Home of the brave: Family that hid Jews from Nazis to be honored
Posted on 04/04/2002 2:40:41 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Home of the brave: Family that hid Jews from Nazis to be honored
04/04/2002
In the final, frantic year of World War II, Karoly Krautheim made the most dangerous decision possible. He dared to help his friends.
Though discovery would have meant immediate execution, Mr. Krautheim, his wife, Terezia, and their daughter, Eva, secreted a Jewish family in their small home on the outskirts of Budapest for almost five months.
RICHARD MICHAEL PRUITT / DMN Eva Mako of Dallas (left) will accept Israel's Righteous Among the Nations award on behalf of her deceased parents, who hid Anna Tamas Gyarmarthi and her family. |
They hid them first behind tinted windows and heavy blinds in the dining room and later in a room in the basement, its door crudely camouflaged with old coats and garden tools.
"It was very dangerous," Eva Mako of Dallas remembered. "If the Germans or the Hungarians had ever come in, we would have been slaughtered right there.
"But my father was a man with a very strong sense of justice. And he was the sort of man who made you feel safe. I was only 14 then, and a bit sheltered. But to tell you the truth, we never thought we were in mortal danger because my father was always right about everything."
Now, 57 years later, her Roman Catholic parents are receiving posthumous thanks the Righteous Among the Nations award for their courage. Ms. Mako will accept the honor at a ceremony Sunday at the Dallas Holocaust Memorial Center.
The award granted by Yad Vashem, Israel's national Holocaust memorial is the first in Dallas and one of 19,141 bestowed on people who managed to save Jews from the Holocaust through extraordinary efforts.
And in Hungary in 1944, only extraordinary people could accomplish that.
Mr. Krautheim was so appalled by the persecution that he eventually changed the family name from the Germanic Krautheim to Karpati, for the Carpathian Mountains that form the rugged spine of south-central Europe. The ceremony Sunday honors the Krautheim-Karpatis.
With the family of Elemer and Ilus Tamas sheltered in their home, the Karpatis lived with absolute care. The dining room remained dark to the world outside. Mrs. Karpati deliberately shopped at different stores so no one would notice the amount of groceries she bought.
When a suspicious neighbor reported them, her father turned the authorities away with the eloquence of the unjustly accused, Ms. Mako recalled.
"We could have been in big trouble," she said, "but my father talked his way out of it."
And from October 1944 to February 1945, seven people lived as three, gripped by fear until the Soviet army liberated Budapest in January 1945.
The lives of Hungarian Jews had grown increasingly difficult beginning in 1938, when Hungary, in the shadow of the German Reich, imposed a series of "Jewish Laws" that limited Jewish economic and property rights and ultimately left them without a shred of protection.
When the Soviet army defeated Germany at Stalingrad in 1943, Hungarian leader Miklos Horthy recognized that the war had turned, and by early 1944, he considered pressing the Allies for peace.
But on March 18, 1944, Adolf Hitler demanded that Hungary maintain its solidarity with Germany, and a day later, the German army occupied Hungary.
Persecution of Hungarian Jews quickly reached staggering levels. Tens of thousands of Jews from rural Hungary were shoved into trucks and railway cars and taken to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in less than a month.
COURTESY MAKO FAMILY The Krautheims, at home in 1937, lived with absolute care while hiding the Tamas family, shopping at different stores so no one would notice the amount of groceries bought. |
Roughly half of the country's Jewish population was sent to the death camps by July.
"Even though the Nazis were losing the war by then, they still tried to kill as many Jews as possible," said Shraga Mekel, development director of the American Society of Yad Vashem in New York.
Under pressure from world leaders, Mr. Horthy blocked the deportations in July 1944, but within months his regime was toppled. The Nazi Arrow-Cross Party assumed power, and with it a renewed persecution of the Jews.
| Recognizing the selfless | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
In Budapest, the Tamas family remained in their two-story home through the summer of 1944, sharing it with seven other Jewish families.
"All of the Jewish families had to go to the houses marked with a yellow star," said the Tamases' daughter, Anna Tamas Gyarmarthi, then 13. "We lived like that from June to October 1944, when the Hungarian Nazis took over.
"We knew then we had to leave our house. We heard all the people would be taken to the ghetto, and we knew after that it was deportation. So everyone tried to find a place to hide."
At first, Anna and her brother, Ferenc, stayed in the Scottish mission to Hungary, where hundreds of Jewish children lived in a gymnasium, cared for by Jewish women, including Mrs. Tamas.
But soon the children were forced to leave the mission. Mrs. Tamas grabbed hers and hid them in the emptied building.
Finally, Ms. Mako said, the Tamas family managed to reach the Karpati house and hide. "I told Eva this [help] was very difficult for us to accept, because we knew by this action that they would be killed also if we were ever found," Ms. Gyarmarthi said. "At the age of 13, this is a terrible thing to know."
Through the months, the Tamas family remained hidden, first in the dining room until the Soviet army approached, then retreating with the Karpati family to the fortified basement, said Ferenc Tamas, then 16.
"There were two rooms a makeshift kitchen and a bedroom with bunk beds," he said. "And the battlefield was above us."
Occasionally, German or Hungarian soldiers would stop by looking for food, but they never searched the basement, he said.
"Families or anyone taking people into hiding would be shot on the spot," he said. "But thanks to the Karpati family, all four of us were alive."
When the Soviet army seized Budapest, one threat ended but another emerged.
"We still had to hide because all the able-bodied men were taken for work in Siberia, and the girls were taken for other reasons," Ferenc Tamas said.
Ms. Mako said her father built a special hiding place for her and Anna, her lifelong friend.
"We kept canned goods there, like a pantry, and it was fixed in such a way that there was enough space for us to climb in. Then a shelf was lowered down in front of us to hide us," she said.
As the Germans and Hungarians fled before the approaching Red Army, they left behind thousands of documents that detailed the catastrophic losses of Hungarian Jews, most in the final months of the war.
COURTESY MAKO FAMILY Mr. Krautheim, with wife Terezia in 1959, was so appalled by the persecution of Jews that he eventually changed the family name from the Germanic Krautheim to Karpati. |
According to those records, now held at the Jewish Museum and Archives of Hungary, more than 550,000 Hungarian Jews died during World War II, from a prewar population of 825,000.
"The Nazis only reached the Hungarian Jews at the late stage of the war," Mr. Mekel said. "But they managed in those few months to kill hundreds of thousands."
The only thing that saved many of those who managed to survive was the bravery of people like the Karpati family, Mr. Mekel said.
"So far, we've found about 19,000 people who did this outstanding thing, who didn't become collaborators or bystanders like most people, but who risked their own lives," he said.
"How many people will risk their own lives, their families, to help others?"
But for Mr. Karpati, there really was no other decision to make.
"Eva's father, he was a very interesting man, a good man, a hero type," Ms. Gyarmarthi said.
"I still remember how good it was to see him in the nighttime, when we lay on the floor on blankets, and he came into our room to look around, to make sure everything was all right.
"And he would come over and cover me with the blanket, and it gave me such a feeling of safety."
E-mail myoung@dallasnews.com
A LETTER FROM ISRAEL
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/658193/posts
Bump!
I've often wondered if Corrie ten Boom & her family are on this Righteous List.....
Does anyone know?
Her elderly father, sister & Corrie, plus in-laws & nephews helped hide in their own home & also spirit away Jews to safe places, and eventual freedom.
Someone later found out, and turned them in......and the father, sister died in prison/concentration camp......the young nephew was killed, and Corrie spent a number of years at Ravensbruck, but was finally freed (on a technicality, it seemed----other women her age were gassed the next week)
More Links:"We're much too young to deal with these problems, but they keep
thrusting themselves on us until, finally, we're forced to think up a solution,
though most of the time our solutions crumble when faced with the facts.
It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise
within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't
abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling
to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly
good at heart.
"...And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will
change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and
tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my
ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I'll be able to realize them!
– From Anne's diary, July 15, 1944
http://www.annefrank.com/
Diary of Anne Frank: A Timeline Adventure
http://www.fsu.edu/~CandI/ENGLISH/fsuwebquest3/annef.htm
Google Search: "The Diary of Anne Frank"
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=The+Diary+of+Anne+Frank&btnG=Google+Search
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
