Under Swiss Protection
Description
This volume retraces Carl Lutz's diplomatic wartime rescue efforts in Budapest, Hungary, through the lens of Jewish eyewitness testimonies. Together with his wife, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser, the director of the Palestine Office in Budapest, Moshe Krausz, fellow Swiss citizens Harald Feller, Ernst Vonrufs, Peter Zürcher, and the underground Zionist Youth Movement, Carl Lutz led an extensive rescue operation between March 1944 and February 1945. It is estimated that Lutz and his team of rescuers issued more than 50,000 lifesaving letters of protection (Schutzbriefe) and placed persecuted Jews in 76 safe houses-annexes of the Swiss Legation. Based on interviews with Holocaust survivors in Canada, Hungary, Israel, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States, this volume shines a light on the extraordinary scope and scale of Carl Lutz's humanitarian response.
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Content
- Intro
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- 1. INTRODUCTION
- Translators' Notes
- Editors' Notes
- Timeline
- 2. CARL LUTZ IN BUDAPEST
- Context and Milestones of the Rescue Activities of Carl Lutz and His Team
- 3. THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENT
- "Carl Lutz stood out like a monument-He was an example of what can be done"
- "On the nineteenth of March 1944, all of us went underground"
- "We tried to save whoever we could, however we could"
- "Every moment, every slip of paper meant human life"
- 4. PROFILES OF SURVIVORS: INTERVIEWS BY AGNES HIRSCHI (2000-2017)
- "Klári, an Arrow Cross man is looking for you"
- "During the bombardments, we hid ourselves in the pantry"
- "Eva never spoke about her childhood"
- "She refused to let the star be sewn onto her clothing"
- "The Red Cross and the Swiss legation had retrieved us from a death march"
- "I will never forget the horrors of the war years"
- "The American air raid saved our lives"
- "I was too young to understand the situation"
- "In my breadbasket, I would smuggle letters for the prisoners"
- 5. TESTIMONIES
- "I did not give up trying to get to no. 29 Vadász utca"
- "I took the doll, [ ], and we started making our way home"
- "I was proud of the small yellow star"
- "Our skirts were filled with the money our wise grandmother had sewn into our hems"
- "The man who changed my life"
- "I remember it was a house built of glass"
- "Shmulik played the accordion and we all sang Hatikvah on the ship's deck"
- "My fate was the exception"
- "Unlike adults, I don't think we, the children, realized the situation was that of life and death"
- "The movement began to provide us with false documents"
- "I didn't know for what I was liberated. The only reason was my son"
- "We were the last ones to get inside the Glass House"
- "Arthur Weisz paid with his life for having saved us"
- "And suddenly they called me saying that my father came back"
- "To this day, I have not been able to understand how she managed to find my father's Kiddush cup"
- "On October 20, at five o'clock in the morning, my Holocaust began"
- "I had many Christian friends who came to our home
- all that changed on March 12, 1938, when the Nazis took over"
- "Our mother convinced us to stay with Aunt Hannah under Swiss protection"
- "We were forced out of the bunker with tear gas and shoved naked in the snow"
- "The last time I saw my mother"
- 6. TRIBUTES AND LETTERS
- "Remembering 1944 and Carl Lutz"
- "We were left with what is the most precious: our lives"
- "Tribute to Carl Lutz"
- Letter to Carl Lutz (1945) A Handwritten Letter of Thanks from Geoffrey Tier
- "Diplomats are not expected to be heroes taking risks"
- 7. APPENDIX: EXCERPTS FROM SWISS COLLECTIVE PASSPORTS NO. 1 & NO. 2
- GLOSSARY
