Jews lining up in front of the “Glass House” during World War II to obtain protective exit visas from Carl Lutz.
Photo courtesy the Holocaust History Project
If you go
“Carl Lutz and the Legendary Glass House in Budapest” will be on display Sept. 7-14 at the museum of the American Hungarian Foundation at 30 Somerset St. in New Brunswick. It is open Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m.- 4 p.m., and Sunday, 1-4 p.m. An opening reception and lecture, for which an RSVP is requested, will be held Sunday, Sept. 7, from 2-5 p.m.
Admission is free, but a small donation is requested. Contact the museum at 732-846-5777 or info@ahfoundation.org. Additional information on the exhibit and foundation is available at www.ahfoundation.org.
August 12, 2008
As a Swiss diplomat in Budapest during World War II, Carl Lutz rescued more than 62,000 Hungarian Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps by sheltering them in safe houses throughout the city and issuing exit visas.
The most famous of the 76 safe houses, a former glass factory that become known as “the Glass House,” sheltered 3,000 Jews. Today the house is under the auspices of the Carl Lutz Foundation, established in 2004 to preserve the memory of Lutz and the Zionist Halutz Youth, a Hungarian resistance organization that assisted Lutz in his efforts to save Jews.
“It was a mammoth undertaking to keep all these houses going, get food, and take care of the people who were there, a good many of whom survived the war,” said August Molnar, president of the American Hungarian Foundation in New Brunswick.
From Sept. 7 to 14, “Carl Lutz and the Legendary Glass House in Budapest: The Swiss Vice Consul who Rescued Jews during the Holocaust” will be on display at the foundation’s museum. The exhibition will also feature three accompanying lectures about the rescue of Hungarian Jewry.
Shown most recently in Washington, the exhibit was previously on display at the United Nations and in Atlanta and will go on to Canada.
“I saw it in Washington and I said to myself, ‘We must get this,’” said Molnar, who was a professor of Hungarian studies at Rutgers University before becoming president of the foundation. “I think this is a memorial not only to Carl Lutz but, in some sense, preserves the memory of the people he rescued.”
Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who operated 76 safe houses and issued thousands of exit visas for Hungarian Jews during World War II, will be the subject of an exhibition and lecture series at the museum of the American Hungarian Foundation in New Brunswick.
In addition to the AHF, the exhibit and lectures are being sponsored by the Budapest-based Carl Lutz Foundation, the Jewish Historical Society of Central New Jersey, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County, assisted by a grant from the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation.
Ruth Marcus Patt of Monroe, a trustee of the Laurie foundation and founder of the historical society, said she was approached by Molnar.
“He wanted to know if I’d help support it and I told him we’d be happy to do it,” said Patt.
This was not the first time she had teamed with the foundation on mounting an exhibit, said Patt. Ten years ago she approached Molnar about staging an exhibit of Hungarian Judaica.
“He said he’d be very happy to do an exhibit about the treasures of the local Hungarian Jewish community,” said Patt of that exhibit, which drew more than 1,000 visitors.
Molnar said the Lutz exhibit includes photos taken around 1944 in and around the Glass House, which was placed under diplomatic immunity after being turned over to Lutz by a well-to-do Jewish family.
Lutz, who was in charge of foreign interests and visas from 1942 to ’45, issued “tens of thousands” of schutzbriefe, or protective letters, to Hungarian Jews. These were reluctantly accepted by Nazi officials, according to the website of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.
As the Nazi regime tried to liquidate the Jewish community during the war’s closing months, Lutz entered into “tough negotiations” with them and the Hungarian government, obtaining permission to issue 8,000 protective letters allowing Jews to immigrate to Palestine.
A memorial in Budapest to Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who is credited with saving the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust.
Photo courtesy Budapest Tourist Guide
By interpreting the 8,000 as families and not as individuals, Lutz and his staff issued tens of thousands of additional letters. He and his wife, Gertrud, liberated Jews from deportation centers and death marches.
Meeting with Wallenberg
Lutz’s idea of issuing protective letters was subsequently adopted by representatives of other neutral countries, particularly Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
On its website, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem said Lutz met with Wallenberg after the Swedish diplomat’s arrival in Budapest and instructed him in various rescue methods.
“By the end of the war, close to 124,000 Hungarian Jews survived,” according to the Swiss website. “Of those, half owed their lives to the courageous actions of Carl Lutz, whose name, until recently, had largely been forgotten by the Jewish people and the world at large.”
Yad Vashem in 1965 awarded Lutz the title of Righteous Among the Nations; after his death in 1975, his wife gave the Israeli Holocaust institution his archives.
Lutz spent almost six years, from 1935 to 1940, as Swiss consul to Palestine. When World War II broke out, he attempted to intervene on behalf of German residents of Palestine who were incarcerated in prison camps or were in danger of deportation. It was because of those efforts that German authorities in Hungary allowed him a great deal of leeway, according to Yad Vashem.
In 1963, a street in Haifa was named after Lutz, who has also been honored in Switzerland. In 1991, a memorial at the entrance to the old Budapest Ghetto was erected, and in 2006 the American embassy in Budapest built a memorial to Lutz in its park.
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