There was no panic in my house…[it] was fully equipped and we had taken over the noble family’s staff of servants, including the most exquisite cook. She was used to the unlimited resources of a Hungarian manor-house and to cooking for many people, and in spite of food rationing and the fact that Göte and I were only two, we were never able to change her habits. Usually this extravagance worried us…but this particular evening we were very grateful for it. Raoul arrived with his Germans and while Göte and I were doing our best with the cocktail shaker the table was laid with the count’s best china and silverware. Thanks to our excellent cook the dinner was a success and I am sure that Eichmann never found out about Wallenberg’s forgetfulness.
But if the dinner itself was confined to the pleasures of good food, fine wine, and inconsequential chatter, what followed was a good deal more difficult for Eichmann to stomach. The two Germans and three Swedes moved into the living-room and, after coffee had been poured, Wallenberg put out the lights and pulled back the curtains from the east-facing windows. ‘The effect was tremendous,’ Carlsson recalled later. ‘The horizon was bright red from the fire of thousands of guns as the Russians closed in on Budapest.’ Berg describes what happened next:
Wallenberg, who on this occasion had no special wish to negotiate with Eichmann, started a discussion about Nazism and the likely outcome of the war. Fearlessly and brilliantly he picked Nazi doctrine apart, piece by piece, and foretold the total defeat of its adherents. These were rather unusual words, perhaps, for a Swede far from his country and more or less at the mercy of a powerful German opponent. But that was always Wallenberg’s way. I think his intention was not so much to put his own views forward as to pass on a warning to Eichmann that he would do well to stop the deportation and extermination of the Hungarian Jews.
Eichmann could scarcely conceal his amazement that anyone should dare to attack him and criticize the Führer, but he soon seemed to realize that he was getting the worst of the argument. His propaganda phrases sounded hollow compared with Raoul’s intelligent reasoning. Finally, Eichmann said: ‘I admit that you are right, Herr Wallenberg. I have never believed in Nazism, as such, but it has given me power and wealth. I know that this pleasant life of mine will soon be over. My planes will no more bring me women and wine from Paris, or delicacies from the Orient. My horses, my dogs, my luxurious quarters here in Budapest will soon be taken over by the Russians and I myself, as an SS officer, will be shot on the spot.
‘For me there will be no escape, but if I obey my orders from Berlin and exercise my power harshly enough I may prolong my respite for some time here in Budapest. I warn you, therefore, Herr Legationssekretar, that I will do my best to stop you, and your Swedish diplomatic passport will not help you if I find it necessary to have you removed. Accidents do happen, even to a neutral diplomat.’
With these words, Eichmann stood up to leave, but not at all displaying any anger. With the imperturbable politeness of a well-educated German, he bade farewell to Raoul and thanked us for a particularly pleasant evening. Perhaps Raoul did not win very much by his direct attack, but it could sometimes be a great pleasure for a Swede to speak his mind to an SS officer.
Chapter 9
Wallenberg enlisted, or bought, the aid and co-operation of many people in his rescue operations and wherever possible co-ordinated his efforts with those of others, such as the active Swiss consul, Charles Lutz, and the Swedish Red Cross representative, Waldemar Langlet. Yet perhaps his most fruitful collaboration was with the infinitely resourceful and audacious Lászlo Szamosi, a Jew who accomplished the remarkable feat of becoming de facto ambassador of Franco Spain in the final stages of the siege of Budapest.
Szamosi was a wealthy young Budapest real-estate dealer. Before the German intervention in March 1944, he had taken the precaution of selling a valuable downtown building plot for the substantial sum of 100,000 pengös (a good middle-class salary in those days was 1000 pengös a month) and keeping the cash by him in case of sudden need. When the savage restrictions on the Jews were imposed by the Sztójay government, Szamosi bought Christian identification papers for himself, his wife, and their two small children, and the family went on the run, blending with the general population.
For some time, posing as refugees from the provinces overrun by the Red Army, they moved from one lodging to another. Finally, after the Szálasi putsch, Szamosi decided the time had come to stop running. At this time a number of homes were being set up under the nominal patronage of the International Red Cross for the abandoned or orphaned children of Jewish parents who had been rounded up for deportation or already sent to the extermination camps. Szamosi went with his family to one of these homes, where his wife volunteered to help look after the children. ‘As for myself,’ Szamosi recalls, ‘I only wanted to spend a night or two there until I could see how things were shaping up.’ But their first evening in the children’s home provided an experience which made him decide to stay. He says in his unpublished memoirs that ‘A meeting was called by the management, at which there were lengthy discussions about the principles by which the children should be brought up. Although many of the children were infested with lice and suffering from malnutrition, and although the most primitive facilities – such as pots to cook in and dishes to eat from – were lacking, the main point of the discussion was purely hypothetical educational problems.
‘I quickly came to the conclusion that my first task should be to attend to the most urgent wants of the children. Then, for all I cared, the management could provide whatever kind of education they saw fit – provided, of course, that the Arrow Cross and the Nazis would allow it.’
By this time, the Jews of Budapest were under permanent curfew and allowed out of their houses for only one hour a day, frightened figures who would scuttle about the streets in frantic search of food and other essentials in the hour allotted to them. Szamosi, thanks to his Christian identification papers, his impeccable Aryan appearance, and a good deal of cool nerve, was able to move about the city freely. The morning after arriving at the children’s home, he called on a wholesaler and purchased, at his own expense, dishes, cutlery, soap, paraffin, delousing powder, and other essentials. Then he went to a friendly Gentile who owned a pasta factory and bought 300 kilos of macaroni, which, together with the other goods, he drove back to the children’s home in a borrowed van.
‘These quick and efficient measures, carried out without any previous conferences, aroused the interest of the children’s home,’ Szamosi says. ‘I finally convinced them that the purpose of this home should be not to provide relative security to the management – whose numbers nearly equalled those of the children – or to discuss pedagogic questions, but to save the lives of as many children as possible.’
Through his work at the children’s home in Dob Street, Szamosi quickly became a member of the A Section of the International Red Cross in Budapest, which had overall responsibility for the welfare of parent-less Jewish children. The Swiss official representative of the IRC, Frederic Born, had few staff and few resources and was happy to leave the A Section in the control of undercover Jews, headed by the Zionist leader Ottó Komoly. Komoly had links with another underground Zionist cell which specialized in forging Aryan documents and foreign protection passes. They had tried their hand at the Wallenberg passports, but finding these too difficult to copy convincingly, had concentrated on the Swiss Schutzpasse, which they turned out in large numbers.*
Szamosi had a typewriter with the same typeface as the machine that had printed the Swiss passes. He and his wife would find out from the children who were brought to the home the names of their parents who had been taken away for deportation and herded temporarily into a large brickyard on the outskirts of the city. When they knew the names they would type them onto the passes. Armed with his IRC credentials, Szamosi would go to the brickyard and get his new ‘protégés’ extracted from the transports. It was on one of these missions that he first encountered Wallenberg, doing the same
thing. ‘He seemed at first rather quiet and reserved, a gentle man, almost effeminate,’ Szamosi recalls. ‘I soon found out how deceptive this first impression could be.’
When the death marches began in early November 1944 he made another vital contact – Zoltán Farkas, a Gentile former acquaintance who was then legal adviser to the Spanish embassy. Through Farkas, he quickly got an introduction to the chargé d’affaires, Angel Sans-Riz. Appealing to him with all the moral authority of the Red Cross, Szamosi got Sans-Riz to agree that, in addition to the few Spanish-descended Jews already under his country’s protection, he would help other Jews by issuing a substantial number of extra protective passes, without inquiring too closely into antecedents. Once again, Szamosi went around collecting parents’ names from abandoned children and then turned the lists over to the Spanish embassy for the passes to be issued. He wrote: ‘I then arranged with Wallenberg that he should join to his Swedish list the Spanish and Swiss lists, which I would hand over to him. Similarly, some safe-conducts were issued by the Papal Nunciature, and I asked Wallenberg to take these to the frontier too. While Wallenberg and his assistants were going to the frontier I persuaded Farkas to get in touch on behalf of the Spanish embassy with the Hungarian officials at the border and send them money to make sure that our lists were honoured. I supported my argument by signing over to Farkas one of my valuable building sites in Buda.’
Whenever Wallenberg sent a group of rescued Jews back from the frontier by train, Szamosi would go out to meet them and help get them safely into Swedish and other protected houses. Since they were generally in a desperate condition after a week on the march and some days packed into cattle cars; and since the streets were constantly being patrolled by Arrow Cross bands, this reception work was no easy matter. Szamosi bribed policemen to help him escort his charges through the streets, brandishing his Red Cross credentials at anyone who made inquiries.
Szamosi had constant battles with the Spanish embassy staff, who complained that the number of protected persons seemed to be far in excess of the number of passes they had issued. They simply refused to deal with the excess. Szamosi solved this and other problems by the simple expedient of getting himself taken on the staff of the seriously undermanned embassy. This was achieved partly through his own contacts with Farkas and Sans-Riz and partly through the good offices of the IRC representative Born, who wrote to the Spanish chargé urging him to give official diplomatic status to both Szamosi and Komoly. Such a thing could perhaps only come about in the chaotic conditions then prevailing in Budapest; soon Szamosi and Komoly were on the embassy staff and the possessors of Spanish diplomatic passports.
In the first week of December things got even better: Sans-Riz and his fellow-Spaniards fled from Budapest, rather than risk capture by the Soviets, leaving Szamosi to all intents and purposes in sole charge of the one foreign mission which recognized the Szálasi régime as legitimate. Szamosi and Komoly thus had all the embassy’s stamps, seals, and printed forms at their disposal, plus the offices themselves, a car with diplomatic plates, a stock of Spanish flags, and a considerable store of goodwill with their fellow Fascists of the Arrow Cross and the Hungarian government.
Szamosi lost no time taking full advantage of this superb windfall. To the seven hundred Spanish passes so far issued he added hundreds more. He raised the Spanish flag over the children’s home in Dob Street, and also over Komoly’s headquarters in Munkács Street, thus claiming extraterritorial status as well as Red Cross protection for both of them. One night when Arrow Cross gunmen burst into the home in Dob Street he indignantly read them a lecture on extraterritoriality before reminding them how close a friend Franco was to Hitler and Szálasi. Mumbling apologies, the intruders left.
In moving about the streets – now armed with three different sets of papers and dressed Arrow Cross style in a fur-trimmed coat with a countryman’s hat – Szamosi would display similar audacity, striding arrogantly through Arrow Cross cordons instead of trying to avoid them. ‘I was dealing with primitive people and most of the time a resolute voice and overbearing manner would do the trick,’ he recalls.
To keep up appearances at the embassy, Szamosi felt he really could do with a genuine Spaniard to act as chargé d’affaires under his instructions. Unable to find a Spaniard in Budapest, he settled for the next best thing, an Italian acquaintance named Giorgio Perlasca, who had been living for some years in an apartment in the embassy building. ‘Without much ado,’ says Szamosi, ‘we “appointed” him, and I must say he made an excellent front man.’ On the many protest notes which the neutral missions were to send collectively to the Hungarian authorities from this time on, Perlasca’s name would appear as a signatory together with those of genuine heads of mission, such as Monsignor Rotta and Minister Danielsson. In company with Szamosi he would go out on rescue missions to recover Spanish-protected Jews who had been taken by the Arrow Cross, even sometimes marching into the party houses where the Arrow Cross would torture their captives before killing them. While these desperate rescue missions went on, there was still the constant problem of finding food for the children’s homes and then getting it to them through the bombing, shelling, and Arrow Cross roadblocks.
Towards the end of December Szamosi, Wallenberg, and the other neutral diplomats engaged in a desperate verbal battle to prevent the fifteen children’s homes and their five thousand inmates being moved forcibly into the enclosed General Ghetto, where it would be almost impossible to feed or care for them. On Christmas Eve the diplomatic corps sent a protest note, drafted by Wallenberg, to Szálasi himself. ‘Even in war,’ they said, ‘conscience and the law condemn hostile actions against children. Why, therefore, force these innocent creatures to live in places where the poor mites will see nothing but misery, pain, and desperation? Every civilized nation respects children, and the whole world will be painfully surprised should traditionally Christian and gallant Hungary decide to institute steps against the little ones.’*
But even as Wallenberg’s protest note was being delivered, Arrow Cross gunmen were celebrating the birth of Christ by bursting into one of the smaller, unprotected children’s homes and slaughtering seven orphans inside. All the efforts of Wallenberg, Szamosi, and the others did not suffice to prevent the most appalling suffering among the children. The management of most of the homes remained intact, but in the final phase of the siege some staff simply fled, leaving the children unattended.
Hans Weyermann, newly arrived IRC representative who replaced Born, reported from one such home: ‘Children of two to fourteen years, famished, ragged, emaciated to mere skeletons, frightened to death by the droning of planes and the detonation of bombs, had crept into corners. Their bodies were eaten by filth and scabies, their rags were infested with lice. Huddled up in fear and misery, they made inarticulate sounds. They had not eaten for a long time, and for many days there had been nobody to look after them. Nobody knows where their nurses had gone or when they ran away.’
So desperate was the condition of the children that for many the Russian ‘liberation’ of the city came too late. Despite the improved food and medical supplies and the continued efforts of the Red Cross – including the tireless Lászlo Szamosi – the children from the homes died by the hundreds during January, February, and March 1945.
Lászlo Szamosi survived the war and Russian occupation and made his way with his wife and children to British-ruled Palestine, later Israel, where he founded a real-estate business in Haifa. Looking back on those hectic and tragic months in Budapest, he stresses: ‘Whatever any of the rest of us may have achieved, it was Wallenberg who was the driving force of the whole rescue operation. It was his idea to co-ordinate the efforts of the Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, Portuguese missions, the Papal Nunciature, and the Red Cross. We all worked in close co-operation under his leadership.’
Chapter 10
Despite his bluster on the night of the dinner party with Wallenberg, Eichmann had no intention of staying behind in Budapest to be kil
led by the Russians. As the Red Army closed its ring around the Hungarian capital he ordered his Kommando to get ready to move out. But first he had two plans to set in motion. The first, the execution of all the members of the Jewish Council, he intended to supervise personally. The second, the massacre of the entire remaining Jewish population in one lightning action, would have to be delayed until the inhabitants of the International Ghetto could be moved into the General Ghetto. This extermination action would be carried out by Waffen SS troops and the Arrow Cross, if necessary after Eichmann’s departure. Early in the evening of 22 December 1944 one of Eichmann’s assistants telephoned Jewish Council headquarters inside the fenced-off General Ghetto, where 75,000 people were crammed into 243 houses and ‘policed’ by a force of 800 Gentiles appointed by the Arrow Cross government. The call was taken by the porter, Jakob Takács. Speaking in German, the SS officer ordered Takács to assemble the Jewish Council members at nine o’clock for a meeting with Eichmann.
At nine o’clock that night three SS staff cars entered the ghetto and pulled up outside the building housing the council’s offices. Eichmann and two other officers – probably Krumey and Wisliceny – got out of the middle car, accompanied by a trooper with a sub-machine gun. The two escorting cars were packed with heavily armed troopers. Eichmann marched up to the porter’s lodge and knocked peremptorily. ‘Well, where are they?’ he demanded of Takács.
Righteous Gentile: The Story of Raoul Wallenberg, Missing Hero of the Holocaust Page 12
