The Other Schindlers (8 page)
Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
he didn’t share the naive optimism of most other Hungarian Jews, who convinced themselves that things were bearable, that they wouldn’t get worse, and that if they only sat tight, they could weather the storm of Nazism. Gergely felt instinctively that things could, and would get worse. Since 1940 there had been a series of laws and decrees concerning the Jewish labour service, which was for the majority of the men conscripted into it, tantamount to a death sentence. In late 1942 he
received his labour service call-up papers. He closed down his salon and gave Vali a parting gift of a black velvet dress he had just finished. Soon afterwards he poisoned himself.
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His death was not only a terrible personal blow to Vali, but also another example of how desperate things were for Budapest’s Jews, even though many still failed to realise it. They had been lulled into a false sense of security by the refusal of the new Prime Minister, Miklós Kállay, to implement many of the Nazis’ demands and his refusal to make the Jews wear the yellow star. Inevitably, this situation could not last and it was discovered that Kállay was trying to negotiate a
separate
peace with the Allies at the same time as announcing in a speech in May 1943: ‘Hungary will never deviate from those precepts of humanity which, in the course of its history, it has always maintained in racial and religious questions.’ It was then only a matter of time before the Nazis determined to control ‘this Jewish-influenced State’, and this happened in March 1944.
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Vali’s greatest success was ironically during the war, when she was a pin-up for the Hungarian troops fighting on the Eastern Front. Additionally, she became resident singer at the Hangli Kiosk. This was a famous Budapest nightspot
overlooking
the Danube and was owned by the Rónay brothers – father and uncle of the food critic Egon Rónay.
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In May 1944 Vali was phoned by an old friend, Bandi Schreiber, in whose hotel she had found great success as a chanteuse in the summers of 1940 and 1941. Bandi was Jewish but had a Christian wife. He described to her the panic in the city of Budapest as news of mass deportations of Jews from rural areas reached the city. Desperate attempts were being made to get forged identity papers:
But public opinion had been poisoned by the years of rabid and systematic
propaganda
by the extreme-Right minority in Hungary. And now Jews were being shunned by their Gentile friends and neighbours, and those living with false Christian papers were being denounced. Humane Gentiles trying to help them were branded as traitors.
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Bandi wanted Vali to hide his cousin and his wife who had been denounced and were desperate for somewhere to hide. Vali knew of the risks and said she would have to think about it for a day or so. She consulted her former lover and now close confidant and friend, Paul Barabás, a writer of film scripts and an ardent anti-Nazi. It was he who devised a plan of hiding the Jews in the back half of an enormous wardrobe, by building a false partition in the middle and creating a secret compartment, for when there was a Nazi raid. The rest of the time they were hidden in the basement.
The Mandels were a quiet middle-aged couple. As soon as they arrived, Vali discussed certain essential precautions with them – they could go outside to the garden for fresh air only after dark; they must stay away from the front windows; and in the event of friends or visitors coming to the house, they were to remain silently in the basement until the visitors were gone. No one must discover their presence.
The Mandels were Orthodox, and their unswerving faith saved them from despondency. Despite their vast religious and cultural differences, Vali and the Mandels understood each other very well. She made things as comfortable as possible for them in one of the basement rooms, where, each Friday evening, they lit candles and celebrated Sabbath.
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They were soon joined by a friend of Vali’s, Margit Herzog, and her 14-year-old daughter Marietta. On one occasion poor Marietta had to hide behind a huge bookcase for hours whilst the Gestapo searched the house (
see plate 12
). The Herzogs were a large and extremely wealthy family, and Margit’s husband Dezsõ had already suffered dreadfully during
eighteen
months of forced labour on the Eastern Front. The family home in Budapest was on Andrássy Avenue, the grandest address in the city, and they owned farms and vineyards which produced some of Hungary’s most famous wine. Margit’s eldest brother Sándor had proposed to Vali, but although she was very fond of him, she declined his offer.
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The Herzogs were among the first people Vali thought of when the Germans occupied the country. No one in the family had thought of taking steps to
forestall
the dangers of a Nazi takeover. Like many other Jews, wealthy and otherwise, they wanted to believe that, despite the passing political traumas, the traditionally tolerant aristocratic leadership of Hungary would in the end protect them. Also, they were strongly bound to their land and their fortune. They simply couldn’t abandon it. It was to be a fatal mistake.
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Margit’s brother Imre was a decorated hero of the First World War. He had lost an arm on the Russian front in 1915 but his valiant reputation allowed him to go unmolested around Budapest, even in the post-occupation regime. He was known as ‘One-armed Imre’, but his freedom was short-lived and, like the holders of the Iron Cross in Germany, his pride in his immunity as a hero was not to provide protection for long. One of the first acts of the Szálasi government, which came to power on 15 October 1944, was to revoke all exemptions for Jews, even war heroes, and ‘One-armed Imre’ had to go into hiding.
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Vali’s daughter, Monica Porter, has written of rescuers such as her mother:
They simply did what they felt they had to do and as far as they were concerned, it wasn’t about ‘heroism’ at all … As she well knew, the penalty for harbouring a Jew was summary execution. But how could she not help when, out on the streets, the city’s Jews were being rounded up, deported, tortured or shot?
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Nevertheless, Vali’s motivation was complex. She was a sophisticated woman who had been involved in show business all her adult life. In Budapest that
theatrical
world was full of Jews and therefore she had known and worked with Jews for just as long, and had loved some of them. When they were threatened she could do nothing but help them. She had been brought up to be a Catholic and her father was extremely devout. Her parents had sent her to a convent for her schooling from the age of 10. There she learnt three skills: ‘an iron discipline, a dedication of purpose and self-restraint – which not only helped to secure her later success as a singer and actress, but helped to save her life’.
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Her daughter also credits her professional and romantic involvement with Paul Barabás, her lover since 1938, as a major influence. Barabás was working for the Resistance and devised the wardrobe hiding place for his precious ‘Valikó’. He was able to facilitate the arrangements and without him she might not have been so
comparatively
successful in hiding her Jewish ‘guests’.
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The house that Vali was living in when she hid the Jews – No 47d Budakeszi Avenue – eventually became the embassy of the government of Columbia.
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These courageous activities brought her anxieties and dangers. She came under suspicion and was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned and interrogated for two weeks, but she was released without giving anything away. After the Russians had liberated Budapest, a group of Jewish partisans accused her of collaboration and sentenced her to death. It is said that a Red Army colonel, with whom she had been having an affair, intervened and saved her, hours before she was due to be shot.
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All the people she hid survived the war and some emigrated to Israel. Vali married a writer, Peter Halász, in 1946. A son, Valér, was born in 1950 and a daughter, Mónika, in 1952. When the 1956 Hungarian revolution failed, the family of four escaped to the USA. They came to London in 1970 and in 1975 Vali and her husband moved to Munich, where she died in February 1997.
Vali was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1991. When Monica was in Jerusalem with her mother, they met up with some of the residents of the life-saving wardrobe and generations of a family who would not have existed but for Vali’s courage.
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She said of her wartime activities: ‘I just did what I had to do’. There is now a website dedicated to her: www.valiracz.com.
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Her daughter, Monica Porter, a freelance journalist, now lives in London, and her partner is Nick Winton, son of Nicholas Winton, who rescued 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia in 1939.
Soeur St Cybard (1885–1968)
. Josie Martin was born as Josephine Levy in Alsace-Lorraine in 1938, where her family had lived for generations. Following the fall of France, the little family fled to a village in Vichy France where they
were accepted and Josie went to nursery school. However, by 1944 there were Nazi sweeps taking place. That was bad enough, but the greater danger was from the French police: the real super Gestapo who were forever trying to show the German Nazis how loyal they were by betraying Frenchmen who were helping Jews.
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They fled to a nearby farm to hide and a farmer and his wife, who were family friends, offered to adopt 5-year-old Josie, but her parents could not bring
themselves
to do it. Then they heard that a nun, Soeur St Cybard, was running a girls’ school about 50km away. They made contact with her and she agreed to take Josie. It was a day school and she was to be the only boarder. Josie stayed for seven months, under the cover name of Josie L’Or, and her parents’ parting words to her were never to reveal her true name. She was in the convent until the liberation of Paris in August 1944, when she was reunited with her parents who had been hiding elsewhere in the countryside.
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Ten years ago Josie recalled:
The nun was a no-nonsense person and a woman of great importance in the small village. She was very political and very involved in helping the villagers. For example, she was the one who would write to the front and ask about missing sons. In some ways she was almost like a social worker. I developed tremendous admiration for this woman, who was strong, important, and very different from the typical French farm woman of the region. Even I felt a sense of importance in being ‘her’ child.
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It was fortunate that no one knew that the girl the nun initially chose to look after Josie was a Nazi collaborator. They did not like each other:
She didn’t know that I was Jewish. That was lucky, because she turned out to be a Nazi collaborator – a fact that my parents did not know until afterward. So much for their effort to put me in a safe place! Of course the nun didn’t know about this woman’s Nazi connection either. By the time she realised it, she couldn’t do
anything
because of her own vulnerability.
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The nun was a remarkable woman. Josie has written:
I can only surmise that Soeur St Cybard was a pious and sincere human being who practised her religious beliefs well beyond the dictates of her immediate superiors. She had been serving as director/headmistress of a girls’ school in Angoulême before being assigned to the backwaters of Lesterps. In that capacity she apparently engaged in some clandestine underground activities to assist the French Resistance. By the early Forties it seems she was in personal danger and therefore was sent into the
interior, both for her own safety and perhaps to have her out of the way. We all know not all Catholics were willing to take risks nor make waves.
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Although Josie never saw her rescuer again, the Soeur was very active until her death in 1968. She was born Marie-Elizabeth Lacalle on 14 January 1885 at Marsous, in the south, close to Lourdes and the border with Spain. She became a nun at the very early age of 14, taking the name Soeur St Cybard in 1899. She became a devoted teacher starting in 1901 at Abzac in the Gironde. In 1918 she was at the Saint-André Institute in Angoulême, and she stayed until 1942 when she was appointed headmistress of the St Bernadette School in Lesterps, where she remained until 1958. It was during this period that she cared for Josie:
At Lesterps she does not content herself with simply running the school; she devotes herself totally to the local community. On Thursdays and Sunday afternoons, she travels the countryside like a little sister to the poor being in turn a nurse,
counsellor
, secretary, therapist: she fights poverty. Indefatigable, she opens a needlework workshop which provides for the making of sacerdotal ornaments and linen for the Church, as well as the making of articles for religious observance in school.
Besides that she organises adult theatre groups composed of pupils’ parents and also a choir for the young of the parish; she herself conducts the choir rehearsals for Sunday mass and for religious festivals.
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Josie was present when Soeur St Cybard was honoured in Lesterps in 1999 and a tree was planted in her memory. Josie was given honorary citizenship of the village. She was delighted to be there but expressed concerns: ‘I was concerned that by honouring me, and through me the deeds of one courageous nun, I would help to whitewash the generally dismal record of French complicity and
collaboration
with the Nazis in the Second World War.’
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The visit back to Lesterps enabled her to meet others who had known Soeur St Cybard, and these meetings led her to conclude, ‘it’s clear she was a very strong and independent woman who saw her role as reaching beyond the strict definitions of what nuns were supposed to do. She was also described as highly intelligent and progressive for her times.’
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Josie discovered that Soeur St Cybard was remembered with love and affection in the area: