Dangerous Diplomacy: The Story of Carl Lutz, Rescuer of 62,000 Hungarian Jews by Theo Tschuy

Author:Theo Tschuy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-12-16T21:28:00+00:00

The moon was already rising over the nearby mountain ranges on that evening ofJune 20 when the Romanian diplomat knocked at the door of the Salvadorean general consulate in Geneva. George Mandel-Mantello was waiting, sitting on edge. At last, you're here! he shouted, but tears fell from his eyes.

It's important, Manoliou said, for you to read this document. He gave George the Auschwitz Protocol. It explained everything, he said. It was worse than ten thousand crime novels put together. He had received it in Budapest from Consul Lutz, when he had gone to give him the thousand Salvadorean papers. The document was a sinister and horrible one, written by two young Slovak Jews who had escaped from the death camp. The truth was that the Jews were not sent to German labor camps - this was a big lie spread by both the German and the Hungarian governments - but that they were, without exception, deported, gassed, and burned at Auschwitz. Manoliou wished he didn't have to talk about it. This meant, Mandel-Mantello asked, that his parents had died at Auschwitz? Manoliou nodded. It was a painful story to tell, because it extinguished even the slightest flicker of hope for any rescue action. Manoliou was himself in tears, but he could not wait any longer before telling what he knew.

The Romanian diplomat sat quietly and watched Mandel-Mantello read. George moaned. A wild pain surged up in him. His gentle mother, his good father dead, murdered. They had never done harm to anyone, they had known the Talmud inside out and remembered how the Almighty had unfailingly rushed to rescue the children of Israel whenever they were in danger. Others in the wider family had died, too, an entire active and gifted community, children, old people, those in the best years of their life, whose faces drifted past his inner eye in one painful parade, and whose voices came back to him. How they must have suffered! Had they seen his image in their dying moment? He shook his fist. If he had only done something about it earlier.

It was a night of pain and hatred and despair, which he would never forget. The truth had seized him without mercy.

But George Mandel-Mantello did not lament long. He carefully listened as Manoliou told him the rest of his travel story. He mentioned the bureaucratic complications caused by Moshe Krausz, who had insisted that he, Manoliou, was obliged to turn over the Auschwitz Protocol to Chaim Pozner, the representative of the Jewish Agency for Palestine in Geneva Krausz had also written a letter to Pozner, not a bad one at that. Krausz had finally agreed that George Mandel-Mantello could see both the Auschwitz Protocol and the letter. This seemed a weird procedure, Manoliou said, but Krausz was a bureaucrat. Even Consul Lutz had complained.

Mandel-Mantello became the efficient business executive again. He said that if Pozner - nothing against him, of course - got the Auschwitz Protocol and Krausz's letter, he would simply pass them on to his superiors in Palestine, who probably had received copies already.

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