Aufbau
was founded in 1934 as a worldwide journal for German-speaking
Jews. On page 19 of its March 9, 1945 issue, among bilingual
ads and announcements of births and weddings, was an article
headlined Flüchtlinge in der Schweiz suchen Verwandte in
U.S.A. This listed various refugees to Switzerland for whom
American friends and relatives were searching via the World
Jewish Congress. Among the seekers was “Ehrlich, Josef (1553
Devon Ave., Chicago),” and those he sought were “Eugen Ivan
Fried und Martha Kun.”
When the present author stumbled across this in 2007, I at first
thought these were not four people but two—a Mr. Fried and a Ms.
Kun. Further Googling led me to the website www.kasztnermemorial.com, a tribute to Oskar Schindler’s
contemporary Rezső (Rudolph) Kasztner, whose bargaining with
Eichmann’s SS enabled the exchange of 1,684 Hungarians for three
suitcases of cash, gold, jewels, and stock shares in 1944.
Nearly a quarter of those
rescued came from Kasztner’s home town of Kolozsvár/Cluj, and
among them were:
Kun, Jenő (Eugen)
born December 26, 1897: a tailor
Kun-Rosenblatt, Fried[a] born
October 28, 1903: a housewife
Kun, Ivan
born May 10, 1928: a student
Kun, Márta/Marthaborn October 17, 1931: a student
According to Holocaust: Survivor List from the Files of World
Jewish Congress (browsable at
Ancestry.com) these were
Prisoners 5588 through 5591 in Bergen-Belsen’s Block 11; and
they were the only Kuns on
www.kasztnermemorial.com’s roster of
the rescued. Although the 1,684 on Kasztner’s List were
deported with the other Hungarian and Transylvanian Jews in
1944, they went not to Auschwitz but a “special section” of
Bergen-Belsen. There they waited nearly six months—July to
December—for relocation to Switzerland. During this time, Márta/Martha’s
shoes were stolen; yet with nothing else to do she had memorized
the pattern on their soles, and was able to track the footprints
to the thief and retrieve them.
Eventually Jenő’s family returned to Transylvania, which by then
had been returned to Romania, but years passed before they were
able to emigrate to Israel; Ivan Kun was an engineer, and
Romania—whatever its opinion of Jews—was not eager to let
engineers leave. The Kuns finally settled in Haifa by 1974,
when Mathilda visited them there.
But Rezső Kasztner’s story lacks a happy ending: he was accused
of collaboration with the Nazis, and in 1952 an Israeli court
declared he had “sold his soul to the devil” for failing to warn
the rest of Hungary’s Jewish community about their impending
fate. (It didn’t help Kasztner’s case that those he was
able to rescue included his own extended family and friends.)
The court’s judgment would be overturned in 1958; but a year
earlier Kasztner had been assassinated—by a survivor of the
Holocaust.
Notes
