[Written in 2011]
Background
In May 1944, the Jews of Hungary were forced by the SS, their local ally the Arrow Cross, and with the help of the Gendarmes, from their homes and deported to concentration camps scattered all over occupied Europe. Most of them were taken to Auschwitz, where more than a third of all the Jews killed there were of Hungarian origin. Some people were gassed and cremated on arrival, others a little later, but almost all were murdered within a period of 10 weeks. Also in May, against fierce German resistance, the Russians had re-captured all of the Ukraine and crossed the border into Romania. The Red Army was about to enter Hungary, but none of this lessened the German determination to complete the task of making Europe Jew-free. On the contrary, it became paramount for the Nazis to complete the job before defeat.
There were brave people who stood in their way, risking their own lives to save Jews. Raoul Wallenberg, Carl Lutz and the Papal Nuncio to Hungary, Archbishop Angelo Rotta, were often successful in frustrating the Nazis. Rudolph (Rezsö, Yisrael) Kasztner and Joel Brant also tried. They were attempting to negotiate a deal to exchange Jews for goods with the Allied Powers. The Germans were disingenuous; they were simply playing for time. Although the deal was doomed, Kasztner managed to convince the Germans to release 1684 Jews (mainly his family, friends and those with enough money to pay the Nazis’ ransom) as a goodwill gesture to the Western Powers. And there was George Mandel…
Georges Mandel
Source: Wikipedia
Bistritza is a small town in northern Transylvania, Romania. Like so many places in the western foothills of the eastern Carpathian Mountains, this settlement was part of historical Hungary until the Trianon Treaty in 1920, when Transylvania was awarded to Romania. The town’s population of 20,000 in the ‘30s was a mixture of Hungarians, Romanians, Gypsies and Suabians. The Hungarian-speaking 2,370 Jews made up about 11% of the town’s population.
In the first half of the 20th century, borders in the Carpathian basin were not permanent and at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna on 30th August 1940, the foreign ministers of the Axis Powers, von Ribbentrop of Germany and Galeazzo Ciano of Italy, awarded Northern Transylvania back to Hungary. The new borders were guaranteed by both Germany and Italy. By the stroke of a pen and without a fight, Bistritza became part of Hungary again.
The Honorary Consul
Mendl György (George Mandel) was born in Bistritza in 1901. His father, an observant Jew, was a mill owner. The family was well-to-do, but the two sons, József and György, chose not to join the family business. The brothers started a textile manufacturing facility. In order to make the cogs of business run without too much official interference, the brothers took in influential high ranking Romanian army officers, one of them General Draganescu, as sleeping partners. As the business grew, they moved it to the nearest big town of Cluj, (Kolozsvár in Hungarian) and then to Bucharest. After the return of Bistritza to Hungary, his business activities relocated again, this time to Budapest. His enterprise demanded that he travel extensively. He happened to be in Vienna when, in 1938, Hitler annexed Austria and saw personally the fate which had befallen the Jews there. In 1939, he was in Prague when the Germans goose-stepped in. He also witnessed the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. Mendl György realised that the outlook for Jews was disastrous without precedent.
El Salvador borders the Pacific Ocean between Guatemala and Honduras. With a population of approximately 5.8 million people in the early ‘40s, it was (and is) the most densely populated nation in Central America. To promote their main national product, coffee, El Salvador wanted to establish a diplomatic service in Central Europe. In 1939, after having met the charming, polished and rich Mendl György, (who by now called himself George Mandel) Colonel José Arturo Castellanos, the Salvadoran diplomat, offered him the post of honorary roving consul covering Hungary, Romania and the neighbouring countries. He spoke no Spanish and he knew almost nothing of El Salvador, but being a neutral diplomat could prove advantageous for business, and therefore he accepted the role. A diplomatic passport was made out to him under the name of George Mandel-Mantello, adding Mantello to his surname to sound Spanish. His passport opened borders for him, and unusually for anyone in those days, let alone a Jew, he could cross borders without hindrance. He used this advantage to rescue Jews from the German occupied countries.
Colonel José Arturo Castellanos, Salvadoran diplomat
Source: World Jewish Congress
Escape to Switzerland
In 1942, he was in Zagreb, Croatia, when the Nazis, suspecting him of being involved in Jew smuggling, confiscated his papers and placed him under house arrest at his hotel. Things looked bad, but his business partner, General Draganescu, asked a mutual friend, a Romanian air force pilot, Captain Vasilescu, to hasten to Zagreb to rescue his partner. In full military splendour, he simply walked in past the SS guarding the hotel room. George had changed into the spare uniform brought by Vasilescu and they simply sauntered out. After driving to a military airstrip, they took off in a small aircraft for Milan. From there he continued his journey by train to Switzerland from where his brother Joseph had carried on running the business. Mandel found safety in Switzerland, but his wife, Irén, and son, Imre and parents in- law were left behind in Hungary.
The Rescuer of Fellow Jews
Mandel-Mantello presented himself to the Consul General of El Salvador in Geneva, who happened to be his old friend Colonel José Arturo Castellanos. Castellanos hired him as Secretary General (a fictitious title that does not exist in the Salvadoran diplomatic hierarchy). In this capacity and in association with a French Jewish émigré, Maître Matthieou Muller, a lawyer who had been the president of the Agudat Yisrael in France before the war, he produced false Salvadoran citizenship papers to be distributed by hand (by voluntary couriers at great risk to themselves). The operation was completely financed by Mandel-Mantello himself and these documents were available to anyone who needed it, free of charge. The documents granted the bearers the right to seek and receive the protection of the International Red Cross; these guarantees saved thousands of “Salvadorans” of Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian extraction from Nazi atrocities. Although these papers were false, the Salvadoran government asked the Swiss, as their neutral representatives in Budapest, to protect the new Salvadoran citizens! It is estimated that Mandel, Muller and Colonel José Arturo Castellanos helped save up to 40,000 Central European Jews from Nazi persecution.
The First Escape
In Auschwitz, the German death machine was operating at full capacity and in total secrecy. Escape from this hellhole was virtually impossible and if anyone managed to get out, the anti-Semitic local population shot many. However, there were exceptions…
Walter Rosenberg (b.11 Sept 1924, d.27 March 2006) and Alfred Wetzler (b.10 May 1918 d.1988) (aliases Rudolf Vrba and Josef Lanik) had been inmates in the camp since June 1942 and for almost two years, the two observed the daily tortures, medical experiments and murders taking place in the camp. The 18-year-old Rudolf Vrba had plans to escape at least three times, in December 1942, May 1943 and January 1944. Having informed the leaders of the Resistance inside the camp on 7th April 1944 of his plans, and accompanied by Josef Lanik, he hid in a woodpile for three days; the two men then managed to pass the various watchtowers, electrified fences, and guards. Inside the woodpile, Vrba had spread tobacco soaked in petrol, on the inside walls of their hiding place, so that the 200 odd trained vicious dogs kept in Auschwitz, would not pick up their scents. “Only Russian tobacco, remember, I am not being patriotic. I just know Makhorka (a terribly vile smelling, incredible strong cigarette, a product of the “world leading” Soviet industry) is the only stuff that works,” was the advice to Vrba, by his Russian friend, Dmitri Volkov, a Soviet prisoner of war and a veteran of Auschwitz. The two succeeded in escaping! With the help of a Polish partisan, they crossed the border to Slovakia on Friday 21st April 1944, where they found refuge with a farmer by the name of Canesky, in the village of Skalite. Vrba recalled,
“We met accidentally on the march within one kilometre of the German Slovak border. He was working in his fields. He saw that we had crossed the border ‘on our stomachs’, and invited us for lunch.”
Rudolf Vrba (left) (Source: HMD Trust) and Alfred Wetzler (right) (Source: jewishcemetery.sk)
The Secret Is Out
Urgently, they got in touch with Erwin Steiner, a representative of the Jewish Council of Slovakia. Steiner at once contacted the Jewish community leaders in Bratislava. He spoke to Oskar Krasnansky, a Zionist leader, who hastened to meet Vrba and Lanik. Krasnansky interrogated them thoroughly and they gave a precise and detailed account of what was going on in Auschwitz. No one believed them, but after checking the Council’s documents regarding deportations, which had been brought from Bratislava, their story checked out. Krasnansky wrote a covering letter to the Vrba and Lanik report stating that it contained
“only what one or the other, or both, experienced, witnessed, or had knowledge of directly.”
This testimony became known as the ‘Auschwitz Protocol’. Although it was written in the Slovak language, Krasnansky translated it to German and his typist made several copies. One copy was sent via a courier to Istanbul for the Jewish Agency, but it did not arrive, the courier being a paid Nazi spy. Rabbi Dov Weissmandel offered to have a copy smuggled to Switzerland for the Western world, but first he took his copy to Nitra, to show it to his father-in-law, Rabbi Unger, the Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox Jewish community. In Nitra, the Protocol was translated into Yiddish. This copy seems to have disappeared too. A third copy went to Monsignor Giuseppe Burzio, the Papal Chargé d’Affairs in Bratislava, who himself questioned the escapees, and on 22nd May, sent it on to the Vatican. In June 1944, Giuseppe Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII) received a further copy. This documented, in detail, the mass murders at the camp and he, just as Monsignor Giuseppe Burzio before him, forwarded the report to the Vatican. The Vatican authorities later claimed they did not know about the report until October 1944. After much procrastination, in October 1944, just prior to Auschwitz being liberated by the Russians, Pope Pius XII warned the Hungarian Regent, Miklos Horthy, that the deported Jews’ fate was death by gassing. Once Allied victory looked more than likely, the Pope, for practical rather than moral reasons, advised the German and Hungarian bishops that it would be to their ultimate political advantage to go on record as speaking out against the massacres of the Jews. Having seen the preparations for the reception of the Hungarian Jewry in Auschwitz, the two young Slovaks wanted to warn them to organise themselves to lessen the disaster Auschwitz would bring. To this end, Krasnansky personally translated the document into Hungarian.
"I was attracted by the possibility of damage to the plans of the Nazis by divulging them to the Hungarian Jewish population while they are still in freedom, and can take to the streets,”
Vrba wrote later. Why was that not happening?
'The Auschwitz Protocol'
(Source: USHMM)
‘Goods for Blood’ versus Resistance
On hearing of the ‘Auschwitz Protocol’, Rezsõ Kasztner, the head of the ‘Va’adat Ezrah Vehatzalah’ (in short, the ‘Va’ada’) (the Aid and Rescue Committee), a frequent visitor to Bratislava, immediately took a train to the capital of Slovakia to find out about it at first hand. He arrived on 25th April and returned with a copy of the ‘Protocol’ on the 28th April 1944. On the 29th, he went to 12 Sip Street, the headquarters of the Neolog (Conservative?) Jewish Community and presented the documents to them. Dr Samu Stern, the chair, asked if all these horror stories were at all conceivable. A discussion ensued and the leaders concluded that the document was best kept a secret, lest the young trouble-making hotheads get hold of it and create situations, which the Nazis would exploit for murdering Jews (as if they did not know what had been done in Russia and Poland, and as if the Germans needed any excuse).
Another reason given was that negotiations had been going on between Eichmann, Kasztner and the Hungarian Jewish leadership about the “Goods for Blood” offer and they did not want to rock the boat. Nevertheless, Kasztner decided that the neutral powers must be aware of the existence of this document and sent copies to their respective representatives. Carl Lutz, the Swiss Vice-Consul was shocked to the core on reading it.
According to Vrba, had the facts, which he and Wetzler brought out of Auschwitz, been immediately publicised in Hungary, many would have been stirred in to action to resist or obstruct the deportation. Had the Jews of Hungary been privy to the facts about Auschwitz,
"they would have been less ready to board the trains and the whole action of deportation would have been slowed down,”
in Vrba’s opinion. However, all able-bodied Jewish men in Hungary, who could have, or may have, risen against the deportation, were conscripted to Labour Units and were slaving away somewhere to facilitate the war effort. These Jewish men, like my father, had their own stories. The Hungarian Army methodically and deliberately murdered their fellow conscripted citizens just because they were Jews. My father, for instance, was made to march in front of the “brave” Hungarian soldiers, so if the road had been mined, he would die rather than them. My father survived, but tens of thousands did not!
Kasztner showed the documents to Eichmann, the person who had been in overall charge for transporting the Hungarian Jews to their deaths! This was to show Eichmann that without Kasztner’s acquiescence, the transportation would not run smoothly. Kasztner, in return, was allowed to have a train full of Jews depart for Switzerland. Eichmann read the ‘Protocol’ and handed it back smiling and asked, “Do you really believe this Allied war propaganda?” He also reminded Kasztner that there were similar unfounded accusations during the First World War. Then he told Kasztner that spreading anti-German propaganda was unlawful and he was liable to be arrested.
Publicising the Auschwitz Protocol
On 19 March 1944, George Mandel-Mantello received the news of the German occupation of Hungary. He frantically tried to telephone home, but the phone gave the disconnected signal. George, worried, asked a fellow diplomat and old friend, Dr Florian Maniliou (the Commercial Attache of the Romanian legation in Bern) to visit his family in Transylvania under the pretext of diplomatic business. He asked the diplomat to hand them one of the Salvadoran citizenship papers for protection and return via Budapest to give the rest to the Swiss Consul Carl Lutz for distribution.
For Mandel-Mantello’s family, the diplomat was unfortunately too late. He found Christians living in the house and they informed him that the previous owners of the property, with the rest of the town’s Jews, had been deported to Poland. This information was accompanied with a finger crossing the neck. The locals had a good idea of the fate awaiting the Jews, and were very happy to assist the Germans in order to lay their hands on property that was not theirs. On his return journey, as promised, Dr Florian Maniliou met Carl Lutz and handed him the Salvadoran documents. Lutz, in return, gave him a copy of the ‘Auschwitz Protocol’ to deliver to Mandel-Mantello. However, Moshe Krausz, the Jewish Agency’s Budapest representative and one of Lutz’s collaborators, who prepared the document, insisted that the document be delivered to his counterpart in Geneva and not to Mandel. To this end, he enclosed a personal letter addressed to Dr Haim Posner, the Jewish Agency representative in Switzerland. When Maniliou arrived back in Geneva, Mandel-Mantello persuaded him that he should hand him the ‘Protocol’ and letter before presenting them to Posner. After reading it, Mandel-Mantello found it to be too long for publication; therefore, he edited it to manageable proportions leaving the important bits in. He took Moshe Krausz’s personal letter, replaced Dr Posner’s name with his own, and added at the bottom,
“Helfet, Helfet und Helfet!” (Help, Help and Help!).
He then returned the originals to Maniliou for delivery to Dr Posner. Mandel-Montello presented his version to the Swiss-Hungarian Aid Committee in Geneva. Then he travelled to Zurich to inform other members of the Committee. There was an immense shock. One member, Chief Rabbi Kornfein (of Hungarian origin) said,
“We really should tear our cloths in the face of this disaster, which reminds us of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem and makes us weep over the countless innocent children, mothers and old people, whom the barbarians are murdering so brutally.”
The group decided that the shortened ‘Protocol’ and the Krausz letter should be made available to politicians and public alike. In order to overcome the wartime censorship in Switzerland that would not permit any anti-German publication for fear of breaking the laws of Swiss neutrality, Mandel-Mantello further doctored the documents by adding an Istanbul date to it (Turkey was also neutral). Almost all the Swiss newspapers, contrary to government order, published the letter and the ‘Protocol’ on their front pages. As a result, prominent and important personalities issued an appeal for the stopping of the deportations. When the German minister to Switzerland protested against this “Kriegsgreuelpropaganda” (lit: atrocities propaganda), the Swiss Foreign Minister replied that it was up to the German government to prove that this was not true. Mandel-Mantello also supplied the Swedish press with the ‘Protocol’ and the Krausz letter. On 23rd June, he gave a copy of the two documents to Walter Garrett, the Zurich representative of the British Exchange Telegraph Company who published the documents in both the UK and the US. Suddenly there were denunciations on the radio and by the press. Thousands turned up at the Madison Square Garden demanding to be told what exactly was going on in Nazi Europe. President Roosevelt set up the War Refugee Board to rescue Jews. The War Refugee Board financed the activities of the other great rescuer of Hungarian Jewry, the Swede Raoul Wallenberg.
The Second Escape
Rudolf Vrba and Josef Lanik were not the only ones to break out from Auschwitz. On 27th May another two Jewish prisoners escaped. They were a young man from Poland named Czeslaw Mordowitz and another Slovak called Arnost Rosin. Rosin had been the head of the block where Josef Lanik worked as a clerk. Because of this, Rosin was questioned and tortured by the SS and was condemned to hard labour in a gravel pit. There he met Mordowitz, who was also being punished for some infringement. During their work there, these two found a bunker filled with stones. With the help of two non-Jewish imprisoned Polish Army officers, bit by bit they prepared the bunker for escape. Their plan was to go north and somehow cross the Baltic into neutral Sweden. After hiding in the bunker and remaining undetected during the searches, they managed to slip out and through the outer perimeter unnoticed. Near Cracow, a peasant woman informed them that all the men of the area had been taken for forced labour. Young males would be conspicuous in a place full of women, children and old people. They therefore changed their destination and struck out south toward Slovakia, which they reached on 6th June. Just as Vrba and Lanik before them, they contacted the Slovak Jewish leaders and related their eyewitness account of the destruction of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Vrba and Lanik saw the preparation of this destruction, but Mordowitz and Rosin were witnesses to the deed itself.
Arnost Rosin, Josef Weiss (Bratislava Ministry of Health) and Rudolf Vrba (left to right)
in Bratislava, 1944
Source: remember.org
Informing the West
Oskar Krasnansky and the Slovak Jewish leadership placed the two sets of escapees in separate rooms and proceeded to cross-examine them. After a comparison, there were no doubts as to the authenticity of their report, but even they found the reality of Auschwitz difficult to believe. How much more difficult would it be for a non-Jew?
The Slovak Jewish leaders prepared a combined Vrba/Lanik and Rosin/Mordowitz report for transmission by a reliable courier to the West. On 13th of June, a copy reached Dr Jaromir Kopecky, the Geneva the representative of the Czechoslovak Government in exile. Kopecky forwarded the documents through channels to the Americans. On 18th June 1944, there was a brief broadcast detailing the reports on the BBC. The veil on Auschwitz had been lifted but the deportations and killings continued.
After the War
The end of the war found George Mandel-Mantello in Switzerland, where he continued his business activities. Mandel remarried and had two sons and a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce. In 1953, he moved to Rome where he led a quiet life, not seeking any recognition for his actions. Mandel-Montello died on 25th April 1992, aged 91. But Mandel-Montello was not forgotten. In 1988, New York's Mayor, Edward I. Koch, awarded him the city’s Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Medal, and in 1989, he received an honorary doctorate from Yeshiva University.
On 11th June 2008, George Mandel-Mantello was remembered posthumously at an event hosted by the Embassy of El Salvador in Washington. El Salvador is the smallest Central American republic, with a population of approximately seven million people (July 2008 Census). Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were saved during the Holocaust, in what was known as the ‘El Salvador Action’. To this day, El Salvador remains a friend of the Jewish people. The Salvadoran government has always condemned anti-Zionist resolutions at the UN. Until the year 2006, El Salvador and Costa Rica were the only two countries that maintained embassies in Jerusalem.
Castellanos hardly ever spoke of his role as rescuer during the war. In 1999, the Jerusalem City Council honoured Castellanos’ granddaughter by the inauguration of El Salvador Street in the neighbourhood of Givat Masua. After the war, Castellanos was posted to London. After retiring to El Salvador, Castellanos died in obscurity in San Salvador in 1977.
In September 1944, Vrba joined the Czechoslovak partisans. After the war, he received the Czechoslovak Medal for Bravery, the Order of Slovak National Insurrection, and the Order of Meritorious Fighter. He became an enthusiastic member of the ruling Communist Party and legally changed his name to Vrba. Vrba moved to Prague and there he attended and worked at the Prague Technical University, where he received his doctorate in chemistry and biochemistry. Vrba married a childhood friend, Gerta, a Slovak Jewess, who survived the war and became a medical doctor. They had two daughters, but this marriage also failed.
In 1952, fourteen leading party members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party were tried in Prague for conspiracy against the state. Of these, eleven were Jewish, including the party secretary-general, Rudolf Slánský. Vrba just could not believe what had happened. Disillusioned, in 1958, he defected and settled in Israel. He worked for the next two years at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. He moved to England in 1960, becoming a British citizen in 1966. Vrba migrated to Canada in 1967, serving on the Medical Research Council of Canada from 1967 to 1973, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1972. On a sabbatical to Harvard Medical School, he met his second wife Robin. Vrba passed away on 27th March 2006, aged 82.
Rezső (Rudolf Israel) Kasztner, 1950s
Source: Wikipedia
Yisrael Kasztner moved to Israel after the War, and as a member of the Labour Party, he held a junior ministerial position. Malkiel Grunwald, a Holocaust survivor, published an amateur news sheet which he distributed in the Jerusalem coffee houses. In this publication, he accused Kasztner of betraying the Jews of Hungary to the Nazis. Malkiel Grunwald was sued for libel. In June 1955, after the trial, Judge Benjamin Halevi found Grunwald not guilty, he said,
“The Nazis could not have misled the masses of Jews so conclusively, had they not spread their false information through Jewish channel”.
Judge Halevi also said that Kasztner “sold his soul to the German Satan”. However, after an appeal in January 1958, the Supreme Court, on a split decision of three judges to two, reversed the finding. By this time, Kasztner was dead. Ze’ev Eckstein, a Holocaust survivor, shot him on 3rd March 1957; his stated motive was to avenge what he and many others saw as collaboration with Adolf Eichmann and the Nazis. Some viewed Kasztner as a traitor, others as a hero. He remains a highly controversial figure to this day.
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