And yet the deportations continued, the trains steaming towards Auschwitz throughout May and into June.
But now some of the other seeds planted by Rudi and his fellow escapees began to flower. Perhaps it was that meeting with Monsignor Martilotti in the monastery on 20 June that did it, prompting the young papal envoy to report back to Rome . Maybe it was the first reports in the Swiss press on 24 June, generated in part by Walter Garrett cycling around Zurich in the early hours, that provided the last crucial push. Either way, on 25 June Pope Pius XII sent a telegram to Admiral Horthy in Budapest. It read:
We are being beseeched in various quarters to do everything in our power in order that, in this noble and chivalrous nation, the sufferings, already so heavy, endured by a large number of unfortunate people, because of their nationality or race, may not be extended and aggravated. As our Father’s heart cannot remain insensitive to these pressing supplications by virtue of our ministry of charity which embraces all men, we address Your Highness personally, appealing to your noble sentiments in full confidence that you will do everything in your power that so many unfortunate people may be spared other afflictions and other sorrows.
The pope had not been able to utter the word ‘Jews’， or to make his plea public , but his meaning was clear enough. The American president, meanwhile, was not quite so squeamish. The very next day, 26 June, and just as the truth of Auschwitz was becoming ever more public thanks to the press coverage coming out of Switzerland, Roosevelt had his secretary of state deliver a message to Horthy :
The United States demands to know whether the Hungarian authorities intend … to deport Jews to Poland or to any other place, or to employ any measures that would in the end result in their mass execution. Moreover, the United States wishes to remind the Hungarian authorities that all those responsible for carrying out those kind of injustices will be dealt with …
The pressure, unleashed by the publication of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, was unremitting. On 30 June, the king of Sweden, Gustav V, wrote to Horthy with a warning that, if the deportations did not stop, Hungary would become a ‘pariah among other nations’。 But it was that US warning, that war criminals would be held to account, that seemed to concentrate the regent’s mind.
‘I shall not tolerate this any further!’ Horthy told a council of his ministers the day Roosevelt’s message arrived. ‘The deportation of the Jews of Budapest must cease !’ Tellingly, that exhortation did not apply to the deportations outside Budapest. Those continued. The next day, 27 June, would see 12,421 Jews shipped to Auschwitz in four separate transports. The deportations would continue the next day and the next.
Despite his royal title, Horthy was not the master of his kingdom: issuing a command did not make it happen. There now ensued a power struggle inside the Hungarian government, as those bent on continuing to do the Nazis’ bidding, collaborating in the effort to rid the country of its Jews, sought to resist the regent’s edict. The security forces themselves were split: there was a tank division loyal to the regent, battalions of provincial gendarmes loyal to the Final Solution.
If Horthy was to prevail, he would have to move fast. Adolf Eichmann and his local fascist allies had drawn up a plan to ensnare the last major Jewish community still untouched by the hand of the SS: the 200,000 Jews of Budapest who were the last Jews of Hungary – and, in effect, the last Jews of Europe.
This is how it would work. On 2 July, thousands of Hungarian armed police would gather in Budapest’s Heroes Square on a pretext designed to arouse minimal suspicion: a flag ceremony to honour their comrades. Then, once the formalities were over, the gendarmes would quietly spend their three days of supposed leave making themselves familiar with the locations of the single-building mini-ghettos known as ‘yellow-star houses’， in particular working out how to block off potential escape routes for any Jews minded to flee. The trains carrying Budapest’s Jews to the gas chambers were scheduled for departure on 10 July .
Except events did not run to plan. On 2 July, the 15th Air Force of the United States dropped 1,200 tons of bombs in or near Budapest, killing 136 people and destroying 370 buildings. The bombs’ targets were, in fact, factories south of the capital, but that was not how it looked from inside Hungary’s ruling circles. To them, it seemed as if Roosevelt was making good his threat to hold the Hungarian political leadership responsible for the slaughter of the country’s Jews. Those at the top trembled at the prospect.
By 5 July, Horthy had installed a loyalist as the chief military commander in the capital and instructed him to take ‘all measures necessary to prevent the deportation of the Budapest Jews’。 That same night, he sent in the tanks. As the army moved in, the provincial police , there to round up Jews, were pushed out.
In the clash of wills, the regent had won. To be clear, his prime motive was self-preservation and the assertion of his own authority, rather than the saving of Jews. The deportation of the Jews of Hungary had not especially troubled him until that moment. Indeed, it would continue for the next three days, at the same intense pace as it had throughout May and June: there were five transports from the provinces on 9 July alone. There was one more on 20 July.
But the rest were stopped. One train bound for Auschwitz was even turned around and sent back, on Horthy’s orders. Eichmann was livid: ‘In all my long experience, such a thing has never happened to me before,’ he raged. ‘It cannot be tolerated !’ Under Horthy, there would be no deportations from Budapest.
The Jews of the capital city were saved, for now. There were many explanations – starting with the shifting calculus of Hungarian politics, as Germany began to look like the losing side in the war – but a crucial role was played by a thirty-two-page document, written by two men, one of them a teenager, who had done what no Jews had ever done before and escaped from Auschwitz. They had crossed mountains and rivers, they had hidden and starved, they had defied death and the most vicious enemy the world had ever seen. Their word had been doubted, it had been ignored and it had been suppressed. But now, at last, it had made the breakthrough they had longed for. Rudolf Vrba and Fred Wetzler had saved 200,000 lives.
PART V
The Shadow
25
A Wedding with Guns
F EW OF THOSE saved ever knew who they had to thank, but there was one exception. She was very clear in her own mind that it was the information conveyed to her by Rudolf Vrba that had saved her life. She was the girl who had nurtured a childhood crush on him back in Trnava: Gerta Sidonová.
When Gerta and Rudi met in those summer weeks in June 1944, taking afternoon walks and swimming in the Danube, Slovakia felt like a haven compared to neighbouring Hungary where, Rudi had told her, the Jews were now being shipped to the gas chambers of Auschwitz at a rate of 12,000 each day. In Slovakia, the deportations had stopped in the autumn of 1942.
Gerta had moved to Hungary and back to Slovakia again in the intervening years, shifting to whichever of the two countries was not murdering Jews at the time. And so she and her parents had fled to Hungary in 1942, only for she and her mother to return to Slovakia soon after the Nazis marched into Budapest. Her father did not make the journey with them. Trusting in authority, he had turned himself in to the Hungarian police and was never seen again.