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Last update - 10:12 26/09/2007

Art for life's sake

By Anshel Pfeffer

Budapest, 1944. Precise information from an informer led an officer of the Arrow Cross militia to search for a Jewish man who had slipped away from the ghetto at the studio of painter Lajos Szentivanyi. There was no time to arrange a proper hiding place, and the Jew simply concealed himself behind a screen in a room that was bad for hiding in, his yellow shoes peeking out beneath it. Fortunately, in the room was a spectacular nude painting that Szentivanyi was working on and from which the officer could not look away. Whether or not he saw the shoes, he stopped searching, spoke a few words to Szentivanyi and left.

The incident is one of the war stories of a small group of teachers and students from the Open School of Art in Hungary, founded by Karoly Koffan, which saved hundreds of Jews and other victims of the Nazis. There is something naive, almost comical, in their stories about forging documents and impersonating soldiers in order to enter the ghetto and take out Jews who pretended to be art students. They did not belong to any organized underground and had neither diplomatic immunity nor access to the resources available to a large organization. They did not have a plan to follow and did not keep orderly records of their activities. They helped people on the basis of personal acquaintanceship, motivated by humanitarian feelings and a sense of adventure. And just as their work had begun in an unstructured manner, after liberation and the end of the war they went on with their lives, without memorializing their deeds or asking for credit.

The story of the bohemian underground that was active during the year of the German occupation of Hungary's capital, from March 1944 to February 1945, is coming to light now, over 60 years later, thanks to a young German, Lauren Krupa, who had heard about it in his childhood. Now, together with some friends, he is trying to make a documentary about the Koffan group and to have its members recognized as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.

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It is difficult to imagine anyone less suited than Karoly Koffan to be cast as the leader of a clandestine rescue group. On the eve of the war Koffan was a 30-year-old painter living in Paris. In addition to painting, he also worked in sculpture and graphics, built a puppet theater and made furniture. He was not a political person but like many people in his milieu, he was a member of the Communist Party, and when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 he fled back to his homeland, Hungary. In Budapest Koffan established the Open School of Art, where he tried to reproduce the cosmopolitan atmosphere he had known during his five years in Paris.

The school, many of whose students were Jewish, had no regular course of study. Students could go into any class, move from one teacher to another and even pay for a single class. Tuition fees were often waived for promising but poor students, who were like family at the school at Erzsebet Square, the top floor of which was the home of Koffan, his wife Keska and their two young children.

Hungary was a German ally. Although tens of thousands of immigrant Jews were deported from the country and murdered, Jewish citizens of Hungary were not touched. Koffan's school enjoyed relative freedom for three years, until 1944, when Germany decided to take over the country. One of the Germans' first actions after entering Budapest on March 19, 1944, was to arrest opponents of the Fascist regime. Among those who were arrested was Lajos Szentivanyi's father, who was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Perhaps that is why the people at the school, in contrast to a large part of the population, including the many Jews who had flocked to Budapest, understood immediately what was about to happen. The Nazi takeover of Budapest, the arrest of the Jews and their deportation to Auschwitz were swift and not as orderly as in other countries in the Third Reich. Thus, hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths, but there were also many opportunities for rescue. Koffan and Szentivanyi ran the group's rescue activities, while three students, carried out the missions. The students - Andre Meszaros, Laszlo Ridovics and Sandor Kovacs - were dispatched to bring Jews forged documents as well as to rescue people from the ghetto and the death marches and bring them to a hiding place.

"Suddenly, many people I knew had to wear a yellow patch and this bothered me very much," Ridovics says in the film Krupa is making about the group. "We were ashamed." At first the group helped anyone who was in danger from the Nazis and their Fascist partners. "It made no difference whether someone was a political refugee, a Jew or a leftist," Ridovics said. Eventually, however, the Jews became the main target for their assistance. "We were a group of people who were determined to stop this slaughter," Meszaros explains simply in the film.

Linoleum prints

The first stage was to prepare false documents. A painter at the school who worked in a government office obtained blank baptism certificates. Szentivanyi and Koffan filled out the forms, which they sealed using linoleum block prints they had made. To deter detection, they wrote in birthplaces that were already under Russian control.

The students' role was to bring the documents to those who needed them, including fellow students and their families as well as personal friends of Koffan, among others. "We didn't ask questions. They asked us to do something and we did it," Ridovics says in the film. "Everyone we knew at the school was involved. Outside of the school, we didn't know who could be trusted. There were houses marked with a yellow star that people who weren't Jewish were forbidden to enter. We would enter."

The group also brought packages and money to Jews. When foreign diplomats like Switzerland's Carl Lutz and Sweden's Raoul Wallenberg began issuing tens of thousands of schutzpasse, fake quasi-passports that protected Jews from deportation to Auschwitz, the Koffan group helped distribute them.

"They gave us Swiss or Swedish documents and told us to bring them to a certain person," Ridovics recalls. "Sometimes people's names didn't match the document. Some were saved by the documents, others weren't. It wasn't always possible to find the people. I was just the messenger. They told me where to go and I went. I was young and I didn't even imagine anything happening to me. Often we didn't know the people's real names and we didn't ask," Ridovics said.

In October 1944, the Germans gained full control over Hungary and appointed Ferenc Zalasi, the head of the Fascist Arrow Cross party, head of state. Mandatory military conscription was imposed, but Koffan's students quickly defected and returned to their rescue activity. Their army coats helped them to go into the ghetto, the walls of which were incomplete.

"We didn't know names but there were people who said, 'Hide us,'" Meszaros related. "In a situation like that you don't say, 'Go away, I don't know you.' You have to hide him. I would simply leave the ghetto with someone. If you walked down the street with a Jew, people knew. I wouldn't say anything, I'd wear an army coat and lead a young man out. I'd speak to him as if he were a slave, ordering him: 'Move. Walk in front of me.'" Sometimes they even used the army uniforms in order to hitch a ride back in a German truck.

'Run fast or I'll shoot'

Danger was a constant companion, as Ridovics related. "I was in the ghetto and a soldier came up to me: 'What are you doing here? You aren't a Jew.' He searched my pockets and there was a Schutzpass in one of them. He stood me up against a wall and he had a pistol and then he said: 'Run over there and I'll fire in the other direction, but if you don't run fast, I'll shoot you in the ass.'"

Later on, the students even began going into the transit camps where Jews were sent before being transported to Auschwitz. They tried to rescue them physically as well as by using documents. Edith Weinberger, a Jewish student at the Open School, who was rescued, along with her brother, with the help of the group, relates in the film how Ridovics carried on his back a Jewish man who collapsed during a deportation march. At the time, the school served as a temporary hiding place for Jews and others who were trying to flee to safety. Early in the morning, before classes, students would bring the people to other, nearby hiding places. Sometimes as many as 20 people stayed at the school overnight.

Koffan and Szentivanyi continued with their art even during the war. That is how the unfinished nude came to save the Jewish man hiding behind the screen in Szentivanyi's studio. "So many Jews and Communists hid at Szentivanyi's place that you could hardly open the door," Meszaros related. "Jews escaped from the marches and ran to Koffan's home and cried out to be hidden. At first they would hide behind the curtains but Mrs. Koffan said to take them out and took them into the living room. She said that either we would be saved together or we would die together. When the soldiers came in, she gave each one an art book." Amazingly, the ruse worked; the soldiers thought they were students in a class.

In the atmosphere of suspicion that characterized the Soviet bloc after the war, it was not always comfortable for those who had acted outside of the Communist organizations to talk about what they had done. Koffan, who had been a Communist, achieved fame as an artist after the war and became a senior lecturer at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts. But after taking part in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet regime he was fired and lost his status. He switched to photography, and by the time of his death, in 1985, he was considered one of the greatest bird photographers of the period.

Edith Weinberger relates in the film that Szentivanyi and his colleagues were monitored by Soviet authorities, who examined their paintings. Some members of the group got in trouble with the regime, and a number of them immigrated to the United States, although most continued with their art.

Moral debt

The Open School was bombed in February 1945, when the Red Army captured Budapest. After the war a parking lot was built on the site, where the luxurious Hotel Kempiniski stands today. The director of Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations Department, Irena Steinfeldt, says it is not unusual for new stories about the rescue of Jews to appear, even today. "We are contacted by all kinds of survivors who feel that now, 60 years later, they must repay a moral debt to their rescuers," Steinfeldt says. "It's not necessarily surprising that we hadn't heard about these cases until now. There were all sorts of groups that organized, of all different kinds, and it must be remembered that after the war Stalinism reigned there and not everyone was able to speak out."

According to Dr. Robert Rozett, Director of the Libraries at Yad Vashem and an expert on the Holocaust of Hungarian Jews, "Even those who came to Israel didn't speak up, because there was a feeling in this country that the only worthy response was to fight." In the commemoration of the rescue of Hungary's Jews, to a large extent Raoul Wallenberg's story overshadowed the stories of many others who were involved. Kathleen Garam, a member of the Weinberger family who knew some members of the Koffan group well,, believes that it was not politics but rather humility that kept them from speaking. "They simply felt that they were doing their humanitarian duty. And there was also something of the adventurousness of young people. The whole story wouldn't have come out had a certain young fellow not heard about the story and been fascinated by it," Garam says.

Krupa, a law student, was born in Berlin in 1981. His mother was French; his father was a psychoanalyst and a neurosurgeon who had fled from Hungary. As a boy, he knew Meszaros and Robert Weinberger, one of the Jews saved by the Koffan group. They were friends of his father, who had lived in Paris before moving to Germany. "I grew up with this story of how Andre [Meszaros] saved Robert. When I realized that even their children didn't know the story, I feared it would die with them," Krupa said.

For the past four years, Krupa - with a few friends - has devoted most of his time to the documentary, and even established a production company that specializes in short films as part of the enterprise. While he does not share the Germans' collective responsibility, he admits that, "As someone who has grown up in Berlin, the capital of Nazism, this history has always been present for me. I feel German, but it is the Germanness of Goethe, Schiller, Freud and all the other Germans the Nazis hated. For me, the Nazis aren't Germans, at least not the Germans I love."

The film is self-financed for now. Krupa and his friends go to Paris and Budapest to interview the members of the group who are still alive. "At first it was still hard for them to talk about the subject, for the first time in 60 years," Krupa related. "Andre wept before he was able to start to speak. When we talked to them we realized that the whole subject had been taboo; they wanted to live a new life and not be involved with the past."

Both Meszaros and Edith Weinberger died in the course of the work on the film. Another member of the group, Sandor Kovacs, immigrated to Canada decades ago and they have not been able to locate him. The sole surviving member of the group is Ridovics.

Krupa visited Israel last week in order to persuade Yad Vashem to hurry up and recognize the members of the group as Righteous Gentiles. Two years ago he gave Yad Vashem a CD containing the testimonies of the members and of Karoly Jr. Meszaros was declared a Righteous Gentile only after his death, last February.

"Ridovics is 82 already and I very much hope that he will live to see this," Krupa says. He also hopes to find, either in Israel or elsewhere, an archive that will lend footage of Budapest during the war for use in his film. "So far we have found only material that costs 300 euros a minute and we can't afford that," Krupa says. He and his partners hope this article will help them locate other people who took part in the group's activities or were saved by them.

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1.	BUDAPEST RIGHTEOUS	15:22	\|	ROBERT E	26/09/07

2.	Art for Life`s sake	15:57	\|	donna schatz	26/09/07

3.	Very Moving....however	16:04	\|	Buzaglow	26/09/07

4.	Art for Life`s Sake	15:08	\|	Sherri Fisch	27/09/07

5.	Raoul Wallenberg	14:11	\|	Marie Dupuy	28/09/07

6.	Re: Sherri Art for Arts Sake	17:19	\|	Allan	28/09/07

7.	Raoul Wallenberg was not alone	10:14	\|	Daniel Rainer	30/09/07

8.	Raoul Wallenberg was not alone	10:25	\|	Daniel Rainer	30/09/07

9.	Raoul Wallenberg was not alone - clarification	10:35	\|	Daniel Rainer	30/09/07

10.	Art for life`s sake - a small precision	16:36	\|	Meszaros Daniel	05/10/07

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