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One night in January 1945, a young couple listened to the sound of Soviet artillery. They had taken sanctuary in a house in Budapest and were desperately waiting for the Red Army to arrive. Then they could leave the overcrowded building which, thanks to the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, had been declared off-limits to the fascist thugs of the Hungarian Arrow Cross.
Erwin Koranyi and Alice Breuer had married in the spring of 1944 before the SS had begun to exterminate the Jews of Hungary. Thanks to Wallenberg, who had issued them with “safe passes”, they had survived the murder of most off their fellow Jewish Hungarians – some half a million had been gassed at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944. They were both brilliant medical students and counted themselves extremely fortunate to still be alive.
The Arrow Cross thugs were so insanely brutal, so full of hatred, that they no longer respected Wallenberg’s “safe passes” and, as the Red Army approached, they began an orgy of indiscriminate killing. It was the early hours of 7 January 1945 when they raided the building where Alice and Erwin had sought refuge. They went room to room, floor by floor, shooting Jews wherever they found them.
Erwin and Alice crawled out of a bathroom window, on the fourth floor, that led to an outside light shaft. A thin metal crossbar served as their only foothold above a hundred-foot drop. They clung to the edge of a windowsill, Erwin recalled, “with white knuckles…We could hear each other’s heartbeats.” Erwin supported Alice with one hand.
The hours crawled by. Still they clung to life. Erwin’s muscles ached, sinews stretched taut.
“Good that I used to be a gymnast,” Erwin told himself.
Small pieces of cement began to crumble from the edge of the metal foothold, plunging down. How much longer would it hold? Then Erwin realized that the Arrow Cross had departed – the building was silent. More than two hundred Jews in the building had been killed or taken away to be shot.
Alice and Erwin moved to another building but that too was raided and they found themselves lined up with other Jews beside the icy Danube, waiting to be killed by the Arrow Cross.
Alice turned to face Erwin.
“I’m pregnant,” she told him.
Erwin held her close. He wanted the horror to end. He was “impatient” to die.
Alice saw a large American car pull up nearby. A man in a dark-blue suit, wearing a fedora, stepped out of the car. He was holding up a megaphone.
Alice stared at Raoul Wallenberg. He was shouting that he wanted his Jews back. They did not belong to the Arrow Cross. They were his. “It was extraordinary because everybody could kill him,” Alice remembered. “Why not kill him? Killing was everywhere.”
Wallenberg shouted: “These are Swedish citizens! Release them immediately and return their belongings to them!”
God had, it seemed, answered her prayers: “To our astonishment, the executioners obeyed Wallenberg. He seemed very tall indeed – and strong. He radiated power and dignity. There was truly a kind of divine aura about him on that night.”
Alice and Erwin were escorted to another of Wallenberg’s “safe houses” which was, thankfully, not raided by the Arrow Cross. A couple of weeks later, Red Army soldiers arrived. “We were liberated from death itself,” recalled Erwin. “It was as if life had begun again after a vicious, bad dream.”
Alice and Erwin decided to leave Budapest and made their way in the bitter cold to a town a hundred miles away where they had attended medical school before the Nazis had occupied Hungary. They were told that their savior, Wallenberg, had been killed by the Germans before the Russians had taken Budapest. In fact, he was taken into custody by the Soviets and to this day his exact fate remains a mystery despite decades of investigation and intense lobbying by his family and others.
The trauma she suffered in January 1945, eighty years ago, proved too much for Alice and she miscarried when five months pregnant. In the spring of 1945, she visited her hometown of Kormend. Her parents and a sister had died during the Holocaust. Of some three hundred Jews in her hometown, only Alice and four others had survived. Around three quarters of Hungarian Jews perished during the Second World War. Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats are credited with saving many of those who lived.
More than a decade ago, I visited Alice in Stockholm where she eventually settled, after separating from Erwin, and began a career as a much-respected psychotherapist. “I never thought it would be so emotional, thinking back,” she told me. “I don’t know why I survived it all. I really don’t. It was fated, pre-ordained.” Alice passed away in 2017, aged 90.
A few months after interviewing Alice, I traveled to a snow-bound Ottawa to meet with Erwin, who also enjoyed a long, distinguished career in medicine. He still corresponded with Alice, seven decades after Raoul Wallenberg rescued them from death. Erwin passed away four years after my visit, aged 88.
I asked Erwin how he had found the strength to hold up Alice for what felt like endless hours in that light shaft in Budapest eighty years ago.
Erwin rolled up a sleeve and flexed his arm muscles. His veins began to bulge.
“Look,” he said. “You’d be amazed at the power of love.”
