[ad_1]
Just before Nazi Germany invaded Hungary in March 1944, the Eastern European country’s Jewish youth leaders acted swiftly: They formed an underground network that, over the next few months, removed thousands of their fellow Jews from the gas chambers rescued.
This chapter of Holocaust heroism is barely remembered in Israel. It is also not part of the official school curriculum. But the few remaining members of Hungary’s Jewish underground want to tell their stories. Frustrated at the prospect of being forgotten, they are determined to keep the memory of their mission alive.
“The story of the struggle to save tens of thousands needs to be part of the annals of the people of Israel,” said David Gul, 97, one of the few members still alive. “It was a beacon in the time of the Holocaust, a lesson and an example for generations to come.”
As the world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, historians, activists, survivors and their families are bracing for a moment when there will no longer be living witnesses sharing first-person accounts of the horrors of Nazi genocide during World War II. In the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis and their allies.
Israel, which became a sanctuary for Jews after the Holocaust, has gone out of its way over the years to honor the thousands of “Righteousness of Nations” — non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Reports of Jewish revolts against the Nazis, such as the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, were a staple of the national narrative, but rescue missions for fellow Jews—such as those in Hungary—were little known.
Before the Nazi invasion, Hungary was home to approximately 900,000 Jews. Its government was allied with Nazi Germany, but as the Red Army advanced on Hungary, the Nazis invaded in March 1944 to prevent their Axis allies from striking a separate peace deal with the Allies.
Read also | International Holocaust Remembrance Day: History, meaning and theme of this year
In the ensuing 10 months, as many as 568,000 Jews were killed in Hungary by the Nazis and their allies, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Yad Vashem memorial.
When three Jewish women arrived at Budapest’s main synagogue in the fall of 1943, Gur said, he and his colleagues knew disaster was coming. They fled Nazi-occupied Poland and brought disturbing news of people being sent to concentration camps.
“They had pretty clear information on what was going on, and seeing a lot of trains, it was pretty obvious to them what was going on,” Gur said.
Gur oversaw a massive forgery operation that provided false documents to Jewish and non-Jewish members of the Hungarian resistance. “I was 18 when the responsibility fell on me,” he said.
There is great personal risk. In December 1944, he was arrested at a forgery workshop and brutally interrogated and imprisoned, according to his memoir, Brothers of Resistance and Rescue. Later that month, the Jewish underground freed him from the Central Military Prison in a rescue operation.
The forged documents were used by Jewish youth movements to run smuggling networks and run the Red Cross, saving thousands from the Nazis and their allies.
Read also | Ukrainian Jewish woman, 92, escapes Kyiv twice – first from Nazi Germany, then Russia
According to Gur’s book, at least 7,000 Jews were smuggled out of Hungary via Romania onto ships in the Black Sea that would take them to British-controlled Palestine. At least 10,000 falsified protection passes, known as Shutzpasses, were distributed to Jews in Budapest, and some 6,000 Jewish children and accompanying adults were kept in houses ostensibly protected by the International Red Cross.
Robert Rozett, a senior historian at Yad Vashem, said that although it was the “largest rescue operation” of European Jews during the Holocaust, the event still strayed from “the main lines of the narrative”.
“It’s very important because these events helped keep thousands of Jews alive in Budapest,” he said.
In 1984, Gur founded the Association for the Study of the History of the Hungarian Zionist Youth Movement, an organization aimed at raising awareness of this effort.
In a kibbutz in northern Israel last month, Sarah Epstein, 97, Dez Hefner-Leiner, 95, and Bezal Groz, 98, and the rest Three survivors who helped save Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary have received the Jewish Rescuer Award for their role in the Holocaust. The award is presented by two Jewish groups – B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem and the Committee Honoring the Bravery of Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust.
“We don’t have many people left, but this is important,” Heffner-Reiner said.
More than 200 other underground members received the award posthumously. Gur received the award in 2011, the year the award was created.
Yuval Alpan, the son of one of the rescuers and a social activist, said the citations honored those who saved lives during the Holocaust.
“The stories of this resistance underground youth movement that saved tens of thousands of Jews in 1944 are not being told,” he said. “This is the largest rescue operation of the Holocaust, but no one knows.”
International Holocaust Day coincides with the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp by the Red Army. Government figures show that there are about 150,600 Holocaust survivors in Israel, almost all of whom are over the age of 80. That’s 15,193 fewer than a year ago.
The United Nations will hold a commemorative ceremony at the General Assembly on Friday, with other commemorative events scheduled around the world.
Israel marks its own Holocaust Remembrance Day in the spring.
[ad_2]
Source link