By Jerry Klinger
BOYNTON BEACH, Florida — It is not unusual for the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation to receive inquiring emails about some aspect of Jewish history. We respond as best as possible or direct the inquirer to where they might be better answered.
An email came a week ago from Australia. It was not a question so much as the sender wanted us to know about Tibor Herz. Tibor was the writer’s father. Tibor had passed away a few years earlier, quietly. For the most part, Tibor is forgotten by all except his family.
Gary Herz, his son, did not want his father to be forgotten. His father was a Jewish Holocaust Rescuer, a Hero. At great risk to his own life, Tibor saved Jews as the blood-thirsty wolves of Nazism and their antisemitic fellow travelers snarled about him.
Gary wrote after he read an article about a recent memorial JASHP had completed in Safed, Israel.
The memorial is unique in the Jewish world. It is unique in the world period. The “Hands of Choice” memorial honors Jews who risked all, frequently their very lives, to save Jews.
The memorial, designed by noted Jerusalem artist Sam Philipe, is simple and powerful. It is a Star of David cupped in open hands. On the sides of the Star are 400 representative names of Jews ranging 3,500 years of Jewish history. They are names of Jews who chose not to be victims but to do what they could to save Jews.
Jewish prayer books and children’s lessons give memory, deservedly so, to Jews who died for Kiddush HaShem; Jews who died martyrs, victims for the sanctity of God’s Holy Name. Jewish prayer books and children’s lessons are not about Jews who sanctified God’s Holy Name by doing what they could to save Jews.
Gary wanted his father’s story to be remembered, to be honored. Yad Vashem, Israel’s and the Jewish people’s national memorial to the Holocaust, when 6,000,000 Jews were slaughtered, was not interested in Jews like Tibor’s story.
After years of effort, Yad Vashem finally relented and permitted a memorial to the Jewish partisans or Jews who fought in the armies of the world against the Nazis. Still, today, Yad Vashem has no memorial to Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. They even resist the creation of such a memorial, arguing it was not part of their creation mandate.
Yad Vashem is correct. Their original mandate was not to honor Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. But their mandate did authorize, again rightfully and properly, a program to seek out, preserve and honor non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. It is called the Righteous Among the Nations.
The Righteous Among the Nations has recognized tens of thousands of non-Jews who saved Jews. Sometimes the Righteous saved one or two Jews, and sometimes they saved hundreds and hundreds, even thousands.
The Righteous Among the Nations did not always save Jews in a vacuum. From within the mouth of death, Jews were there trying to help, organize and link up as best they could with Righteous Gentiles to save Jews. Yad Vashem does not memorialize their courage.
The modern state of Israel represents the never-again face to the world. It is a face of Jewish resistance and Jewish perseverance. It is a face Jews feel with pride, even security, as the antisemites rise to the top once again in many countries and the U.S. It is an inadequate face, a narrow face, and a face whose origins were Jews who chose to save Jews before there was even the reality of an Israel.
Tibor was one of the faces that time and Yad Vashem’s failure to remember has passed into the night. Tibor is one of the many stories I have come to know. There are others. There are many others, only I do not know them.
As the days pass, the memories fade of the contemporaries of the Jews who saved Jews and pass into forgetfulfulness.
2010, at the Yom Hashoah program in Melbourne, Australia, at Monash University, Dr. Alex Friedman spoke about Tibor Herz’s courage. He spoke about how Tibor saved Jewish life when it would have been more expedient, far safer to be silent and not risk his own life.
If I had known Tibor’s story before the “Hands of Choice” was completed, his name might have been on the Star. I did not know it.
How many more Tibor stories are there to tell? Yad Vashem should be documenting, preserving, and sharing them.
What is the messaging of the Holocaust? Only that hate brings about destruction? There is a second message for Jews, a lesson for their future.
If Jews will not save Jews, who will? If not now, then when?
Friedman’s presentation:
But I wish today to focus on one such courageous individual, a young man, who at the age of 19, fled the city of Pishtany in Slovakia after his parents and sisters were deported. He was caught with false papers in Budapest and spent nearly 6 months in a detention center, where he made sure to spend his time near the Entrance Gate and there became depended upon to secretly advise and help new Jewish detainees fill out their papers, so as to avoid deportation back to Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland and the Concentration Camps.
This young man was Tibor Herz.
At great risk to himself, Tibor took advantage of his position at the entrance, not only to secretly advise newcomers but also to smuggle critically important messages of survival and hope, for the prisoners and their families and friends.
In 1944 when Eichmann came to Hungary to implement the Final Solution, Tibor realized the danger to this group of Jewish detainees and that they needed to escape.
Whilst the Guards were temporarily absent, he took the opportunity, given his position at the gate, to make a copy of the key.
He could have escaped easily alone, but instead at clandestine meetings he encouraged others to escape with him. Whilst the guard was in another room he led the escape of eight other inmates, leaving the gate unlocked so others could change their minds and follow.
He could not stay in Budapest, where so many police knew him, and fled to Slovakia, where relatives arranged false papers under the Slovak name of Tibor Krinsky. He was tall, over 6 ft 2 inches and blond and did not look remotely Jewish, so he could walk the streets of Bratislava, in safety without question.
He could have just melted away anonymously in the city, but took a job in a wholesale hardware shop owned by Jews, but administered by a non-Jewish manager. The owner, Mr. Reisner, knew he was Jewish and, as Jews in Bratislava were under threat and in hiding, Reisner entrusted the lives of himself, his wife and two children to this young man.
The Reisners hid in a small space between two stacks of hardware during office hours, when the non-Jewish workers and customers were about. Even a cough would have led to their death, and probably of Tibor as well. During the day Tibor would help run the business and keep people away from their hiding place. At night he smuggled them food and took away bundles of their bodily refuse.
For 11 months, the lives of the four Reisners depended on 21-year-old Tibor, and his ability to evade capture, and his resourcefulness to keep them safe. Yet, for 11 long months, Tibor controlled this intense fear, and kept that fearful beast at bay, and a Jewish family lived.
This modest man, who does not seek recognition or acclaim, became a story, of what we normal men, and women, can achieve.
The Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation is willing to work with and donate significantly to create a sculpted memorial at Yad Vashem to Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust.
Will Yad Vashem be willing???
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Jerry Klinger is President of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation; www.JASHP.org