Siege of Budapest 1944-45: The Struggle to Survive

Judaism was much on my mind during a vacation last year that started in Budapest. I knew the tragic last phase of the Holocaust there, but I had much to learn about the layers of history packed into the Siege of Budapest that lasted from December 1944 to February 1945.

The trip took my partner Naomi and me to the synagogues near our hotel, traced the boundaries of the ghetto and the Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial. My entrée into a more personal connection to the Siege came from my knowledge of the work of Tibor Baranski Sr., a Catholic theology student who worked with daring and ingenuity to rescue Jews that fall and winter; his work in 1944 earned him recognition as a Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem. During my trip I learned more about Budapest in that time, including the likely presence of Jewish doctors in the underground Hospital in the Rock found on (or, actually, under) Buda Capital Hill.

This way to the Hospital in the Rock Nuclear Bunker Museum (courtesy of the author)

The 2005 book The Siege of Budapest: 100 Days on World War II by Krisztián Ungváry filled in my knowledge of the onslaught against Hungarian Jews and their struggles in ghettos and elsewhere. Ungváry does an admirable job tracing the battles pitting Hungarian and German forces against the encircling Red Army, Hungarian insurgencies against the defenders, and the unchecked Jewish hatred of the Arrow Cross forces.

Ungváry writes in detail about the extensive tunnel system under Budapest’s Castle District area and the hospitals that occupied parts of it. The book quotes statements from German staff medical officer Werner Hübner about the conditions he saw involving German and Hungarian soldiers in parts of underground hospitals:

In the Castle sheer madness ruled. The weeks of encirclement drove everybody to the brink of insanity. Deprivation, misery, and worry about the future provoked actions for which the individual could no longer be held responsible . . . Pistols were going off in every corner of the huge underground infirmary: nobody wanted to be captured by the Russians in a wounded state. I quickly lined up some sensible, only slightly injured officers, a staff paymaster, and a group of eight NCOs and sergeants, who I deployed at key points. We announced to the wounded by radio-telephone that we were immediately taking responsibility for their care . . . The Hungarians contented themselves with collecting the remaining weapons of the wounded and spreading horror stories. . . With the generator gone, the water supply also ended. The latrines overflowed and excreta floated between the straw beds of the wounded. In the darkness we could not find any candles. . . . The number of dead was frightening. The bodies were piled in the former kitchen in the deepest catacomb, where they stiffened into gnarled shapes. Between them, medicines, tin cans, slashed paintings, precious china, laundry, etc., were lying all over the place.

I wonder how these two strands of the Siege overlapped or even connected. Did Baranski hide Jews in the tunnels? (Most likely not, his focus was elsewhere.) Had his rescue efforts helped Jewish physicians survive? Here are segments of the history of Budapest before and during the Siege.

Tibor Baranski Sr.: Outthinking the Nazis to save Jewish lives

Baranski’s story is familiar to me through my friendship with his son, also named Tibor Baranski, a Princeton classmate.

Baranski’s efforts earned him recognition as a Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem. Details can be found here. A Hungarian documentary, Until Death, provides another perspective, and this article gives an exceptionally thorough overview of his work and life. It notes about Baranski’s impact:

(Papal Nuncio Angelo) Rotta was impressed by the braveness and courage of Baranski. Baranski spoke native level German that made him an effective negotiator with the German occupiers. Two weeks into his new role, Rotta appointed Baranski the executive secretary of the Vatican’s Jewish Protection Movement in Hungary, serving as a direct emissary of the Papal Nuncio. Baranski became the head of the Jewish Protection Movement on behalf of the Vatican and coordinated with the other embassies (Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal and Spain) active in saving Jews in Budapest. In only nine weeks, Baranski helped thousands of Hungarian Jews to survive certain death [by establishing “protection houses” in the Pest area close to the Danube].

Budapest ghetto marker (photo courtesy of the author)

On January 17, 1945, the day after the Soviets arrested Raoul Wallenberg, Baranski was also arrested and sent on a death march to a camp, but he escaped and returned to Budapest.

According to my friend Tibor Baranski Jr., given his father’s anti-Nazi and anti-communist stance, he was put in 1948 before a kangaroo court set up by the Hungarian communist regime and sentenced to nine years in a high-value political prison in the City of Vác, north of Budapest. His “crime:” leading student demonstrations against the fraudulent elections perpetrated in Hungary in 1948. He served a little over five years of this sentence and was granted amnesty in 1953 upon the death of Joseph Stalin.

Baranski led the Red Cross efforts in the second district of Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Towards the end of the revolution he was dispatched with a group by  Chairman of the Council of Ministers  Imre Nagy to request International Red Cross assistance in Vienna; Baranski never returned to his homeland until after the end of the communist regime in Hungary in 1989. In his own words, he went to Vienna not with the intention of escaping but to get help for his countrymen. After spending about eight months in Vienna and then Rome, he eventually settled first in Toronto, Canada, and then in Buffalo, New York.

Baranski lived long enough to win recognition from Yad Vashem, passing away at the age of 96 on January 20, 2019. In December 2022, on the first night of Hanukkah, the Vig Bar on New York’s Spring Street honored him with a wall mural, along with a ceremony in English and Hungarian inside involving his family and Hungarian officials.

Mural of Tibor Baranski, Sr. on New York’s Lower East Side, December 2022 (photo courtesy of the author).

As my partner Naomi and I explored Budapest and its wartime and Soviet history, we encountered other strands of history paralleling Baranski’s rescue strategies.

The Hospital in the Rock and its Jewish doctors

This notion of parallel lives especially struck us when we found another gripping part of the struggle to survive—this time involving primarily civilians and also, toward the end of the siege, German and Hungarian soldiers in underground hospitals, cared for a medical staff that included Jewish doctors.

Naomi and I saw a listing of the Hospital in the Rock Nuclear Bunker Museum when we were exploring Buda Castle Hill. We didn’t know what to expect there, so we bought tickets and joined a tour. We are glad we did. Here’s the overview:

The Hospital in the Rock Nuclear Bunker Museum is the name given to a hospital created in the caverns under Buda Castle in the 1930s, in preparation for the Second World War. . .The hospital is a 2,300 m² facility, which was used during the Second World War and the 1956 revolution. During the Cold War, it was a top-secret facility, known as an “emergency air-raid hospital”, with the designation LOSK 0101/1.

The tour in the underground caverns was illuminating and claustrophobic as the guide shepherded the group through narrow corridors full of medical facilities. The rooms and displays held racks of medical equipment from the war era. The presence of wax reproductions of doctors, nurses and patients sharply heightened the nightmarish atmosphere—we couldn’t imagine the noise, heat, fear, flickering lights and chaos of the hospital during the Siege, when the medical staff struggled to treat the injured during the Soviet onslaught taking place overhead. Ungváry’s description of the wartime conditions made what we saw on the tour hit home.

My ears perked up when the guide mentioned Jewish doctors serving in the hospital. Back home, I queried the museum staff for any other details about the presence of Jewish doctors. I soon had this thorough response from museologist Ákos Varga. The summary is worth reading in full:

Unfortunately, we don’t know much about the Jewish doctors of the Hospital. What we do know is that eight Jewish doctors were here in 1944-45, as part of forced labour service. During the Second World War, the Hungarian army conscripted Jewish men into unarmed labour units. Sadly, most of the times the Hungarian officers of these units were anti-Semitic and didn’t really care if their men died on the frontline. Interesting turn of events that by the end of the war, a lot of these units were the safest places a Jewish person could be, because some officers saved the people serving under them (similar like Oskar Schindler did, but on a smaller scale).

Probably the latter was the case here in the Hospital in the Rock, too. These Jewish doctors were kept safe by the staff, and later when the facility became an official hospital of the Red Cross (because the Red Cross delegate to Hungary moved in), everybody was under international protection. Sadly not all of them survived, because when the Arrow Cross party (Hungarian Nazis basically) came to power in October 1944, the Jewish doctors were reported by somebody—probably the janitor. They had to leave the Hospital and hide, but later they returned, and some of them worked here until the end of the Battle of Budapest.

During this time, outside in the city, two of them were caught and killed. According to witnesses, one of them was last seen on a deportation train (Dr. Ernő Hauer), and the other was probably shot by the Danube (Dr. László Somogyi). The others survived in the Hospital in the Rock (Dr. Endre Mester, Dr. Endre Szántó, Dr. József Ladányi, Dr. Béla Molnár, Dr. József Schweicher, Dr. Kornél Horváth), but we barely know anything about their work here. Unfortunately, we only have very few first-hand accounts from them, mostly brief communist investigations. We know the family of Dr. Endre Mester, but his sons didn’t really remember their father talking about those times.

The summary gives vivid testimony to the horrors and humanity of the time, as military commanders protected Jewish soldiers, and Jewish doctors applied their skills to the patients in the underground hospitals. Perhaps some of the German and Hungarian soldiers who survived thanks to Jewish doctors changed their views about Jews.

Did Tibor Baranski help save Jewish doctors who fled the hospital and hid in protection houses after October 1944? That might have happened, as he was active at the time the doctors left in October, before the Red Army attacked. The idea of these parallel journeys intersecting is tantalizing; as the 80^th anniversary of Siege of Budapest rolls across our collective memory, I like to think untold stories about the tenacious theology student and the underground hospital and its doctors remain to be discovered.

Images of terror in 1945 and 2024, at the Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial (photo courtesy of the author)