Although Hungary was an ally of Nazi Germany, Hungarian Jews were largely exempted from mass extermination until the German invasion in March 1944. But when Hitler’s army occupied his country, Pastor Gábor Sztehlo was torn from his peaceful pastoral work and given a new mission. It was a mission that plunged a naïve and unprepared pastor into the heart of the greatest tragedy of the century. “Save the Jews,” was all the Bishop told him that spring.
During a twelve-month “course” on the nature of human baseness and goodness, the free-spirited pastor desperately tried to find hiding places for the children the world wanted to destroy.
A year later Sztehlo emerged – literally – from the rubble of a ruined Budapest, followed by 2,000 souls who – as Sztehlo put it – had been saved for life. They founded a beautiful utopia, a republic of children, called Gaudiopolis, the City of Joy.
The case of Hungary, which was an ally of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, is unique, because the Jews of that country remained relatively untouched until mid-1944. They were decimated only in the last year of Hitler’s reign in an ever smaller Europe under Nazi domination, which was inevitably destined to collapse in defeat.
Hungary was the only country in which the perpetrators knew full well that the war was lost when they began to commit genocide against the Jews. Moreover, the mass deportations in that country could no longer be covered up, as was the case in the other occupied countries from 1942 to 1944. They were carried out openly and in full view of the world.
Hungary’s uneasy alliance with Hitler
Hungary was one of the countries allied to Nazi Germany, which one historian has described as opportunistic because it “joined the Nazi camp in order to gain territory for itself”. After Hitler’s rise to power, the former Austro-Hungarian admiral Miklós Horthy, who had led Hungary as regent, entered into an alliance with Germany in order to recover some of the lost territory of the former Hungary, which Hungary briefly did. For Horthy, who was obsessed with the communist threat, Hitler was also a bulwark against Soviet intervention or even invasion.
Between 1938 and 1941, the Hungarian Parliament passed a series of anti-Jewish laws which progressively placed more and more restrictions on the rights and privileges and economic activities of Jews. In fact, when the Nazis entered into their alliance with Hungary, they imposed one condition – the implementation of strict anti-Jewish measures in order to counteract the considerable influence that Jews had in Hungary.
When Hungary joined Nazi Germany in the war against Russia, 130,000 Jewish men were conscripted into auxiliary unarmed battalions for forced labour at the front, after they had been banned from serving in the regular armed forces by the adoption of Hungarian anti-Jewish laws.
In Hungary, Jews made up more than eight per cent of the population and the government introduced an alternative to military service. The gendarmes and soldiers guarding these ‘slaves’ were mostly members of the anti-Semitic, fascist Arrow Cross party, and their superiors made it clear to them that it was in the best interests of the state to guarantee a high death rate among these forced labourers.
Poorly fed and clothed units of Jewish men were assigned to do heavy work in the mine quarries, and with the German invasion of the Soviet Union, most of these labour battalions were sent to the Ukraine, where they experienced atrocities such as marching into minefields to clear an area with their bare hands for the advance of regular troops.
In fact, some 42 000 forced Hungarian-Jewish workers died, mostly as a result of the abuses, brutal treatment and inhumanity of their non-Jewish commanders – with the notable exception of a handful.
But apart from the conscription into forced labour and the occasional brutality of the Hungarian army – such as the forced raids of 12.000 Jews in the area of Rutenia, then annexed to Hungary, who were then handed over to the Nazi mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen, who killed them, and the massacre of 4,000 Jewish workers in the Hungarian area of Yugoslavia – Hungarian Jews for the most part lived in relative security while they watched the Jewish communities of Europe disappear one by one in flames under Nazi domination.
In January 1943, the Red Army crossed the Don River south of Voronezh and attacked the 2nd Hungarian and 8th Italian Armies. 30,000 Hungarian soldiers were killed in the battle, 50,000 were captured by the Soviets and the Hungarians lost most of their tanks, armoured vehicles and artillery. After this catastrophic defeat, the Hungarian government began to look for ways to get out of a war that seemed lost.
The relative security enjoyed by the Jews in Hungary increasingly disturbed the Nazi leadership and in April 1943, because of the “abnormal state of affairs in a country allied to Germany”, Hitler demanded from Horthy stricter physical measures against the Jews, not just economic restrictions.
“Nations which hesitated to deal harshly with the Jews have perished,” Hitler warned the Hungarian ruler, and added, “The Jews must be treated like the bacilli of tuberculosis which threaten the healthy body.”
As Horthy began to realise that an anti-Jewish campaign pushed too far would not be well received by the Allies, with whom he hoped to reach an agreement on the issue of surrender, he decided not to step up anti-Jewish measures.
Another year passed and in March 1944 the Germans, who were beginning to lose the war, decided to put pressure on the Hungarians, who were still negotiating secretly with the Allies, and to force their wavering ally to act.
On 19 March 1944, German forces occupied Hungary on the orders of Adolf Hitler in order to secure Horthy’s loyalty. A shocked Horthy reported to his government that an additional reason for this German action was that ‘we are accused of a crime for not carrying out Hitler’s wishes, and I am accused of not allowing the massacre of the Jews’.
With the Germans now in control, things began to move quickly and tragically for the country’s approximately 825,000 Jews. Every day, new decrees were published restricting the rights of the Jews. A special Nazi unit, the Sondereinsatzkommando, led by SS officer Adolf Eichmann, arrived in the Hungarian capital, charged with implementing the “Final Solution” throughout Europe.
The German ambassador and plenipotentiary, Edmund Veesenmayer, was at his disposal to assist him and to arrange for anti-Jewish actions by the Hungarian government. The extermination of the Jews living in Hungary in 1944 was characterised by speed and intensity. The mass deportations were carried out at lightning speed, with more than 15 000 people being transported every day in four trains of 45 cattle wagons, in which a hundred people were crammed, given seven buckets of water and taken to Birkenau, where they were driven for seven days.
Forced abdication
Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, more than 434,000 Jews were deported by 147 trains, mostly to Auschwitz, where around 80 per cent of them were sent to the gas cells immediately or shortly after their arrival. On 6 July, international protests, diplomatic pressure and the Allied bombing of Budapest convinced the Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy to order a halt to the deportations. When they did stop three days later, almost all the Jews had been removed from the Hungarian countryside, leaving only the Jewish community in Budapest.
The mass deportation of Hungarian Jews was the largest killing in the context of the Holocaust since 1942. It took place at a time when the Second World War seemed to be coming to an end and world leaders had known for some time that Jews were being killed in gas chambers. The expropriation of Jewish property was useful for achieving Hungary’s economic goals, and by sending Jews as forced labourers, Hungary avoided the need to send non-Jewish Hungarians and was able to keep these workers at home.
In October 1944, as the Soviet front was approaching, the Hungarian government was still trying to get out of the war. When the Germans learned of the Regent’s plan to make a separate peace with the Soviets and withdraw from the Axis alliance, they kidnapped Horthy’s son, Miklós the Younger, and threatened to kill him if Horthy did not abdicate in favour of Ferenc Szálasi, the leader of the fascist Arrow Cross party, which was an extension of Nazi ideology.
Horthy abdicated under duress and on 16 October 1944 the Kingdom of Hungary became a puppet state of Nazi Germany.
Szálasi, the leader of the nation and Prime Minister of the Government of National Unity, pledged all the country’s capabilities to the service of the German war machine and immediately unleashed a wave of terror in the capital, where thousands of Jews became victims.
All Jewish businesses were forced to cease trading, bank accounts were seized, valuables confiscated, Jews were forbidden to use public transport, the wearing of the distinctive yellow star was made compulsory from the age of six, and movement was severely restricted. Jews were forced to hand in their radios and, huddled together and in deplorable conditions, were only allowed to live in houses marked with a clearly visible six-pointed Star of David. A noose began to tighten around the Jewish community.
In brutal street violence, some 600 Jews were murdered by the men of the Arrow Cross in the first days of Szálasi’s reign.
Barely two months into the German occupation, Jews in a country that was still officially independent were left completely disenfranchised and outside the law.
Szalasi also renewed the Holocaust, which had been stopped by Horthy.
Adolf Eichmann returned to Budapest and immediately began deporting the city’s Jewish survivors. He ordered a forced march of Jews to the Austrian border. This march, known as the infamous Death March from Budapest to Hegyeshalom, involved some 60 000 men and women of all ages, who, with poor food and water supplies, walked in transports of 2 000 to 4 000 people 20 to 25 kilometres a day in the cold, rain, soda and mud all the way to the Austrian border, with Hungarian guards shooting the sick and the infirm.
When Szalasi called off all further marches on 21 November, thousands of corpses lay on 170 kilometres of road. The surviving deportees were handed over to the SS, who sent them on to concentration and labour camps in the Reich.
At the end of November 1944, the Budapest ghetto was established, completely cut off from the outside world. The Germans were willingly assisted in this depraved act by members of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party.
The directive allowed Jews to take food for 14 days and 50 kilograms of luggage with them to the ghetto. In the ghetto, garbage and refuse were not collected and taken away, the dead lay in the streets and the buildings were overcrowded, causing the spread of diseases such as typhus. More than half of those forced into the ghetto were sent to concentration camps almost immediately after its creation.
Between November 1944 and January 1945, death squads of Arrow Crosses entered Jewish houses and the ghetto, and it soon became a brutal training ground for murderers. Old men, women and children were dragged out of their beds and taken to the Danube, where they were shot until they fell into the river. Between 10,000 and 15,000 Hungarian Jews brutally lost their lives on the banks of the Danube.
In December 1944, Budapest was besieged by Soviet forces. The leadership of the Arrow Cross Party retreated across the Danube into the hills of Buda at the end of January, and the city surrendered to the Red Army on 13 February 1945 after a devastating two-month siege.
Christian churches in Hungary and the Holocaust
The leaders of the three main Christian denominations in Hungary – Catholic, Reformed (Calvinist) and Evangelical (Lutheran) – were not entirely opposed to the anti-Jewish measures, but they were strongly against the decrees aimed at racial cleansing, not so much out of concern for the Jewish population, but mainly because Jewish converts to Christianity were also affected by these measures.
According to the 1941 census, there were 825 000 Jews in the country, of whom between 62 000 and 95 000 were Christians. This figure also includes the Jewish population of the territories annexed by Hungary from Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia between 1938 and 1941.
The decree on the wearing of the yellow star hit the Catholic Church hard, as it was clear that tens of thousands of Christians born Jewish, including even members of the clergy, would soon be seen wearing the Jewish symbol on the streets. But the protests of the Catholic Primate of Hungary, Cardinal Seredi, did not succeed, as the authorities feared that they would cause a stampede of conversions among other Jews, in addition to the 10,000 converted Jews.
Already in May 1944, at the beginning of the deportations from the countryside, the Apostolic Nuncio in Budapest, Monsignor Angelo Rotta, and other Catholic prelates from the Vatican put strong pressure on Cardinal Seredi to publish a pastoral letter strongly condemning the authorities’ actions, but he evaded.
Under constant pressure, he finally produced the long-awaited pastoral letter on 29 June 1944, which was to be read in all churches during the Divine Liturgy, but by then almost all the Jews, except those in the capital, had disappeared from the “scene”.
In his pastoral letter, Serédi did not mince words about the Church’s fundamental anti-Jewish sentiments. This was followed by words in support of the anti-Semitic measures taken by the government before the German invasion in March 1944. Cardinal Serédi then condemned the discriminatory measures against Jewish converts to the Church and deplored the controversial measures against Jews, without naming them explicitly.
As soon as the government was informed of the contents of this letter, they began to put strong pressure on the Cardinal not to publish it. With assurances that the deportations of Christian Jews would now end, Serédi withdrew the letter.
The Lutheran and Calvinist Churches, represented by Bishop Ravasz, issued their own separate condemnations of the deportations. Bishop Ravasz specifically called for exemption for all officials and employees of Protestant churches, including teachers, cantors, deacons and churchwardens. However, this letter with harsher words was also withdrawn at the last moment, when Bishop Ravasz also received assurances that Jewish Christians would be excluded from further deportations.
Prime Minister Döme Sztójay told representatives of the churches that reports of torture of Jews were exaggerated. He also repeated the standard lie that Jews were merely taken to Germany to work and their families sent along to spare them unnecessary worry about their loved ones.
Thus, the leaders of the country’s largest churches refrained from condemning the deportations of the country’s Jews, leaving their congregations with the impression that their spiritual leaders did not view the mass elimination of Jews with disfavour.
The inability of the highest church leaders to take a public stand in defence of the Jews has had a negative impact on the majority of bishops and clergy. Their passive attitude emboldened Jew-haters and discouraged would-be saviours. The few bishops who dared to raise Jewish persecution in their sermons could not stem the tide, as their messages reached only a limited local audience. Due to the lack of encouragement at the higher levels of the hierarchy, the lower members of the clergy generally did not take an active part in the protest against the measures taken against the Jews.
Meanwhile, further deportations were halted by increasing pressure from world leaders, including US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, King Gustav V of Sweden and Pope Pius XII, who had remained silent until then about the ‘Final Solution’, and no doubt also by German military setbacks and the advance of the Allies.
On 26 November, Bishop Ravasz proposed to Cardinal Serédi that a delegation of the leaders of the three Churches should visit Szálasi. The Cardinal, who was already quite ill at the time, rejected the idea as useless. Seeing that the Cardinal was reluctant to cooperate, the bishops of the Reformed and Evangelical Churches submitted a memorandum of their own to Szálasi. The document, dated 1 December 1944, declared that the treatment of the Jews “makes a mockery of the eternal laws of God, which prescribe human conduct even with enemies, and brings down the wrath of God on the head of the nation”.
In contrast to the highest Church leaders, several regional bishops have taken a more active role in their dioceses on behalf of persecuted Jews. They did everything in their power to encourage the local authorities to alleviate the plight of the Jews.
The Good Shepherd Committee
In Budapest, which was besieged by the Russian army in December 1944, some 160,000 remaining Jews were herded into two large ghettos, 90,000 of them in the so-called international ghetto, houses under the protection of neutral countries (Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal and Spain), the International Red Cross and the Vatican. But they too were subjected to violence and occasional killings by Arrow Cross guards.
Those who survived the deportations and atrocities of the Nazis and Hungarian collaborators owe their lives to the kindness and courage of individual non-Jewish men and women throughout the country, to the compassion shown by some priests, and to the hospitality of various religious and secular institutions, as well as to the unwavering support of diplomatic representatives from foreign governments and agencies.
Bishops Vilmos Apor in Győr and Áron Márton in Kolozsvár were tireless in their interventions for the protection of the Jews, and from their pulpits they condemned the atrocities committed against the Jews without mincing words. Márton also wrote letters to the Hungarian government and to the local police and other authorities, demanding a ban on deportations. But the answer to his pleas was his expulsion from the Archdiocese of Transylvania in Romania, where he was serving as bishop.
On 27 December 1999, Yad Vashem honoured him as a “Righteous Among the Nations” for his efforts to stop the deportation of Romanian and Hungarian Jews during the Second World War.
While church leaders tried to alleviate the situation of the Jews by direct appeals to the “head of state” Szálasi, some priests took an active role in saving Jewish lives. By far the most active of these were those associated with the various monasteries and religious orders, and above all the two church institutions which looked after the special interests of the converts: the Society of the Holy Cross and the Committee of the Good Shepherd.
The Society of the Holy Cross, which began its work in October 1939 under the leadership of Fathers Cavallier and Jánosi, was an institution dedicated to the protection and advancement of the interests of Jews who had converted to the Catholic faith. It was soon providing assistance to the many refugees in the country, whatever their religious affiliation, in collaboration with the main Jewish social organisations and with the Apostolic Nuncio, Angelo Rotto.
At the end of November 1944, Cavallier was wounded in a shooting attack on his office by members of the Arrow Cross party, and the activities of the Society of the Holy Cross were largely taken over by the Committee of the Good Shepherd.
The Good Shepherd Committee was the main association of Jews converted to Protestantism. It was founded in October 1942 and its leadership was entrusted to the Rev. József Éliás, himself of Jewish origin. The Evangelical Church joined the Committee in May 1944, when Bishop Raffay appointed Gábor Sztehla as his representative in charge of aid to the children of forced labourers and converts. He also helped Jewish and non-Jewish refugees by providing assistance to forced labourers and their families – sending clothes, blankets and food to workers on the front and to the needy at home. The Bishops’ Conference has described the activities of the Good Shepherd Committee as very dangerous, simply playing with fire.
The work of the Committee became particularly important and dangerous during the period of the German occupation, when the Good Shepherd sheltered some 1500 children in 32 homes. Food, accommodation and childcare were provided with the cooperation of the International Committee of the Red Cross. As Pastor Éliás had to go into hiding almost immediately after the coup, having been blacklisted for his humanitarian and political activities, the responsibility for protecting the children fell almost exclusively on Pastor Sztehl.
The benevolent pastor carried out his duties with great courage and skill, and although some homes were raided by the fascist Arrow Cross militia, nothing ever happened to any of the children under Sztehl’s care.
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The naive pastor Gábor Sztehlo
Gábor Sztehlo was a popular and respected hospital priest in his mid-thirties. At the beginning of November 1944, he was given a leave of absence from the church so that he could devote all his energies to saving people. Pastor Sztehlo knew what was happening, but he felt that this was not his war.
“It was an alien world encroaching on my world, and I could not – I did not want to – accept it. I avoided the evidence of it. I found the war repulsive and disturbing. I felt not fear, but helplessness, that I could not fight it all,” Sztehlo wrote fifteen years later.
Gábor Sztehlo was concerned exclusively with the extent to which this or that event could hinder or stimulate his pastoral work. As he later admitted in his memoirs, he was naïve and politically immature at the time. He was not alone in this, for a large part of the Hungarian intelligentsia was similarly blind, with tragic consequences.
But one thing was certain: Sztehlo hated the war, even though he never had to serve in the army, and he condemned what the Nazis did. But nothing more. He looked through their propaganda papers and magazines, he admired their technical equipment, but he did not consciously fight against them. There was not enough hatred in the pastor until he saw more closely what they were doing.
It was only when he came into conflict with them in his work that he rebelled, and only then did this inner rebellion of his turn into action. The young priests, Sztehl’s colleagues, received the news of the German occupation of Budapest in much the same way as the pastor. They asked themselves only one question: whether or not they could continue to do their work under these new circumstances. They considered everything from this narrow point of view, which was “sinful ignorance and a selfish way of life, seeking only personal salvation”, as Sztehlo wrote. This was a characteristic of the Hungarian Churches in 1944.
When Friedrich Born arrived in Budapest in 1944, sent there by the International Committee of the Red Cross, he quickly realised the consequent danger for the Hungarian Jews. Action had to be taken quickly and he contacted Gábor Sztehl. He opened his eyes and told him what was happening to the Jews in the occupied countries. He spoke about the concentration camps and the factories where the deported Jews worked and could not imagine that the Hungarian Churches were not aware of the aim of the German camps – the liquidation of the Jews. He wanted to know if the Good Shepherd Committee had any plans to save the Jews.
“Now I began to notice a number of people standing in rows with a yellow star on their clothes, trying to cover it with a briefcase or some other object. Visitors started coming to my office with or without the star. How many tragic and desperate lives!” wrote Sztehlo in his memoirs. “Quick coffins, forged documents, false identities. There were two offices in the building, the Catholic one and the pastor’s. When the rumours spread, people stood in line to be baptised. These poor people thought that maybe this would save them.”
In November 1944, when the Arrow Cross Party’s terror campaign was in full swing, hundreds of Jewish children, whose parents had fled or been killed, were wandering the streets of Budapest. Sztehlo offered them a hand, but the Protestant orphanage was so full that it could not take any more children, and there were many more waiting to be housed.
The inexperienced pastor was desperate to find a shelter for the children he wanted to save. All the villas of the “Star Bearers” were confiscated and the men of the Arrow Cross moved in.
Apart from idealism, there was still a great deal of gullibility in what the young parish priest did. He approached a lawyer to help him buy a villa in which he wanted to build a home for Jewish children. After paying him an advance of 4 000 pengö (today’s value of about 20 000 euro), the corrupt lawyer refused to remember him when he handed over the keys and even threatened him with the police. Earlier, the inexperienced Sztehlo, who came from a family of lawyers and therefore trusted all lawyers implicitly, had told him in an overly confidential manner why he wanted to buy the villa.
The Good Shepherd’s office was no longer a place of refuge but, on the contrary, a dangerous place, and Sztehlo had to retreat to the safer countryside of Sárszentmiklós for two months in July 1944. There he joined his family, who had retreated from Budapest to a village 75 kilometres away, when the Allies started bombing the city. As part of the British and American strategy of laying mines in the Danube, American planes also dropped bombs on German-occupied Budapest from the air.
The Homes of the Good Shepherd
After Sztehl’s return to the capital, events followed quickly. The pastor, with the help of Friedrich Born of the International Committee of the Red Cross, searched for suitable buildings in Budapest to accommodate children and teenagers at risk. Several wealthy families offered their villas to the Mission, partly out of humanitarian sympathy and partly for their own safety. The owners hoped that the Swiss security stamps on their houses would give them protection. They had to create a shelter, albeit temporary, in a hurry for the children at risk.
The pastor was faced with new tasks: how to arrange these homes, which children to put in them, of which age and sex? Sztehl’s friends from the Good Shepherd Committee admired his commitment, but they also warned him that these were not only persecuted Jewish children, but also children with wounded souls who had suffered a great deal and needed a home where they would feel safe.
But how could they really feel safe if they also perceived the walls around them as a prison? The neighbours must not have noticed that so many children had suddenly moved in, much less what kind of children they were.
Because of his inexperience and idealism, Gábor Sztehlo was unaware of the great responsibility he was taking on: “I knew nothing about the diversity of life and the unexpected outbursts of human emotions. How much trouble and anger had arisen from living together! I constantly had to settle disputes and defuse problems. Now this seems natural and inseparable from human coexistence, but at that time I was only just realising that running a home for children is a demanding profession. How could young women who came from offices or lower-middle-class households, without prior study, immediately learn the skills of working in such a community?”
Sztehlo had to explain over and over again to relatives, nurses and other members of the household that the safe house had to become a home in which one big family lived. All the children are supposed to be brothers and sisters, so the staff of the home must do everything in their power to create the right atmosphere for these young traumatised Jews.
That sounded nice, but even in a real family there are quarrels, and the pastor was rightly worried about how these 30 to 35 children would cope when they were packed together. The ruthlessness of the strong towards the weak can foster many negative traits in wounded souls. They also had to overcome social differences, as some children came from luxurious homes with beautiful libraries, others from damp basement flats.
In the homes under the protection of the International Red Cross, children lived secretly behind the four walls of these houses, using false documents to evade supervision. Their fathers were arrested and their mothers handed them over to strangers, leaving them nameless. For them, this was a real tragedy.
But out of this heterogeneous group of boys and girls, a community was born. They felt that they belonged together and did not consider their confinement to the house a prison. They became friends and felt responsible for each other.
The furnishings in these safe houses were meagre and it was very difficult to maintain order in the rooms under such circumstances. After all the hardships and horrors they had endured, some of the children wet the bed, so that, on top of everything else, the bedrooms smelled unpleasant. In the first week of the first safe house, the beds ran out. The Good Shepherd Committee already had meagre resources, and the relatives of these children were unable to help. The money Sztehlo received from the Swiss had to be handled carefully: it was used to buy food and to build new homes. He wrote that he often had headaches because he felt so helpless and did not know where to turn.
They also faced food problems. There was rationalisation in the city, exacerbated by discrimination. The children brought Jewish food cards with them, but to suddenly start paying with large numbers of such cards would have been very dangerous. It would arouse suspicions and investigations. It was not easy to buy food, not even with the appropriate cards and not with cash, because the quantities they needed in the safe house would again be suspicious. There would not be enough food in one shop anyway.
All the measures made it necessary to stand in queues outside the shops, but it was not possible to send the children shopping, as Sztehlo and his colleagues were afraid they would give themselves away. There were many difficulties, but the children did not know hunger in those difficult days, even though milk, butter and bread were scarce.
As this random group of children slowly began to form, the pastor and his assistants began to think about how to recruit them, as they wanted to offer them much more than just protection from death. Nurses and civil activists taught the children various subjects, taught them songs, encouraged them to exercise and played theatre with them. They tried to create a joyful atmosphere and dispel fear and bad memories.
Gábor Sztehl learned some hard lessons and started to run a real secret society. Bills, receipts, lists and permissions from embassies and the Red Cross for safe passage – the pastor left nothing to chance.
Every night, miserable phenomena rushed secretly through hostile Budapest – mothers with their children who wanted to entrust them to the care of an unknown pastor.
Although the Good Shepherd Committee initially only rescued baptised Jewish children, Sztehl soon did not care whether they were baptised Jews or not, and began to help all children in need. And the children came continuously from the autumn of 1944, and among them were children of both the persecuted and the persecutors. The context was not important, only whether anyone needed help.
Gábor Sztehlo housed Jewish children in his own home, in the houses and apartments of relatives and acquaintances, and in properties bought with donations from wealthy Jewish families and organisations. More than a thousand children, a few mothers and hundreds of adult guardians were hidden in the heart of a remarkable network of 32 safe houses, which he reached by various means, sometimes through political connections.
An apocalyptic Christmas
On 29 October 1944, the Red Army sent thousands of planes and tanks and one million soldiers over Budapest. The capital was engulfed in a hail of fire and lead. But although the Soviets managed to gain considerable territory, they were unable to take Budapest because of fierce German resistance.
Sztehlo first hid his children from the Nazis and Hungarian fascists, and then had to rescue them from bombs, war, cold and hunger.
In mid-December, Sztehlo learned that the Good Shepherd’s homes were to be raided. He rushed to the homes in Buda and tried to check the documentation. False school reports and baptismal certificates were produced. The most difficult thing was to teach the young children their new names and what to say about their parents. It took a long time for a frightened little child to remember who he was supposed to be. But even then Sztehlo could not be sure that they would answer correctly if questioned. How much fear and terror these little ones had to endure, and how much more unpleasant things they had to endure! Those days were desperate, panic gripped all homes.
But a miracle happened and the police officers who appeared outside the homes did not even enter.
Christmas was approaching and there were pleasant smells in the Sztehl house as another miracle happened. Sztehl’s Catholic friend had procured food and medicine from an unknown source. All this distracted people from the fear and unpleasant news. Everyone hoped that Christmas would become a day of joy.
The pastor’s wife and children prepared and hid small gifts. The children in the homes also made presents for each other: Christmas nativity scenes, drawings, woodwork and clay figures. They knew they would also get real toys, so everyone was in joyful anticipation. The nurses went out of their way to teach the children theatre games or happy sketches and songs. The only fear the children felt was the fear of performing – as if they did not live in a besieged city.
Szstehlo celebrated Christmas afternoon in the office with the leaders back home and his closest colleagues. As they began to disperse, an elderly woman appeared, carrying a little girl of about three years old in her arms. She was looking for the pastor, as she had heard about his activities and hoped that he would be able to take the child in. If she had arrived a few minutes earlier, when the leaders were still in the office, one of them could have taken the little girl with him.
The problem was solved by Sztehl’s wife, who accepted the girl from the tired woman and firmly said that she would take her home. After all, she was a mother with a daughter almost the same age. For Sztehl, it was the most beautiful Christmas present: an abandoned child in need of love found it.
After a peaceful Christmas Eve, suddenly the sound of machine guns and thundering cannons could be heard. The front was very close.
Sztehlo took refuge in the cellar with his family and four others. Sirens wailed, the shelling grew louder and louder, and they could hear the planes coming. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, a light shone through the basement window as if it were daylight: multi-barrelled rocket launchers, the awe-inspiring “Stalin’s organ”, burst into flames above Buda.
Part of the huge basement of Villa Legrady had been transformed into a complete bomb shelter. It had thick concrete walls and a heavy vaulted ceiling over a room big enough for three rooms.
Several days of bombing destroyed many of the Good Shepherd’s homes, and in early January the pastor was awakened by a heavy knocking on the basement window. It was Eva Stiasznyi, the head of the Bogarjeva Street home, with two German soldiers standing behind her. Sztehl was momentarily breathless. He feared that the Germans had liquidated the Bogar Street home and might have taken away or even killed the children there.
But the opposite was true. After a brief lull after days of shelling, Eva transported the children to safety, even with the help of German soldiers. Sztehlo almost cried with emotion. These tough soldiers came one after the other with machine guns slung over their shoulders, carrying small boys of a strongly Semitic appearance in their arms.
During the long offensive, which lasted from Christmas 1944 until 11 February 1945, Sztehlo lived in a basement shelter with his family, a few colleagues and 33 Jewish children. They passed the time by talking about life, death and persecution. These conversations could be frighteningly adult or utterly childish, on topics such as who could curse the longest without repeating themselves, sports or funny aunts and uncles.
And, of course, there was always talk of food. In the besieged city, all food supplies were cut off, all food shops were closed, and slowly they began to starve. In some of the Good Shepherd’s homes, the children formed a small choir and sang German songs to the German officers.
Pastor Sztehlo was more afraid of the Hungarian Arrow Cross fascists than of the German soldiers. He deliberately befriended several German officers who came to visit him and his family almost every evening. The young Jews posed as Hungarian refugee children fleeing the advancing Soviet army in eastern Hungary. Fortunately, their faces were barely visible in the dim light of the kerosene lamps, and so the children provided the occasional entertainment in exchange for a piece of bread.
A million townspeople were caught between the unstoppable Red Army and the SS troops, who were desperately defending themselves. The city was burning and for the Germans the battle was lost. The Russians cleared the last German outposts with flamethrowers and came across the hiding place of Sztehl and his children. In mid-February, an explosion destroyed the cellar door and flames burst through. A Russian soldier appeared on the doorstep with a rifle pointed at them.
Sztehlo recalls that he shouted, “Comrade! This is a children’s shelter!”
When the Russian soldier saw the crowd of frightened children, he just sighed with relief and smiled.
Budapest was liberated, but at the same time conquered. The Russian soldiers were smiling and resting, and the bodies of Germans were lying in the mud. For Sztehl, his protégés and compatriots, one occupation had ended and another had begun.
(To be continued next time)
