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May 14, 2004
The Hungarian Holocaust
The Courage of a Just Man focuses on Giorgio Perlasca.
JÁNOS MATÉ SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
There are extraordinary people who seize the moment history offers
them and make an everlasting contribution to the collective story
and dignity of humanity. These people are heroes, and Giorgio Perlasca,
an Italian citizen, is one of them.
In the winter of 1944, Perlasca, who has been called the "Italian
Wallenberg" or the "Italian Schindler," repeatedly
risked his life to save the lives of more than 5,000 Hungarian Jews.
His daring actions are dramatically captured in the feature film
Perlasca: The Courage of a Just Man, which screens next week
as part of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival.
Perlasca was born in Como, Italy, in 1910. As a teenager and a young
man he strongly identified with the nationalist and fascist political
ideology and policies of the poet Gabrielle D'Annunzio and Benito
Mussolini. Acting on his beliefs, he volunteered to first fight
in Mussolini's war against Ethiopia in 1935 and then on Franco's
side in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War. At the end of the Spanish
Civil War, he returned to Italy.
Italy's alliance with Germany and the 1938 enforcement of Italian
race laws against Jews ended Perlasca's active support of fascism.
Later in life, he said: "I was neither a fascist nor an anti-fascist,
but I was anti-Nazi."
In 1943/'44, Perlasca was in Budapest working for an Italian export
import company when he witnessed the plight of Hungarian Jews. With
courage and ingenuity, he devoted himself to saving as many people
as he could during the last few months of the war. In October 1944,
he used his past connections to Franco to secure a job with Angel
Sanz-Briz, the Spanish envoy in Budapest. Changing his name from
Giorgio to Jorge, Perlasca was put in charge of the Spanish "safe
houses" sheltering Jews from German deportation and from the
murderous rampages of the Nyilas, the Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross
militia.
Sanz-Briz, along with other members of the diplomatic community,
had been issuing protective passes to Budapest Jews since the spring
of 1944. When the Spanish envoy was withdrawn from Budapest in November
1944, Perlasca, with forged papers, audaciously appointed himself
as Spain's charge d'affaires so that he could carry on his mission
to save Jewish lives. He continued to issue "safe passes"
and to look after the Jews in safe houses. He bribed Hungarian officials
and Nazi generals to remove Jews from cargo trains; he repeatedly
confronted German soldiers and literally snatched Jewish children
out of their clutches; and he fearlessly demanded that the authorities
honor the diplomatic status of the safe houses.
The Vancouver showing of the Perlasca film coincides with the 60th
anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. Of the 825,000 persons
considered Jews in 1941 in greater Hungary, about 565,000 perished.
Nearly 437,000 men, women and children, more than 50 per cent of
the entire Hungarian Jewry, were systematically deported and murdered
in Auschwitz-Birkenau within the span of 10 weeks in the spring
and early summer of 1944.
During these 10 weeks, a Sonderkommando of 200 men, under the direction
of Adolf Eichmann, engineered the most efficient genocide in modern
history, with the co-operation of the Hungarian state and the compliance
of Hungarian Jewish leaders. It was industrial slaughter that, according
to Eichmann, "went like a dream."
The operation was carried out until growing international outrage,
a rapidly deteriorating military situation and threats of retribution
from Western governments, forced the Hungarian government to order
a halt to the deportations of Jews on July 8. But the plight of
the remaining Jews was not over. Tens of thousands more died in
death marches, train transports, forced labor battalions, mass executions
by Nyila extermination squads, starvation, disease and suicide.
Nearly 95,000 Budapest Jews died between Oct. 15, after the Nyilas
seized power through a German-backed coup d'etat, and Jan. 18, 1945,
when the Soviet troops liberated the city. Many more would have
perished had it not been for the efforts of a few courageous foreign
diplomats like Angelo Rotta, the Papal Nuncio in Budapest, Per Anger
and Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, Carl Lutz of Switzerland and Giorgio
(Jorge) Perlasca of Italy and Spain. Nearly 33,000 Jews found shelter
in the diplomatically protected safe houses of Switzerland, Sweden,
the Red Cross and, amazingly, of fascist Spain.
After the war, Perlasca returned to Italy and kept his achievements
to himself. Only later, in 1988, due to the efforts of some Hungarian
Jewish women who were saved by him, was he recognized as a war hero.
He was subsequently awarded honorary citizenship from Israel, proclaimed
Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem, awarded highest honors by
Italy and Spain, and invited by the United States in 1990 to lay
the first stone of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.
Perlasca died on Aug. 15, 1992. He is buried in the cemetery at
Maserà, a few kilometres from Padova. He wished to be buried
in the ground, with the words written in Hebrew "Righteous
Among Nations."
Those he saved remember him with utmost gratitude. Veronica Winkler
of Richmond, B.C., is one of them. As a 20-year-old young woman
who had barely survived a "death march," she sought and
received help from Perlasca in November 1944. With tears in her
eyes, she says, "My sister and I owe our lives to that wonderful
man. Without him we would probably not have survived."
Among the victims of the Hungarian Holocaust were this writer's
grandparents, Anna and Dr. Joseph Lövi, of Kosicze, who died
in the gas chambers of Auschwitz on June 4, 1944. The Lövi
Memorial Endowment Fund of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre,
which was established in 1996 in their memory, is the sponsor of
the Perlasca film.
The screening takes place Wednesday, May 19, 7 p.m., in the Norman
Rothstein Theatre. It will be an occasion to honor the memory of
the victims of the Hungarian Holocaust and the courage of those
individuals who risked their lives to save others. Special guests
at the event will be the current consul general of Italy, Giorgio
Visetti, and the deputy mayor of Vancouver, Coun. Ellen Woodsworth.
János Maté was born in Budapest immediately
after the Second World War. His family escaped from Hungary during
the 1956 Hungarian revolution and immigrated to Canada. Presently
he is a video producer and the co-chair of Chutzpah! The Lisa Nemetz
Showcase of Jewish Performing Arts.
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