The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II Read online

  The Hermans knew they would in all likelihood be next because they were alien Jews—Jews from another country. They had just one option: flee to Hungary, the last country in Europe from which Jews had not been deported en masse to the death camps, although sixty-thousand-odd had been killed in forced labor battalions. But did they still have the energy and will to make the dangerous crossing into Hungary? Vera’s forty-five-year-old father, Emil, had begun to tire of the constant stress of trying to stay a step ahead of the Nazis. Their years on the run had worn down this once proud and ebullient doctor’s strength and stamina.15

  Emil always tried to put on a brave face. Vera had seen him cry only once, when he thought she was not looking, his shoulders shaking as he looked out of a window and realized how desperate their situation was.16 “By now, he was, perhaps, just content to be a sitting duck,” she recalled. “But mothers in the Holocaust were not inclined to be sitting ducks.”17

  Margit, Vera’s forty-one-year-old mother, had heard about an underground railroad: peasants and partisans who could take Jews across the border into Hungary and all the way to Budapest. Margit didn’t have a contact in the organization, but she was determined to get in touch with it, no matter how. At great risk, she knocked on doors, asked around, ignored cruel rebuffs, and finally discovered someone who would help her. And that was how the family now came to be in the attic above a Nazi sympathizer’s farmhouse.

  THE HERMANS HID IN THE ATTIC and tried to be as quiet as possible. To her horror, Vera discovered rats scurrying around the attic. Their frantic scratching interrupted the happy chatter of young children in a room below. She was worried that the rats might attack her father’s balding head, so she wrapped her scarf around it for protection.18

  The Hermans spent the night and the following day in the attic. Unrelenting rain lashed against the barn’s roof. When they finally climbed down from their hiding place, they were drenched. They started walking with the man who had hidden them but didn’t get far before they were bogged down. “We sank into the mud, to mid-calf, and we literally had to lift each foot out to take the next step,” remembered Vera. “I was just so exhausted that I wanted to sit down in the mud and lean against one of the trees and take a nap. I said that to my mother, but she wasn’t impressed.”19

  They followed the young man through the woods, but then he spotted a light in a building that was usually dark. Something was wrong. He lost his nerve, not wanting to be caught with three Jews, and scurried away, leaving the Hermans alone in the dark forest. The rain still pelted down.20

  Margit ran after the young man and Vera watched, astonished at her mother’s speed.

  “You have children of your own,” Margit screamed at the young man. “Are you going to let this one die?”21

  No. He wasn’t. The young man said they would try again and took the Hermans back to the farmhouse. Forty-eight hours later, he collected them and they tried to escape Czechoslovakia once more. This time, the man led them along winding paths through a dense forest until they found themselves near the border with Hungary, and he directed them toward the local Hungarian railroad station.

  The Hermans took the first train to Budapest.

  Vera sat looking out the window, trying to look as “normal as possible” but feeling as if she were “going to explode” at any moment.

  Did we really make it? Vera asked herself. When are we going to get caught?

  Finally, the train pulled into Budapest. Germans, green-uniformed Arrow Cross men (Hungarian Nazis), and Hungarian soldiers crowded the platforms. From the train station, the Hermans set out for the Central Jewish Agency. They passed through the streets of Pest. Domes, spires, turrets, and cupolas jostled for attention. Balconies boasted bizarre mythological figures. Many buildings had a gaudy confidence with their imitation marble, fake bronze, art deco stained glass, and peeling stucco walls in every pastel shade imaginable.

  At the Central Jewish Agency, someone consulted a roster of Jews willing to take in other Jews and directed the Hermans to a family in Pest that had two girls, one of whom was about Vera’s age.22

  The Hermans had finally made it to Hungary, “a promised land for Jews on the run; the only place where you could be a Jew and stay alive.”23 Their escape had brought them a few more months of survival: “a miracle [that] we,” recalled Vera, “at the time could appreciate more than the native Jewish population.”24

  Vera and her family joined three hundred thousand Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled Europe who had already made it to Hungary. Despite the introduction of ever more punitive anti-Semitic laws under his quarter-century rule, Admiral Horthy had not agreed to liquidate these or his own country’s Jews, who constituted much of the middle class. After almost four years of genocide, the Hungarian Jews, who made up 5 percent of the population, still lived in relative safety.

  Most Hungarian Jews in fact felt utterly assimilated in Hungary, and many were fierce Magyar nationalists in a country that had been deeply scarred by the humiliation of defeat in the First World War and then the subsequent dismemberment under the Treaty of Trianon, in which two-thirds of the nation’s territory had been lost.

  Despite the resentments of a large, uneducated feudal class whose prejudices and hatreds were easily aroused, the Jews had nevertheless enjoyed an extraordinary prominence in the nation’s cultural and economic affairs, being especially prevalent in such professions as law, journalism, medicine, and academia. In the 1920s, an astonishing half of all Hungary’s lawyers were Jewish.25

  Horthy’s own views were common among Hungary’s elites at the time: “As regards the Jewish problem, I have been an anti-Semite throughout my life. I have never had contact with Jews. I have considered it intolerable that here in Hungary everything, every factory, bank, large fortune, business, theater, press, commerce, etc. should be in Jewish hands, and that the Jew should be the image reflected of Hungary, especially abroad. Since, however, one of the most important tasks of the government is to raise the standard of living, i.e., we have to acquire wealth, it is impossible, in a year or two, to eliminate the Jews, who have everything in their hands, and to replace them with incompetent, unworthy, mostly big-mouthed elements, for we should become bankrupt. This requires a generation at least.”26

  Although they had been gradually pauperized and their civil rights stripped from them, the Hungarian Jews were for the most part confident in early 1944 that nothing apocalyptic would happen to them. As Vera recalled: “They said: ‘It happened in Germany and in Czechoslovakia, but it is never going to happen in Hungary.’ They said this even though they knew that Jews [in labor brigades] had already been deported from the countryside. But it was not going to happen in Budapest, where Jews had been living for a thousand years.”27

  The Hermans, by contrast, knew only too well what could happen to Budapest’s Jews: Vera’s grandparents had already been sent to a death camp, revealed after the war as Auschwitz.28 They were among an estimated 90 percent of the prewar Jewish population—263,000 people—who were killed in the Final Solution in Czechoslovakia.

  3

  Mauthausen

  THE MERCEDES STAFF CARS passed through an entrance into the vast concentration camp of Mauthausen, situated on the northern bank of the Danube in upper Austria. One after another the SS officers stepped out of the cars and headed inside an SS barracks. The most ruthless and efficient mass murderers in all Nazi-occupied Europe, they were about to be briefed on how they were going to complete the Final Solution.

  As elsewhere in the vast gulag of Nazi concentration camps, it was just another day in Mauthausen. In a quarry in one section of the camp, emaciated Jews, communists, homosexuals, Gypsies, and any other so-called enemies of the Third Reich were being worked to death on the infamous Stairs of Death. Inmates carried rough blocks of stone, weighing more than a hundred pounds, up 186 uneven, often slippery and icy steps. Over and over, they climbed them, until they slipped or fell to their deaths. Today, as usual, prisoners collapsed and fe
ll back, knocking others over, falling into each other like dominoes. So it went, from dawn until dusk.

  The SS guards at Mauthausen quickly grew bored, even by this frequent spectacle, and would create their own sport, forcing inmates to race each other up the steps and then placing the survivors at the edge of a cliff, known as the Parachute Wall. At gunpoint, Jews and other inmates would then be given a quintessentially Nazi choice—be shot or push the person in front of them off the cliff.1

  As Adolf Eichmann and his men gathered, they had every reason to be confident yet again of success. Indeed, Eichmann had already carried out orders from his superiors—SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler, RSHA Chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and the Gestapo boss Heinrich Muller—with extreme diligence, not to mention impressive results, in Poland, Romania, Germany, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Slovakia, and Austria.2

  This cold March morning in Mauthausen, Eichmann reportedly gave a pep talk to his men. Time was of the essence, he stressed. In a week, a new operation vital to the survival of the Reich would begin: the German military occupation of Hungary, code-named Operation Margarethe. Eichmann’s men would follow in the footsteps of the occupying German forces and then set about removing the country’s million-odd Jews, the last significant population in Europe. The cleansing of Hungary would be fast and systematic.3 From east to west, Hungary would be rendered “Jew clean.” Each province would be cleared of Jews, with the capital, Budapest, saved until last. This final operation of the Final Solution would be completed in a matter of weeks, not months.

  “Now the turn of Hungary has come,” said Eichmann. “It will be a deportation surpassing every preceding operation in magnitude.”4

  “SEND DOWN THE MASTER IN PERSON,” Heinrich Himmler had commanded when told of the Nazi plans to occupy Hungary.5 “Comb the country from east to west! Begin with the eastern provinces, which the Russians are approaching. See to it that nothing like the Warsaw ghetto revolt is repeated in any way.”6

  That Master was Adolf Eichmann. He had been involved with the Final Solution from its inception and was now the key functionary in the Gestapo department assigned to ridding Europe of the Jews. In the words of his deputy, Dieter Wisliceny, he was “very cynical in his attitude to the Jewish question. He gave no indication of any human feeling toward these people. He was not immoral: he was amoral and completely ice-cold in his attitude.”7

  It seemed that nothing could stop Eichmann from killing Jews. According to Rudolf Hoss, commandant of Auschwitz, who knew Eichmann well and worked closely with him, “Eichmann was sharply opposed to every suggestion to sift out the Jews capable of work from those deported. He regarded this as a constant danger to his plans for the Final Solution, in view of the possibility of mass escapes or some other event that might permit the Jews to remain alive . . . He showed himself to be completely obsessed with the idea of destroying every single Jew he could lay his hands on.”8

  In 1942, Eichmann had argued against the mobilization of his men to deal with the partial deportation of alien Jews, such as the Hermans, from Hungary. But now, with Horthy under intense pressure from Hitler to cooperate fully with Nazi demands, there was the opportunity to carry out a total deportation, no piecemeal affair. Then he had advised: “Experience has proved [that] a partial action requires no less effort in preparation and execution than a total measure against all the Jews of a country . . . We had better wait till Hungary is ready to include all its Jews in the necessary measures.”9

  That time had come.

  DRESSED IN A SILVER-GRAY UNIFORM, Adolf Eichmann stood at the front of the column of 140 vehicles. It was now midday on March 19, 1944, a red letter day for the hard-drinking, increasingly dissolute colonel—his thirty-eighth birthday.10 Dragging on a cigarette, he surveyed his two-hundred-odd men as they readied to leave for Hungary. A corner of his thin-lipped mouth twitched. He had a nervous tic. From a distance, he was an unimposing figure with his thin frame, light brown hair, and impassive gray-blue eyes. He walked with a slight stoop, his legs bowed like a cowboy.

  Engines cranked up, clouds of exhaust fumes formed, and Adolf Eichmann stepped into his Mercedes staff car. He gave the command to move out, hot on the heels of no less than eleven Wehrmacht divisions that had stormed into Hungary and occupied it in the early hours of that morning. The ensuing journey to Budapest was almost a festive affair. En route, Eichmann and his closest advisers stopped in his hometown of Linz and gathered around to celebrate his birthday with a bottle of rum.

  Among the well-wishers were Herman Krumey, Dieter Wisliceny, and Theodor Dannecker. Krumey, a bespectacled toady who had earned the nickname “Bloodhound of Vienna,” had cleansed Amsterdam, Warsaw, and Paris of “dirty” Jews. Like many of Eichmann’s men, he had a weakness for prostitutes, and in Budapest he would soon find himself a new mistress, Eva Kosytorz—a notorious courtesan who would become as loathed and feared as her porcine lover.

  Perhaps the most fanatical anti-Semite among Eichmann’s aides was Dannecker, dubbed the “Exterminating Angel.” He had earned his reputation for diligence in the French countryside, hunting down Jewish children who had somehow escaped the Nazis’ massive Europe-wide dragnet. According to Xavier Vallat, the first French commissioner for Jewish Questions in Vichy, France, Dannecker was “a fanatical Nazi who went into a trance every time the word Jew was mentioned.”11 He was also something of a fusspot, according to his colleagues, and a superb pimp, Eichmann’s ever-ready provider of sexual distraction. In Paris, he had organized several clubs, along the lines of Salon Kitty, the famous brothel in Berlin. The most beautiful girls were easy to procure: Most often, they were pulled from the terrified lines of deportees at Drancy by Dannecker’s men and told they could “spare themselves the journey East” by becoming high-class whores. According to one source, Dannecker himself liked to select them from a distance. Later, at his office, they were told to strip and were then marched back and forth so he could inspect their suitability. They could either serve the SS or die. It was that simple. Few refused.12

  The Austrian Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann’s obese, sometimes jocular deputy, had cleared out Slovakia and Greece. Rumor had it that all a smart, wealthy Jew had to do was slip a diamond into an expensive white chocolate truffle and Wisliceny would arrange for his death list to be one name shorter. He would soon become so fat, gorging on Hungarian cuisine, that he would find it difficult to sit comfortably in a chair.

  It was Wisliceny whom Eichmann had first informed in 1942 of plans for the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. “I was sent to Berlin in July or August 1942 in connection with the status of Jews from Slovakia,” Wisliceny recalled. “I was talking to Eichmann in his office in Berlin when he said that on a [written] order of Himmler all Jews were to be exterminated. I requested to be shown the order. He took a file from the safe and showed me a top secret document with a red border, indicating immediate action. It was addressed jointly to the chief of the Security Police and SD [Security Service] and to the inspector of concentration camps. The letter read substantially as follows:The Fuehrer has decided that the final solution of the Jewish question is to start immediately. I designate the Chief of the Security Police and SD and the Inspector of Concentration Camps as responsible for the execution of this order. The particulars of the program are to be agreed upon by the Chief of the Security Police and SD and the Inspector of Concentration Camps. I am to be informed currently as to the execution of this order.

  “The order was signed by Himmler and was dated sometime in April 1942. Eichmann told me that the words final solution meant the biological extermination of the Jewish race, but that for the time being able-bodied Jews were to be spared and employed in industry to meet current requirements. I was so much impressed with this document which gave Eichmann authority to kill millions of people that I said at the time: “May God forbid that our enemies should ever do anything similar to the German people.” He replied: “Don’t be sentimental—this is a Fuhrer order.”

 
An order, Wisliceny realized, that was in fact the “death warrant for millions of people.”13

  THE GERMAN OCCUPATION of Budapest on March 19 came as an enormous shock to the Jews living there. One Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia, who would soon become active in the Hungarian Zionist Youth Resistance movement in Budapest, vividly recalled “the endless columns of gray tanks, the motorbikes, the vehicles in military camouflage, everything moving forward wordlessly with clockwork precision, spreading fear and terror across the snow-covered city. What we had so feared and had warned of so often was now happening.”14 Eighteen-year old Marianne Lowy, an attractive, dark-haired aspiring actress and dancer, was due to meet with her fiancée, Pista Reiss, at 11 a.m. on the Corso, Budapest’s famous riverside promenade, where families and young lovers would sit on beautiful spring Sunday mornings. Marianne and Pista, ten years her elder, had just furnished an apartment in the hills of Buda with Swedish modern furniture and Oriental rugs. They couldn’t wait to move in after their marriage in three weeks’ time. Marianne had already picked out a dress and a veil of finest Brussels lace.

  Around 10 a.m., just as Marianne was about to put on a new spring dress, the telephone rang. It was Pista, calling from the new apartment, which had a superb view of the Danube. “Don’t go out of your house,” he said. “The Germans . . . I’m looking out the window and I can see the German army marching across the bridges.”15

  And so it was, Marianne recalled, that the “world of my girlhood suddenly ended.”16

  4

  The Last Refuge

  EICHMANN ARRIVED IN BUDAPEST on March 19, 1944, with the swagger and ambition of a man who knew he was close to ridding all of Nazi-occupied Europe of its Jews. Hungary was the last place where they could be found in large numbers, more than 725,000 of them, and if he had his way, they would be dispatched in record time to the gas chambers in Auschwitz.1 Almost half had already escaped his grasp and were refugees, like Vera Herman and her family, from other countries.2