, ‘only conceals the essence: the Szálasi régime simply handed over the Jews of the capital to be exterminated.’
With even the ultra-cautious IRC putting in reports like this, Himmler thought it time to find out exactly what his zealous subordinate Eichmann was up to. He sent SS General Hans Juettner on an inspection tour. Juettner expressed himself shocked. ‘I was told that Eichmann was responsible,’ he said later, ‘but since he was not in Budapest I spoke to an SS Sturmbannführer whose name I have forgotten [it was Theo Dannecker] and gave him a piece of my mind.’ At Hegyeshalom, Juettner met Dieter Wisliceny, who told him Eichmann had instructed him to pay no attention to illness, age, or protection passes: ‘The main thing is statistics; every arriving Jew must be mercilessly taken over.’
Himmler, now preparing the ground for his peace feelers to the Allies, summoned Eichmann to Berlin and told him the death marches must stop. ‘If up to now you have been busy liquidating Jews,’ he explained icily, ‘you will from now on, since I order it, take good care of them, like a nursemaid.’ When Eichmann protested that this was contrary to his understanding of the Führer’s wishes, and that Gestapo chief Müller had approved of the marches, Himmler snapped back, ‘I remind you that it was I – and neither Gruppenführer Müller nor you – who founded the RSHA. I’m the one who gives orders here!’ Eichmann backed down and Himmler dismissed him. By way of consolation prize, Himmler later awarded Eichmann another decoration, his second in two months, the Cross of War Merits, First Class, with Swords.
Years later, in Argentina, Eichmann was to reminisce with pride on how he had conceived and executed the death marches; faced with a lack of road or rail transport, a lesser man might have called off the deportation programme. In an obvious reference to his run-in with Himmler, he conceded, ‘There were, of course, difficulties on all sides…But Winkelmann [the Nazi police chief in Budapest] congratulated me on the elegant performance. So did Veesenmayer. So did Endre. We even had a drink on it. For the first time in my life I drank mare’s milk alcohol.’
At the beginning of December 1944 Wallenberg reported to Stockholm in a matter-of-fact way that during the death marches ‘it was possible to rescue some two thousand persons from deportation through intervention for some reason or another.’ He added, almost as a throwaway, that the Swedish mission had also secured the return of fifteen thousand labour service men holding Swedish and other protective passes.
Chapter 8
As the advance guard of Soviet Field Marshal Rodion Malinovsky’s army battered its way into the eastern and southern outer suburbs of Budapest against stern Nazi resistance, conditions for the capital’s inhabitants became desperate. Day and night, in turn, the heavy bombers of the American and British air forces pounded the city; right around the clock, the field artillery of the Red Army contributed to the destruction.
Rations were drastically reduced. Household fuel became virtually unobtainable. Epidemics spread and hospitals were critically over-crowded with the sick and wounded. Municipal services scarcely functioned. Along the road west to Hegyeshalom the pathetic columns of women, children, and the aged again made their painful way. This time, though, they were not driven on by the blows, curses, and shots of the gendarmerie; this time, for those who survived the march, no gas chambers and crematorium ovens were waiting. This time the marchers were not Jewish deportees but Gentile refugees.
The Jews were trapped in the city, and though life there was a nightmare for everyone, no section of the population suffered as they did. They had now been herded into two ghettos. There were 35,000 Jews – all holders of foreign passes – in the International Ghetto consisting of Swedish, Swiss, and Red Cross ‘protected’ houses, and about 70,000 unprotected Jews crammed into the enclosed General Ghetto. The overcrowding in both ghettos was appalling, with people fighting for living space on staircases, in cupboards, and on window ledges.
In a general atmosphere of anarchy and lawlessness, bands of Arrow Cross gunmen – some of them delinquents of fifteen and sixteen – roamed the city, looting Jewish property, violating Jewish women, and dragging Jewish men off to be tortured and killed. Protective passes were often no real protection for Jews caught out in the streets by the Arrow Cross, but in a surprising number of cases the ‘Wallenberg passes’ retained their power to impress. Joni Moser, a member of the Jewish underground in Budapest, recalled some twenty years later how ‘the protective passports issued by the Swedes looked like normal passports, with a seal, name, photo, and signature. They were therefore respected. The Swiss passports were of a general nature, without name and signature of the responsible person in the legation. They were rarely effective.’
Wallenberg himself was to report to Stockholm on 8 December: ‘Up to now Jews in possession of Swedish safe-conducts have been treated leniently in comparison with those enjoying the protection of other neutral powers. As far as can be ascertained, only ten Jews with Swedish safe-conducts have up to now been shot in and around Budapest.’ In the same report Wallenberg also recorded that ‘thousands of Jews with Swiss and Vatican passports are removed daily from the [International] Ghetto and transferred to the General Ghetto or deported.’
The role Wallenberg played is movingly revealed in the account of Tommy Lapid, subsequently director-general of the Israeli Broadcasting Authority in Jerusalem. In 1944 he was thirteen years old and one of nine hundred people crowded fifteen or twenty to a room in a Swedish-protected house.
‘We were hungry, thirsty, and frightened all the time and we were more afraid of the Arrow Cross than of the British, American, and Russian bombardments put together. Those people had guns and they thought the least they could do for the war effort was to kill a few Jews before the Russians got there, so they were entering these houses, which were undefended, and carrying people away. We were very close to the Danube and we heard them shooting people into the river all night.
‘I sometimes think that the greatest achievement of the Nazis was that we just accepted the fact that we were destined to be killed. My father was in Mauthausen concentration camp and perished there. I, an only child, stayed with my mother. I kept asking her for bread. I was so hungry. (Years later, if there was no bread in the house, she would get out of bed at night and go down to a café and ask for two slices of bread – although then a very well-to-do lady in Tel Aviv, she had to have some bread in the house because of those days when she couldn’t supply me with any.)
‘One morning, a group of these Hungarian Fascists came into the house and said all the able-bodied women must go with them. We knew what this meant. My mother kissed me and I cried and she cried. We knew we were parting for ever and she left me there, an orphan to all intents and purposes. Then, two or three hours later, to my amazement, my mother returned with the other women. It seemed like a mirage, a miracle. My mother was there – she was alive and she was hugging me and kissing me, and she said one word: “Wallenberg.”
‘I knew who she meant because Wallenberg was a legend among the Jews. In the complete and total hell in which we lived, there was a saviour-angel somewhere, moving around. After she had composed herself, my mother told me that they were being taken to the river when a car arrived and out stepped Wallenberg – and they knew immediately who it was, because there was only one such person in the world. He went up to the Arrow Cross leader and protested that the women were under his protection. They argued with him, but he must have had incredible charisma, some great personal authority, be
cause there was absolutely nothing behind him, nothing to back him up. He stood out there in the street, probably feeling the loneliest man in the world, trying to pretend there was something behind him. They could have shot him there and then in the street and nobody would have known about it. Instead, they relented and let the women go.’
Time and again, as in the testimony of Joni Moser, Wallenberg’s extraordinary personal authority and lonely courage comes through.
‘I was Wallenberg’s errand boy. As I spoke German as well as Hungarian I could pass through barriers and therefore was well equipped to be a messenger. I had been served with a deportation order by the Germans but had escaped, and I used to show the deportation order, embellished with the swastika, to young Arrow Cross men who could not read German. They only saw the swastika and let me pass. I always took care to avoid the Germans but they caught me once, and it was almost the end for me. But just then Wallenberg happened to come by in his grand diplomatic car. He stopped and asked me to step forward for questioning. “Jump in, quick,” he said – and before the astonished soldiers realized what had happened we were gone. Wallenberg was fantastic! His conduct, his power of organization, his speed in decision and action! What a strategist! Wallenberg was the initiator of the whole rescue action, remember that.’
Moser recalls the day when Wallenberg learned that eight hundred Jewish labour service men were being marched to Mauthausen. He and Wallenberg drove to the frontier and caught up with the column. Wallenberg asked that those with Swedish protective passports should raise their hands. ‘On his order,’ Moser says, ‘I ran between the ranks and told the men to raise their hands, whether they had a passport or not. He then claimed custody of all who had raised their hands and such was his bearing that none of the Hungarian guards opposed him. The extraordinary thing was the absolutely convincing power of his behaviour.’
Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust Page 10
