Yom HaShoah in Wartime: Survival Has Always Been an Act of Will

This Friday, days before Yom HaShoah, I walked through the door of a building at 29 Vadász Street in Budapest while Israel is at war.

The building is called the Glass House — Üvegház — a former glass wholesaler that became, in the winter of 1944, one of the most unlikely sanctuaries of the war. Thousands of Jews crowded into its rooms, sleeping on floors not built for human habitation, surviving on almost nothing, listening to a city in which the men outside had been granted license to kill them.

I was greeted by Mr. Miklós Szedő — the quiet, dedicated custodian of this place and its history. The Carl Lutz Foundation Memorial Room he tends opens just three hours a day, charges no admission, and operates on resources so minimal they barely cover part-time care of a site whose rescue operation — centered on this building — has been called the largest and most successful of the entire Second World War. Forty to sixty thousand thousand Jewish lives. Almost half of all Jewish survivors in Budapest. And almost no one knows it exists.

Standing there with Mr. Szedő, I thought: if ever there were a metaphor for how the world treats inconvenient acts of heroism, this is it. A building that held thousands when the world wanted them dead, now tended by one man on almost nothing. The Glass House deserves better. So does its story.

My mother was one of the people inside that building. She did not simply hide there. Her story sits at the heart of what Yom HaShoah was always meant to honor: not only the six million lost, but those who, in the middle of their own struggle to survive, summoned the extraordinary courage to help others, to resist, and to act with dignity in conditions designed to strip them of all three. That lesson — that survival is an act of will, not of waiting — is the inheritance they passed to us. No generation has needed it more than those now in harm’s way, facing an enemy whose objective is not victory but our destruction — and drawing on the same fierce refusal to surrender that has always been, and remains, the deepest source of Jewish survival.

What Brought Her There

Before the Glass House, there was Klauzál tér.

Klauzál Square sits in Budapest’s seventh district — the historic Jewish quarter, a neighborhood of 19th-century apartment buildings around a central square. My mother and her family were assigned to a building there in June 1944, when Budapest’s mayor decreed that nearly 1,950 buildings across the city would become compulsory Jewish residences, each marked with a canary-yellow Star of David. Some 220,000 Jews — a quarter of the city’s population — had days to relocate. Those in the seventh district were crammed into the buildings around Klauzál tér and its surrounding streets, living under curfew, stripped progressively of what remained of ordinary life.

They could not know what that square was about to become. In November 1944, the Arrow Cross sealed the Jewish quarter into a walled ghetto — wooden palisades enclosing barely a third of a square kilometer, forcing more than 70,000 people into it. The daily bread ration fell to 150 grams. Between 80 and 120 corpses were removed from the streets every single day. By the time Soviet forces liberated the ghetto in January 1945, some 3,000 unburied bodies lay in the streets — and in Klauzál tér itself, the square my mother’s building had faced, the dead were buried in mass graves dug into the ground where children had once played. The green space at the heart of the Jewish quarter became a field of........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)