The actress who saves children

Katalin Karády – film actress

Elza Brandeisz was born on 18 September 1907 in Budapest. She grew up in a bourgeois family that valued books, knowledge, knowledge and faith. As a young girl, she attended lectures and was interested in many things, but she finally committed herself to movement, Kisalföld.hu wrote in her tribute. The special turn named after her, the Brandeis jump, is still taught at the artistic gymnastics school.

Katalin Kenczler was born in Kőbánya in a family of seven children. After many years of hard work, she became the celebrated star known as Katalin Karády. She used her salary to buy several properties, which became significant when she continued her work as a lifesaver. After the German occupation, she became an undesirable person, and her songs were banned from broadcasting because they were ‘alien to the Hungarian soul’. She was detained for a time by the Gestapo, and was interrogated about her contacts. Later, in an interview in America, she told of the humiliation she suffered on a daily basis. After her release in July 1944, she found her apartment on Pál Nyáry Street ransacked.
Seeing the persecution of the Jews of Budapest, including several of her colleagues, she decided not only to feel sorry for the victims but to actively help them. She hid the needy in her apartments at Nyáry Pál Street and at 26 Lepke Street. She saved a group of children from execution on the banks of the Danube by giving jewellery and gold to the Arrow Cross in exchange for them. She hid the rescued children in his own apartment. „I don’t like to talk about it, lest it look like bragging. But the truth is that I hid persecuted people. I had three apartments at the time, and I hid a number of people in each of them. I felt it was not some heroic sacrifice, but a human duty.” After the war, she had a nervous breakdown after learning that her fiancé, a high-ranking Hungarian military officer and one of the leaders of the alienation, had died in Russian custody. After that, she was only given humiliating roles, and eventually emigrated to America. She never returned home, but after her death in 1990 she was finally buried in Budapest. Karády’s lifesaving work was recognised by Yad Vashem in 2004, and her posthumous award was accepted by Vera Gyürei, Director of the Hungarian National Film Archive, who placed the award in the institution.

” …the truth is that I have hidden persecuted people. At that time I had three apartments, and I hid a number of people in each of them. I felt it was not some heroic sacrifice, but a human duty.”

Pál Lengyel – police officer

The ingenious policeman

Pál Lengyel worked as a driver for the Budapest police. Thanks to his courage and ingenuity, he successfully saved many Jewish people from certain death. He used his service car and uniform for the purpose of saving people after the Arrow Cross takeover. One of his acquaintances, István Grauer, was called up for labour service and was sent with his unit to a car repair workshop on Sváb Hill. Meanwhile, his wife and son were taken to the brickworks in Óbuda. From there, the death marches were started to West Hungary. Lengyel went to pick them up and arranged for the woman and her child to be handed over to him on false pretexts. He then took them up to Svab Hill and hid the woman and the boy in an empty room in the workshop. There they survived until liberation. Paul Lőrincz and his mother-in-law were also escorted out of the ghetto by Pál Lengyel and taken to a safe place. Jenő Vida also asked Lengyel for help, who „arrested” him and „brought him before the police station for further questioning”. In reality, however, he escaped to Kispest, where Vida also escaped by hiding in a safe house. According to the memoirs, Paul the Pole behaved fearlessly during those terrible days. For his courage and humanity, Paul Lengyel was awarded the title of Righteous among the nations by Yad Vashem in 1994.

„He used his service car and his uniform for the purpose of practically saving people after the Arrow Cross takeover.”

Gyula Szabó – miller

Gyula Szabó, a miller, lived with his family in Ipolynagyfalu. A company of labourers was escorted through the village by German soldiers on their way from the front to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. His wife Ilona took out bread and distributed it among the labourers. Three young men escaped from the procession and hid near their mill. The family’s house also housed Germans, so Ilona carefully hid the escapees and provided them with all the necessary things and food. The young men stayed there until the Russians moved in. Gyula Szabó’s wife Ilona Pál was awarded the title of Righteous among the nations by Yad Vashem in 2002.

Emanuel Zima – caretaker

The man who hid Jews in the German Embassy

There is no better hiding place than the building of the Third Reich Embassy in Budapest, where those responsible for, organising and carrying out the Holocaust also appear on a daily basis. But even so, Jews can be saved if the rescuers are brave enough. Emmanuel Zima was such a hero. Zima originally worked as a janitor at the Czechoslovak embassy in Budapest. In the spring of 1939, when Czechoslovakia was liquidated under Nazi Germany, the Germans took over the embassy building and attached it to the German embassy. The Czech Zima was able to keep his job as a janitor. During the war he became seriously ill and was treated by a Jewish doctor named Maria Flamm. Zima promised the doctor, as a token of his gratitude, that if the situation for Jewish women in Hungary became worse, he would somehow provide a hiding place for the doctor and her family members in the German embassy. In the summer of 1944, when the deportation of most of the Jews from the countryside had already taken place, the people of Budapest feared that Governor Horthy would again authorise the deportations to Auschwitz. The doctor and her family decided to take the opportunity offered by Zima and moved into the building. Zima did not live there, but he and his son Joseph took turns supplying the Flamms in hiding with necessities. In the autumn the Germans decided to move the embassy to Sopron to escape the approaching Soviet troops. Zima was supposed to go, but his wife was ill and he managed to stay in the capital.

He hid more Jews in the empty building. This was how Maria’s brother, Sándor Flamm, and his wife found shelter from the Arrow Cross rampage. They were followed by Gábriel Keményi and his wife, and then by the family of a man named Rosenthal. Finally, Mrs Kornfeld Hill also hid in the former embassy. After the siege began, the German soldiers wanted to use the embassy shelter, but Zima’s brave stand discouraged them and persuaded them to seek refuge elsewhere. Although the fighting in Pest had ended, the hiding men were not allowed to breathe a sigh of relief. Buda was still occupied by the Germans and the Arrow Cross. It was then that Aharon Gruenhut, the Orthodox Chief Rabbi of Bratislava, and his wife joined the hiding party. After the liberation, Zima only let the hiders out after all danger had passed. In 2014, Miklós Zima received his great-grandfather’s Just World Award, which Yad Vashem had already awarded to the rescuer in 1971 for his heroism.

Pál Szalai – secretary

The philanthropist Arrow Cross, who became disillusioned with Hungarism and distanced himself from the party

Pál Szalai started his political career as an Arrow Cross youth leader. At the age of 22, he was already helping Ferenc Szálasi to create the Arrow Cross movement. In 1937, he was sentenced together with the future national leader as an organiser against the established order. In 1942, he became disillusioned with Hungarism and distanced himself from the party. After 16 October 1944 he was recalled by Szálasi, took up a leading position and became the party’s liaison with the police. Pál Szalai then became secretary of the Northern Command. In this capacity he visited houses where Jews lived. He helped to recover from the Arrow Cross warehouses their valuables that had been confiscated earlier. He issued a decree that the Arrow Cross could only confiscate valuables from the apartments with permission and in the presence of the owners, so that half of their property could be saved. Pál Szalai played an important, perhaps even decisive role in saving the ghettos. At that time, not least because of the influence of his schoolmate and childhood friend Károly Szabó (who had already worked with the Swedish rescuer), who had been through the Ukrainian front and was suffering from the war, he was driven by a conscious desire to try to prevent the extremist activities of the Arrow Cross. Through his mediation, he met Raoul Wallenberg at the Swedish Embassy in December 1944.

The then Interior Minister gave ten Jews permission to take food and drink into the ghetto; thanks to Pál Szalai, the number of permits later increased to 100. When the ghetto leaders felt that the Jews were in danger, they approached Szalai and with his help, they made rules to protect the residents from attacks. In January 1945, he used his position to save hundreds of Jewish lives on two occasions. At that time, word spread throughout the ghetto that the Arrow Cross was planning to blow up the entire ghetto to prevent the arrival of any surviving Soviet troops and thus liberate it from Nazi-Poacher rule. Szalai then met Major General Gerhard Schmidhuber, one of the commanders of the German troops fighting in Budapest. The German officer was averse to Nazi racist ideas and therefore seemed the right person for Szalai. During the conversation he convinced him that if he did not prevent the massacres, he would be prosecuted as a war criminal after the war. Schmidhuber then arrested the SS officer who had organised the massacre and ordered German military guards to the gates of the ghetto. Two days later, both ghettos in Pest were liberated. Pál Szalai’s rescue mission saved the lives of Kálmán Rózsahegyi and Huppert Kulcsár, among others. After 1945, he was tried as a former Arrow Cross archer by the People’s Court, but was acquitted because those who had been rescued had testified in his favour. When the members of the former Jewish Council were arrested by the ÁVH as accomplices in the murder of Raoul Wallenberg, Szalai was also arrested and tortured. No wonder he emigrated in 1956. He settled in the United States, living in California until his death in 1994. He changed his name to Paul Sterling.