International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust - A Little-Known Story: The Jewish Holocaust Rescuers

The United Nations is holding a memorial ceremony at the General

Assembly in Manhattan, New York on January 27, 2023, and other

memorial events are scheduled around the globe.

“The story of the struggle to save tens of thousands needs to be a part of the chronicles of the people of Israel,” said David Gur, 97, one of few survivors still alive. “It is a lighthouse during the period of the Holocaust, a lesson and exemplar for the generations.” Gur is the author of the memoir, “Brothers for Resistance and Rescue” where he recounts how the Jewish underground broke him out of the central military prison in a rescue operation.

Brothers for Resistance and Rescue - Gefen Publishing

 House

Hungary was home to around 900,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion. Its government was allied with Nazi Germany, but as the Soviet Red Army advanced toward Hungary, the Nazis invaded in March 1944, to prevent its Axis ally from making a separate peace deal with the Allies.

Over the next 10 months, as many as 568,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies in Hungary, according to statistics from Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial.

Gur described how he and his colleagues knew that disaster was looming when three Jewish women arrived at Budapest’s main synagogue in the fall of 1943. They had fled Nazi-occupied Poland and carried disturbing news about people being shipped off to concentration camps.

“They had fairly clear information about what was happening, and saw the many trains, and it was obvious to them what was happening,” said Gur.

Gur ran a massive forgery operation that provided false documents for Jews and non-Jewish members of the Hungarian resistance. “I was an 18-year-old adolescent when the heavy responsibility fell upon me,” he said.

There was a huge personal risk. In December 1944, he was apprehended at the forgery workshop and brutally interrogated and imprisoned. The forged papers were being used by Jewish youth movements to operate a smuggling network and run Red Cross houses that saved thousands from the Nazis and their allies.

According to Gur's book, at least 7,000 Jews were smuggled out of Hungary, through Romania to ships on the Black Sea that would bring them to British-controlled Palestine. At least 10,000 forged passes offering protection, known as Shutzpasses, were supplied to Budapest’s Jews, and around 6,000 Jewish children and accompanying adults were saved in houses apparently under the protection of the International Red Cross.

Robert Rozett of Yad Vashem in Hebrew means a monument and a name is 

Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust.

Robert Rozett, a senior historian at Yad Vashem, said that although it was “the largest rescue operation” of European Jews during the Holocaust, this episode lingers off “the main route of the narrative.”

“It’s very significant because these activities helped tens of thousands of Jews stay alive in Budapest,” he said.

In 1984, Gur founded “The Society for Research of the History of the Zionist Youth Movements in Hungary,” a group that has promoted awareness about this effort.

Last month at a kibbutz in northern Israel, Sara Epstein, 97, Dezi Heffner-Reiner, 95, and Betzalel Grosz, 98, three of the remaining survivors who helped save Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary, received the Jewish Rescuers Citation for their role in the Holocaust. The award is given by two Jewish groups — B’nai B’rith World Center-Jerusalem and the Committee to Recognize the Heroism of Jewish Rescuers During the Holocaust.

“There aren’t many of us left, but this is important,” said Heffner-Reiner.

More than 200 other members of the underground were given the award posthumously. Gur received the award in 2011, the year it was created.

Yuval Alpan, a son of one of the rescuers and an activist with the society, said the citations were meant to recognize those who saved lives during the Holocaust.

“This resistance underground youth movement saved tens of thousands of Jews during 1944, and their story is not known,” he said. “It’s the biggest rescue operation in the Holocaust and nobody knows about it.”

Israel is home to some 150,600 Holocaust survivors, mostly over the age of 80, according to government figures. That is 15,193 less than a year ago.

The United Nations is holding a memorial ceremony at the General Assembly in Manhattan, New York on January 27, 2023, and other memorial events are scheduled around the globe. International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust is observed on January 27th because it is the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Israel marks its own Holocaust Remembrance Day in the spring.