A colleague at the consulate adds: ‘Fear that they, too, will end up in a gas chamber pushes the persecuted into a state in which they can now scarcely be called human. They are completely at the mercy of the brutal guards.’
He read, as I read, a report from Police Captain Batizfalvy:
Those arriving at the border crossing of Hegyeshalom are handed over to SS Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny. The Hungarian committee handover is led by László Bartha. By their number, not their names: 10,000 human beings had already lost their lives before reaching the border, mostly shot dead, beaten or starved to death. At Gönyű several hundred people are lying on barges waiting for death as a result of many days of walking, starvation and torture. On the way back there were hundreds of dead bodies lying by the roadside, nobody having given any thought to burying them.
At the same time that Lutz was reading those reports an Arrow Cross squad burst into the Great Synagogue and picked out ten men who are hauled out into the yard outside.
I hear the burst of gunfire.
It is ten days since the Swiss Minister Maximilian Jaeger had left to travel back to Berne, and in their final talk had left it up to him whether he stayed in Budapest or went home, too. Every day Carl Lutz and his wife posed themselves the same question: should they go or should they stay. They had arranged weeks before for their furniture to be removed. He would have been delighted, I read, if his own name had been included in the telegraphed instruction that the head of the Swiss mission in Budapest had been sent by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Berne in response to the question as to whether he was willing to accept the invitation made by the government of the Hungarian Prime Minister Szálasi and relocate the Swiss representative mission to Sopron, the city in western Hungary to which the government offices were being withdrawn. ‘We see little possibility of the Swiss Legation being able to follow the Szálasi government. We ask you to entrust Kilchmann and staff with the protection of the Swiss colony in Budapest and to report with Major Fontana to Berne.’
Frau Lutz asks her husband what will become of them. Neither our name nor what will happen to the department are mentioned in the telegram, says Lutz after he has discussed this with the minister. So what did Jaeger say? He said I was to do as my conscience dictates.
The following day he receives a request from the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to relocate his Representative Department for Foreign Interests to Sopron or face the loss of all diplomatic rights should this not be done. An hour later the news came through that the German Embassy was on the brink of removing to Sopron. The person who transmitted this added enigmatically that as long as Lutz was in Budapest the Arrow Cross should not attack Jewish yellow-star houses under the protection of foreign embassies.
Who is sending you cryptic messages from the German Legation, Frau Lutz asks?
Lutz paces in front of the colonial writing desk. Dr Gerhart Feine, he says. Who’s Dr Feine, if I may ask? His wife lights up a fresh cigarette and pours a brandy for herself; she does not pour one for her husband. The first secretary at the embassy, says Lutz. He’s the one who, four years ago, when we were representing German interests in British-mandated Palestine always thanked me for my efforts. The parties, oh my God! says his wife, tossing back the drink; the parties were most agreeable; it was just the climate that was so unbearable!
He had likewise poured a drink for himself, and likewise thrown it back twelve days later, when Moshe Krausz, head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine in Budapest, placed on the Vice-Consul’s desk a copy of the minutes of a meeting that he had attended on Lutz’s behalf to represent the Swiss Legation.
Gertrud Lutz is in a négligé with a deep décolletage, from which the lace of her blue silk nightdress is visible. It is a quarter past midnight. The chandelier is shaking from nearby bomb strikes.
Lutz reads the minutes, which record what police captain Batizfalvy had experienced on a more recent visit to Hegyeshalom. He supposed, he read, that he had seen them set off from the Óbuda Brickworks mentioned in the reports. In Batizfalvy’s view, says Moshe Krausz, many members of the escorting guard could not bear the sight of people being tortured, some even saying they would prefer to be sent to the front rather than continue to take part in the horrors. Batizfalvy had acquired an open order, and if we were to set off in a registered legation car he undertook to accompany us to Hegyeshalom, says Moshe Krausz; if we were to take blank Schutzbriefe along we could fill those out at the border for the people who were in the worst shape. That is why the officers are here.
There are two officers: a slim, fair-haired first lieutenant in the artillery and a squat infantry second lieutenant. Both are members of a resistance group among army officers. Alongside the first lieutenant is a tall, blonde, attractive woman in her forties; she has one arm around him. Lutz’s wife looks at her with interest, asking her what hair dye she uses, poppet; what is your natural hair colour? Brunette, says the woman, dark brown. Frau Lutz pours a drink for her and the two officers; she polishes it off in such a way that she does not wriggle out of the first lieutenant’s embrace to do so.
Lutz seemed at a loss to start with, but then he swiftly made arrangements, the blonde woman told my mother later. Gizi could not tell her coherently what had happened, Mother later told me. Both of them left it up to me to try to assemble the words, like fragments of sentences on slips of paper floating in time, to restore order to the unrestorable — the fact was that Gizi had not paid much attention to the faces, and although she distinctly remembered Frau Lutz asking about her hair colour and that it was Hennessy cognac that they drank, still her clearest memory was that Károly had been woken up one hour earlier by his batman to be told that an order had come in that he should set off for the Swiss Consulate.
But that can wait five minutes, Gizi says in the bed. They had made love for five minutes; Gizi had related that, too, Mother later told me; Gizi even said that they had not had enough time to wash because Károly’s fellow officer, the infantry second lieutenant, was waiting at the gate in a car.
Gizi was Mother’s aunt, although no more than two years older — in 1944 she was forty-three years old.
On other occasions Károly was a stickler for formalities, but that time he permitted me to put an arm round him even at the Lutzes’. The woman was uninhibited: it was evident that she would happily go to bed with Károly and that she had made the drink for me in order to obtain my approval.
Lutz’s hands were trembling, but he went ahead straight away with making arrangements. We knew he already had a long experience of consular duties, having worked in America and in Palestine for the British; he issued the orders like clockwork … we, too, did everything … like clockwork … If we had not operated that way we would not have dared go out on the streets. Nor should I forget that Lutz kept his eye on me for a long time. How had I ended up there? Perhaps he thought I was a grass.
Lutz gives an order that the legation’s other car should be brought out. The infantry second lieutenant declares that his own car is also available. The first lieutenant says that the two of them, along with the woman who was with them (only now did Lutz notice her Red Cross armband), were also ready to go. He says that they are in contact with the He-Halutz, the Zionist socialist pioneer youth movement, which has been organizing the rescue of Budapest’s Jews, and they have at their disposal some cars camouflaged as Red Cross ambulances. Frau Lutz turns to Gizi. Won’t this be too risky, poppet? Gizi says she has already made the trip once; she is looking for her younger sister, who was in one of the marching columns that had set off from the brickworks.