Hungarian magician, Dr. Laszlo Rothbart, survives Nazi concentration camp
Hungary has a proud history of magic. Famously, Harry Houdini (Erich Weisz) and his younger brother Hardeen (Ferencz Dezso Weisz) were born there. When magician Charles H. Larson visited the country in 1938, he wrote, "Magic and Budapest compares with the best I have seen...Magicians here are [the] highest type professionals and business men. Magic should be proud of such dignity." One of these professionals was Dr. Laszlo Rothbart.
Born in Budapest on 1 May 1897, Rothbart was an educated man with good language skills. He completed his medical studies in 1918–19 and specialised in radiology. By the late 1930s he was listed in Budapest as a röntgenológus-főorvos – radiologist and chief physician – and Hungarian biographical research identifies him as head of the Central X-ray Institute of the Royal Hungarian 2nd District Hospital. His address, recorded in contemporary Budapest directories, was Pozsonyi út 4.
Rothbart was a member of the Magyar Amateur Magusok Egyesulete (M.A.M.E.) (translates as Hungarian Amateur Magicians Association), the leading magic club for amateurs in Hungary between the world wars. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he served on M.A.M.E.'s board and as its treasurer. He was also a founder member of the Magyar Mukedvelo Buveszek Kore (M.M.B.E.) (translates as Circle of Hungarian Amateur Magicians) formed in 1938, serving by turn as its secretary and president.
Dr. Laszlo Rothbart
(Source: Linking Ring, Vol. 27, No. 11)
Rothbart also brought an inventive mind to medicine. In 1921 he published a new forensic identification method which he called Röntgendaktyloskopia – X-ray dactyloscopy. The technique involved filling the grooves between the ridges of a fingertip with a contrast substance before taking an X-ray, allowing the fingerprint pattern and the underlying structure of the finger bones to be recorded together. Rothbart believed that this could provide additional characteristics for identifying individuals and make fingerprint classification easier. A similar method had been developed in France by radiologist Henri Béclère, but Rothbart maintained that he had reached his results independently and had offered his technique to the Budapest police before learning of Béclère’s work. It never became established practice, but was an ingenious attempt to combine the relatively new sciences of radiology and fingerprint identification. Perhaps this work on forensics was inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes - given Rothbart's pipe-smoking portrait photograph (above)!
In the years leading up to World War Two, Rothbart created scores of original magic effects, or variations of existing plots. These were published in popular magic periodicals, such as Bat, Chap's Scrapbook, Genii, Jinx and Linking Ring in America, George Johnson's The Magic Wand in the U.K., Hokus Pocus (the Journal of The Magic Ring of Switzerland), La Baguette Magique (translates from French as The Magic Wand), Magi (translates from Danish as Magic), and Magikeren (translates from Norwegian as Magician). He also edited and contributed to M.M.B.E.'s in-house journal, Házi Közlönye, which ran for around 60 issues from 1938 to 1942. Few other magicians have contributed magic to such a range of magazines. Most of Rothbart's magic was in the ever-popular domain of card tricks, often with a mental magic theme. He also developed tricks or moves with sponge balls, rubber bands, thimbles, matches and other small objects.
Cover image for Házi Közlönye, the in-house magic magazine of
the Circle of Hungarian Amateur Magicians, edited by Dr. Rothbart
(Source: M.M.B.E., courtesy of Swedish Magic Circle Library)
(Source: Magyar Magia by Kelle Botand, courtesy of Erik Nordvall)
Rothbart wrote up 25 of his best card tricks in an English-language book called 'Deck In Hand: Magic of the Magyar' (or, fully translated, 'Magic of the Hungarian'). It was published, in early 1941, by Abbott's Magic Novelty Co., based in Colon, Michigan in the U.S.A. The introduction to this 48-page book was written by American magician, Caryl S. Fleming, an advocate for international collaboration and a leading voice in the creation of the International Alliance of Magicians. In the introduction, Rothbart's long-distance friend wrote about the kinship between magicians:
"This work represents more than just that which appears between its covers. It is the product of the peculiar bonds of friendship which instinctively develop through correspondence between two distantly separated individuals with a common interest - MAGIC - which speaks an universal language, appreciated and understood by all within its ever-widening circle, despite the possible complete ignorance of its Babel of tongues."
'Deck in Hand: Magic of the Magyar' (1941) by Dr. Laszlo Rothbart
(Source: Author's collection)
The book was well received by the magic community, containing tricks that appealed to lay audiences rather than just magicians, and novel advancements in technique and methods. Fleming described Rothbart was "an outstanding magician" with "an highly constructive mental capacity for invention, adaptation and presentation". "He is the most prolific inventor of brilliant effects in card magic now used the world over," wrote John Mulholland in The Sphinx.
Rothbart was a social magician and enjoyed sharing his magic and learning from others. For years, he regularly and prolifically corresponded with other magicians and magic clubs all over Europe and America, where he built-up strong relationships. He was the de facto foreign correspondent for the Hungarian magic scene.
He continued creating and submitting tricks for publication throughout the war, and sending occasional updates on club news, such as theatre shows put on by magicians in Hungary. But, censorship and the banning of communication with 'the enemy', reduced letters to and from Rothbart, especially after the U.S.A. joined the war in December 1941. From 1942 to 1944, Rothbart's tricks appeared in neutral Switzerland's Hokus Pocus magazine, presumably because it was one of the few countries outside of the Axis Powers he could still write to.
Then, in 1944, Rothbart's contributions stopped and he vanished.
Laszlo Rothbart (top right) at a meeting with German magician Kalanag (Helmet Schreiber) (centre, seated) in Budapest, Hungary
(Source: Erik Nordvall)
In October 1945, Percy Abbott's The Tops magazine carried a report from Europe by magician Jack Stanley (Jaks), that Dr. Rothbart was assumed to have been killed. The same month, The Sphinx magazine conjectured that Rothbart was murdered by the Nazis; noting that news had reached America that another Hungarian magician and physician, Dr. Vilmos Lenard, had been murdered three days before the Russians captured Budapest from the Germans.
In fact, Laszlo Rothbart survived the war, but only just.
Rothbart was Jewish. When Hungary's leaders chose to align themselves with the governments of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, they adopted a series of anti-Jewish measures. Starting in 1938, these included restricting the number of Jews in certain occupations (including medicine), banning intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, and prohibiting their employment in government jobs at any level. Life for Rothbart and the Jewish population of Hungary became incredibly difficult. His situation became worse when his hospital was destroyed by a bomb, probably from an Allied air attack.
Hungarian Jews had already suffered years of persecution. Tens of thousands of Jewish men were conscripted into unarmed labour-service units, many of them sent to the Eastern Front, where conditions were frequently lethal. Yet the mass deportation of Hungary’s Jewish population did not begin until after German forces occupied the country in March 1944.
Between May and July 1944, German and Hungarian authorities deported around 440,000 Jews, overwhelmingly from towns and communities outside Budapest. Most were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where a large proportion were murdered. The Jews of Budapest were temporarily spared when the Hungarian government halted the deportations in July.
Rothbart nevertheless became a prisoner of the Nazis. Hungarian magician and magic historian Kelle Botond later wrote that during the war he was sent to a “German concentration camp”. Kelle stated that Rothbart survived, but returned suffering from tuberculosis. He did not identify the camp, and a surviving prisoner or transport record has not yet been found that establishes where Rothbart was held.
Auschwitz therefore cannot safely be assumed. Rothbart was a Budapest resident and the persecution of the capital’s Jewish population followed a different chronology from the earlier mass deportations from provincial Hungary. After the German-backed Arrow Cross Party seized power in October 1944, tens of thousands of Budapest Jews were seized for forced labour. In November, more than 70,000 were assembled at the Óbuda brickworks and forced westwards towards Austria. Thousands died or were murdered during the marches. Those who survived were used for forced labour or sent to concentration camps, particularly Mauthausen and Dachau.
Whether Rothbart was caught up in these late-1944 deportations, sent to Auschwitz by another route, or imprisoned elsewhere remains unknown. Nor is there presently evidence that he worked as a doctor among the prisoners or performed magic while incarcerated; though that could reasonably be expected. What can be said is that he survived imprisonment in a German concentration camp, but his health had been permanently damaged.
Prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp
(Source: Public domain)
News of Rothbart’s survival eventually reached his friends in the international magic community. In June 1946, The Linking Ring carried a report from Jack Stanley: “He is now in a sanatorium [in Budapest] very sick, having contracted tuberculosis.” Hungarian accounts likewise state that Rothbart returned from the concentration camp suffering from the disease. The doctor had become the patient.
Aside from his serious illness, Rothbart's other main problem was getting hold of food. It was in short supply and he had no money to pay for it. Stanley started sending Rothbart food parcels and called on members of the International Brotherhood of Magicians to do the same; which they did. Echoing Fleming's introduction to 'Deck In Hand', the kinship of magicians and their common bond of magic, overrode the fact that Rothbart was a native of an enemy country.
In October 1946, the Linking Ring published a further update on Rothbart's condition, saying that he was now so poor he even had difficulty securing paper to write his letter for help and had to borrow money to send it.
In better news, American Dr. Zina B. Bennett, a fellow magician and physician/surgeon - and a long-term pen pal with Rothbart - received a letter from him in July 1947, informing that he was now back home, having being discharged from hospital. Seemingly, two years after the war ended, Rothbart could begin rebuilding his life.
But, just after Christmas 1948, a letter from Bennett to Rothbart was returned unopened with a note scribbled on the envelope by the postal service. Other writers received the same annotations.
Devastated by the war, diagnosed with incurable tuberculosis and facing an imminent painful death, Dr. Laszlo Rothbart had taken his own life on 8 August, 1947, aged 50 years old.
Any more information on Laszlo Rothbart would be greatly appreciated. Given his extensive letter writing, some of his original letters no doubt exist in magic collections around the world. Post comments below, or get in touch via the Contact Form, and I can update the blog.
Related article: 'Dutch magician deported to extermination camp', tells the wartime story of card magician Louis Lam. Blog link.
Research supported by The Good Magic Award 2021 from The Good Thinking Society
*** AVAILABLE NOW ***
The Colditz Conjurer tells the amazing true story of Flight Lieutenant Vincent ‘Bush’ Parker, Battle of Britain pilot and prisoner-of-war magician.
Written by the Magic at War team, The Colditz Conjurer is a remarkable tale of perseverance, courage and cunning in the face of adversity. It features over 55 original photographs and maps. 126 pages.
Comments
Post a Comment