Holocaust Survivors Record Acts of Heroism : Eyewitness Recalls Raoul Wallenberg’s Exploits During War

The subject, his survival of the Holocaust, was painful for Tibor Vayda to talk about, but as the conversation turned to Raoul Wallenberg, that pain did not prevent him from speaking of “the only one real hero, the one who risked his life for us every day.”

For Vayda and his fellow Jews of Budapest, their roundup, from the spring of 1944 to January, 1945, was the last Nazi atrocity during World War II, the end of Hitler’s “Final Solution.”

In May and June, before they turned their attentions to Jewish families in Budapest, the Nazis shipped 435,000 Jews who lived elsewhere in Hungary to Auschwitz and other death camps.

Those 225,000 still living in Budapest represented the last major settlement of European Jewry.

A Swedish Diplomat

And were it not for Raoul Wallenberg, a diplomat from neutral Sweden sent to their ancient city in the closing years of World War II to help them, at least 30,000 Budapest Jews, among them Tibor Vayda, would not be alive today. Wallenberg is credited personally with saving those 30,000, and was instrumental in assisting the rescue of about 90,000 through efforts of the Swiss, Red Cross and the underground.

On a recent afternoon, Vayda, 72, sat in a room at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in West Los Angeles, videotaping his remembrances of the Nazi occupation of Budapest. The interview would be a part of the center’s ongoing program, “Testimony to the Truth,” a series of interviews with European Jews who survived the Holocaust.

Vayda and many other Holocaust survivors living in Southern California contacted officials at the center after reading about the “Testimony to the Truth” series in the Jewish press. According to Richard Trank, coordinator of the project, about 100 hours of interviews already have been videotaped.

The two-hour interview would leave Vayda, a retired Los Angeles art dealer, “tired and sad,” as would seeing a preview that evening of the Monday and Tuesday television miniseries, “Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story,” starring Richard Chamberlain. (The programs, to begin at 9 p.m. both days, will be broadcast by Channel 4, KNBC.)

The tale Vayda has to tell is more unusual than most because all of his family survived--all six of his brothers and sisters and their families, his mother and mother-in-law; his wife, Klari (Claire) Reiss Vayda, and daughter; and his wife’s brother, Stephen Reiss and his family.

The Vaydas survived through diversified efforts, those of Wallenberg, of a Hungarian army officer paid by Vayda’s brother-in-law, and of a Catholic sister-in-law.

Helped Rescue Others

But it is Wallenberg who yet commands much of Vayda’s recollections. He was saved by the Swedish diplomat, and later ended up working for him, assisting in the rescue of other Jewish citizens of Budapest from deportation by Adolf Eichmann, Adolph Hitler’s chief exterminator of the Jews.

“It is very sad,” Vayda said several times, “a true hero as Raoul Wallenberg ended up in a Soviet prison and has never been heard from again. We admired Wallenberg greatly. We knew he was a Gentile, not Jewish, but he saved Jews. We wish we would have a chance to kiss his hand.”

Arrested by Russians

Wallenberg’s efforts on behalf of the Jews of Budapest were sanctioned by his own government. He was an official diplomat assigned to the Swedish Legation in Budapest, where he arrived July 9, 1944. But his operation actually was financed by the War Refugee Board of the United States. He was arrested by the Russians on Jan. 17, 1945, shortly after they liberated Budapest from the Nazis.

There are many accounts from men once incarcerated in Russian prisons who claimed over the years to have seen Wallenberg, one as late as 1965. But in an official communique in 1957, Soviet officials declared that Wallenberg had died in 1947. Previously they said he had never been in the Soviet Union.

Vayda’s remembrances of Wallenberg often mirror scenes from the television production, although Vayda maintained that the TV show does not depict the true brutality of the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s fascist soldiers.

“They were worse than the Nazis, far more horrible and violent than the movie shows,” Vayda said afterward. “They were shooting Jewish people like dogs in the street.”

Vayda said that although Richard Chamberlain “didn’t look like Wallenberg, he had the same kind of presence and sympathy.

“Wallenberg,” he added, “was a real human being.”

Tibor Vayda first learned of Raoul Wallenberg’s efforts to rescue the Jews in late October, 1944, when Vayda had been sent back to Budapest from a Jewish work battalion in Czechoslovakia, where he had been injured in the shoulder by flying shrapnel.

Vayda, along with 55,000 other young Jewish men of Budapest, had been sent by the Hungarian government in 1940 to the Jewish work forces, which built airports and roads, laid train tracks and repaired war-damaged factories. Sometimes the Jewish labor battalions worked in Hungary, other times in the Ukraine and parts of Romania and Czechoslovakia.

“I had been in the Hungarian army from 1937 to 1939,” Vayda said in his Hungarian accent. “You had to be in for two years. But then they passed a law saying Jews couldn’t be in the army. Jewish people are not trustable anymore with guns. The atmosphere for Jews began to change in Hungary in 1935 or ’36. We heard about Hitler. He was a politician, a voice on the radio.

‘Many Hated Us’

“But after many years, he had many admirers in Hungary and we started feeling different because we were Jewish and many people hated us. We later felt we are not Hungarian, we are Jews.”

Even before that, Vayda said, “it was difficult to be Jewish and serve in the army. There weren’t many in the army. There were only three Jewish people in my regiment. People didn’t say ‘stinky Jew’ to me, but you got the feeling we were second-type citizens. But in the work battalion you began feeling a prisoner. You had not the same freedom as in the army.”

When they were sent to the labor battalions, Jewish men were required by the Hungarian government to wear yellow armbands to denote their ancestry. Later, when the Nazis occupied Hungary in March of 1944, each Jewish person had to wear a yellow star on the left breast pocket of his or her garment.

During 1940 and ‘41, members of the Jewish labor forces were allowed to go home for Christmas and New Year’s holidays, according to Vayda, but later the men went months at a time without news of their families back in Budapest.

Germans Invaded

“Things were relatively normal in Hungary through the winter of 1940,” Vayda continued. “We would escape every week or so to see our wives. But then it began to change. In June, 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. The Hungarian government said Jewish people could not own factories anymore (Vayda’s father, Herman, had operated a small shoe factory and store), and began reducing what the Jewish community could have.”

Vayda and Klari Reiss, who now uses the Americanized version of her name, Claire, were married Dec. 25, 1939, and their daughter, Susan, was born in 1941. Vayda took every opportunity he could to go home for brief visits until security on the Jewish work forces began to tighten.

In 1942, when Vayda got word that his father was dying, his Hungarian work force commander refused to allow him to return to Budapest.

At this point during the interview, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Wiesenthal center asked Vayda if the Jews of Hungary had not heard of the mass murders of Jews living in other European countries.

“We didn’t have newspapers,” Vayda replied. “No radio, no communication. Even by 1943, we didn’t hear much about what was happening at Auschwitz.

“And when we heard it, we didn’t believe it. Nobody at that time believed it. And they didn’t start the deportations from Hungary until the winter of 1944.”

Most Were Deported

Vayda believes he would never have seen his family again had he not been injured and brought back to Budapest. Most of the men of the Jewish labor forces who were working in the countryside were deported to Auschwitz and had perished before the purge of Budapest began.

While in the hospital, Vayda was able to contact his wife through his brother-in-law, Stephen Reiss. When Claire Vayda came to see her husband, she brought a special document with her.

It was one of Wallenberg’s schutz-passes , an official-looking paper with the three Swedish crowns on it, a photo of Vayda and information stating that he was under the protection of Sweden.

Vayda recalled: “She said, ‘Tibor, I have to tell you we are Swedish now.’ ”

But Vayda was a prisoner in the hospital and couldn’t use the protective pass unless he escaped, which he did soon after hearing in November that with the Red Army advancing toward Hungary, all the people in the hospital were to be moved to a hospital in Germany.

Vayda went to a “Swedish safe house” at 4 Ulloi Street to join his wife and daughter. By that time, Wallenberg had established many such houses throughout the city.

Lived With Army Officer

Before getting Wallenberg’s schutz-passes, Claire Vayda had sent her baby daughter to live with her Catholic sister-in-law. She, meanwhile, lived for two months outside Budapest with her mother and a Hungarian army officer who was paid by her brother to pretend to be her husband.

Fearing the charade would be uncovered by the officer’s anti-Semitic neighbors, Claire Vayda returned to Budapest to seek out the protective passes.

“There were about 300 Jewish people living in the safe house at the time,” Vayda remembered. “And Wallenberg came to visit us almost every day. One day he ordered me to come meet with him. He took about eight of us with him to be a ‘protocol group.’ ”

Vayda believes Wallenberg picked him because he “didn’t look Jewish and had a little military background.”

Some members of the protocol group were to pretend that they were officials from the Swedish embassy, others Wallenberg dressed as monsignors.

“He had a big diplomatic car and he came each morning to give us our instructions for the day,” Vayda said. “We were to pick up these people here or there. A typical case would be very early in the morning we would go to the railway station and get people out of line and issue the schutz-passes. There were Swiss passes and Spanish and Red Cross, too. Then we would take the people home and hide them.

He Risked His Life

“Wallenberg never gave up,” Vayda said. “He was there everyday, at the risk of his own life.

“One day we went to the station at 4 a.m., and we were supposed to go in and say we are from the Swedish embassy and are here to pick up people with schutz-passes. Wallenberg was supposed to be there, but he was late. It was almost 9 o’clock and they were ready to take the Jewish group. We were afraid something had happened to him. We had about 50 people to be saved when three German jeeps arrived and the SS started screaming and beating on us. Then Wallenberg shows up and he goes to the officer in charge and says put those 50 people back in the wagon. Then he got the three of us, and we all left. We thought our jobs were finished (because of the incident), but the day after that we went out again.”

Wallenberg, Vayda said, intervened like this every day, often bribing the Hungarian fascist soldiers as well as Nazis, or simply intimidating their officers into releasing some of the “Swedish Jews.”

“Wallenberg did many brave things every day, many more than the movie has time to show,” Vayda said. “But he suffered with the defeats.”

Perhaps the worst defeat, Vayda recalled, came on Christmas Eve, 1944, when Arrow Cross soldiers came into the Swedish safe houses and took Jewish children to the banks of the Danube River and shot them.

“There was much bad news then,” he said, tears welling up in his eyes. “They were killing everybody. There were dead bodies all over the streets of Budapest.”

Vayda continued his graphic descriptions of the horrors, emphasising the extreme brutality of the Arrow Cross soldiers.

“Wallenberg was working night and day then, and was depressed from the strain of it all,” Vayda said. “He rescued everyone he could, but he couldn’t save them all. And less than a month later, when the Russians came in, he was gone.”

Eleven years would pass before Tibor and Claire Vayda would be gone from Hungary, too, walking out of their little apartment into a snow-covered Budapest street, each with a suitcase, and holding onto their children, Susan, 15, and Thomas, 10.

They escaped Nov. 25, 1956, a month after Hungarians revolted against the Russians, and spent their first night of freedom in a small inn in Austria.

“We were lucky,” Claire Vayda said after viewing the miniseries with her husband. “We closed the door and left everything behind us. I will never forget the first night we slept peacefully in Austria. The Austrians were very helpful to Hungarian refugees.”

The Vaydas eventually made their way to Paris, where they lived for a year and a half before emigrating to Canada.

“Hungary was a big prison,” Claire Vayda said. “First the Nazis, then the Russians. It was a risk just to walk out in the street. You didn’t know when somebody rang the doorbell if it would be the secret police because somebody had said something about you. It’s not a life.”

The Vaydas’ daughter, Susan, later was discovered by a film producer and came to Los Angeles to make movies under the name of Valerie Varda. By that time, her parents and brother had emigrated to Toronto and become Canadian citizens.

Became U.S. Citizens

In 1962, the Vaydas were permitted American citizenship through France, where they had applied to emigrate to the United States in 1957.

Susan Vayda, who lives in Los Angeles, has since retired from her brief film career and is married and has two children; her brother, Thomas Vayda, is a computer science professor at Chico State University.

“I don’t want to be born again and have to live through that experience,” Claire Vayda said of the Holocaust and the Russian occupation. “But I wish that Wallenberg would be here and the whole world would celebrate with him for what he did. But I am 100% sure that he couldn’t live through 40 years in the Russian gulag. It would be impossible.”

Tibor Vayda smiled at his petite wife and said: “No, there is a 1% possibility that he is still alive. We have heard of people who saw him who said he exercised in prison every day. He was always a very strong person.

“But even if he is still alive, the Russians will never let him out. First of all, he was famous for saving Jewish lives, and the Russians don’t like Jews. And he was from a world-famous capitalist family, a rich family in Sweden. Even if he’s still alive, we’ll never see him again.”