„Alleluja! Ecce ego, mitte me!”

[Tamas]

Today was the birthday (she was born 120 years ago) of Sára Salkaházi, a social worker who were hiding Jews and other prosecuted people during WW2 in Hungary.

She died on 27th of December, 1944, when an Arrowcross (Hungarian nazis) militia unit shot her to the Danube.

The Arrowhead unit surrounded the social care house earlier that day for a razzia. They only found 4 persons as suspectible to being Jewish, the rest were protected by their forged papers. The thugs took those 4 people, Sara, and her assistant Vilma Bernovits, marched them to the Danube, stripped them naked, and executed them on the spot. Using the river as convenient body-removal was fairly commonplace for them those days.



Sara joined the Social Sisters' Company (a bit awkard translation) in 1940. This organisation tried to replicate the helping spirit of the old monastic orders in a more modern manner (although they were clearly religious). Basically, nowadays you would call them an NGO.




The organisation was publicly against anti-semitism that was growing rampant in the country, since 1939. They found it incompatible with Christian morality. Sara supported this even with a symbolic step: In 1942, when many Hungarians of German origin did exactly the opposite, she took her original German-sounding last name (Schalkházi) and changed it to the more Hungarian spelling of Salkaházi.

The first known case of the organisation helping Jews was in 1940: following the partial return of Transylvania, the Hungarian portion came under military administration, and some officers used the chance to try and expel a few Jewish families to the Romanian side of the new border. The Romanians would not have them, so the soldiers tried to basically smuggle them through the Soviet border. Some of the families managed to sneak back, and they found shelter with the Sisters.

Sara did not make her views secret, she wrote newspaper articles denouncing Hitler and nazism. She also denounced communism as well.

29th of March, 1944, 10 days after the German occupation of Hungary, Jews were required to wear the yellow star. People started to flock to the Sisters' shelter homes. These were already full and the situation kept detiorating, with Allied bombings, food shortages, and the increasing scrutiny of the Arrowcross and the Gestapo.

Also, their open hostility to the persecution of Jews was not well received, and they were labelled anti-Hungarian in several newspaper articles.

Vilma Bernovits, the Baptist

The Arrowcross Party took power in mid-October that year, which of course made the situation much worse for the Jews and all prosecuted.

One of Sara's colleagues, Vilma (who would be executed together with her) took a leading role in helping the Jews turning to them for help. This started as assisting Jews wishing to convert to Catholicism, first just by teaching them and organising baptisms for them, then to helping them get the paperwork and perform baptisms herself, and eventually, as things continued to escalate, just getting blank forms for them from the Church offices.

She refused any compensation for it, even refused to accept the price of the stamp on these documents. In one occassion she bumbped into an Arrowcross razzia and only saved herself by eating the papers she had on her, before she was searched.

Betrayed

It feels very trivial to me, how it ended. She was working in a single mother's home of the Sisters' where they employed Jews under forged paperwork. On 26th of December she told one of her 18 year old employees, that she disapproves her affair with one of the soldiers placed there (placed as in having his allocated accomodation there). Since she could not fire her without thus forcing her to return to a warzone, she decided to organise a transfer for her to a different care home.

But, the young girl, offended, went to the local Arrowcross office and as an act of revenge told them about the Jews being hidden in the home.

On the 27th, Sara returned to the home late afternoon, the Arrowcross was already there. She saw the guard out in front but instead of fleeing she went in to take charge as the leader of the home. Interrogations were already going on in the cellar.

There were 6 persons taken, as mentioned: Sara, her colleague Vilma, 2 Jewish ladies (a Mrs Fischer and Dr. Jonas), and a third lady (Mrs. Batori) with her son (Istvan). The latter two could not sufficiently prove their non-Jewish origins.

Initially the militia took them to their HQ building, and then at 9PM they were taken to the foot of one of the bridges, undressed, and shot into the river.


These last details emerged 23 years later during trials of one of the Arrowcross thugs present. He said, a "short, brunette lady" (Sara) turned to toward her execurioners while kneeling on the riverbank, and looked to their eyes and prayed. The guy mentioned above, Istvan, actually managed to jump into the river and survive.


----------------------------------------


I wanted to share this because nowadays in Hungary the NGOs helping the downtrodden, the homless, the refugees, they face the same kind of hostile rhetoric these heroes faced. It was a stark reminder of how terrible things were not too long ago, and how easy it is to slide back to those days again.

[garbon]

As I just read in a book:

Such an understanding should make us more aware of the chance-like nature of human civilisation, and of the need not to assume the inevitable survival of any aspect of our society but, rather, to fight actively for what we wish to remain part of our world.

[The Brain]

and

[PDH]

Heroes are often defined by acts of decency and doing the proper thing when all else is craziness and anger around them.  We do not live in an age of too many heroes.