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"There aren't many of us left, but this is important," said Heffner-Reiner. 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. 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. 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. "It's very significant because these activities helped tens of thousands of Jews stay alive in Budapest," he said. 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 remains off 'the main route of the narrative'. At least 10,000 forged passes offering protection, known as Shutzpasses, were distributed to Budapest's Jews, and around 6,000 Jewish children and accompanying adults were saved in houses ostensibly under the protection of the International Red Cross. The forged papers were used by Jewish youth movements to operate a smuggling network and run Red Cross houses that saved thousands from the Nazis and their allies.Īccording 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. The Jewish underground broke him out of the central military prison in a rescue operation later that month. In December 1944, he was arrested at the forgery workshop and brutally interrogated and imprisoned, according to his memoir, 'Brothers for Resistance and Rescue'. "I was an 18-year-old adolescent when the heavy responsibility fell upon me," he said. Gur oversaw a massive forgery operation that provided false documents for Jews and non-Jewish members of the Hungarian resistance. "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. They had fled Nazi-occupied Poland and bore disturbing news about people being shipped off to concentration camps. Gur said he and his colleagues knew that disaster was looming when three Jewish women arrived at Budapest's main synagogue in the fall of 1943. Over the 10 months that followed, as many as 568,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis and their allies in Hungary, according to figures from Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial. 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. Hungary was home to around 900,000 Jews before the Nazi invasion. Israel, which was established as a refuge for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust, has gone to great lengths over the years to recognize thousands of 'Righteous Among the Nations' for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.Īccounts of Jewish resistance to the Nazis, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, are mainstays in the national narrative but rescue missions by fellow Jews, such as the Hungarian resistance, are less known.
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