The Concierges of the Ghetto Buildings

Abstract

“The házmester came up to our apartment to warn us not to go out on the street”—writes Mrs Anna Dévényi, a pregnant Jewish Hungarian woman in her diary on 21 March 1944, two days after the German troops invaded Budapest.¹ Her building manager was right; the Nazi German occupation was the moment when the situation of Jewish Hungarians declined most sharply. Right after the invasion an SS unit arrested not only the leaders of the Hungarian political opposition, but also hundreds of Jewish Hungarians in Budapest.² They used torture and blackmailing to force the wealthier Jews to pass huge savings to the Gestapo in exchange for their survival.³ On 30 March, Mrs Dévényi switched on the radio to listen to the evening news at 9.40. Her face went red when she heard the announcement of decree 1.240/1944 of the newly appointed Sztójay government, which starting from 5 April ordered all Jews above the age of six to wear yellow-star badges on their outer clothing.⁴ Anna Dévényi thought she was not going to be able to walk on the streets with a yellow badge. Many thought the same, no wonder that the aftermath of the Nazi German invasion brought a peak in suicide attempts among Jewish Hungarians. Most of them—like Tivadar Szinnai’s physician—took poison, but dozens chose other methods of suicide, such as jumping under a tram.⁵ Tram drivers routinely filled accident report forms in these days with texts like “today, around the Zoo, tram number 44 ran over an approx. 70–74 years old Jewess, who jumped under the tram presumably on purpose…”⁶ This suicide wave was a reaction to the suddenly worsening situation: despite the anti-Jewish laws, most Jewish Hungarians lived in relative safety compared to the surrounding countries’ Jewish communities until Hungary’s Nazi German occupation on 19 March 1944.⁷ From this date on, the new Hungarian government issued decree after decree to increase the pressure on the persecuted people. For example, decree 108.500 K.M. reduced their sugar ration to 0.3 kg per month, and their meat ration to 0.1 kg beef or horse meat per week. As Mrs Dévényi noted in her journal: “[t]he Jew’s food ration is decreasing. We are not allowed to consume milk, egg or butter. … They want to starve us gradually.”⁸