Rodolfo: Magic, persecution and survival in wartime Hungary — Part Two
By 1944, Gross Rezső had already lived under two names...
Born into a Jewish family in Budapest, he had become Rodolfo, building a career around sleight of hand, pickpocketing and a personality audiences remembered. Anti-Jewish legislation eventually forced him to depend entirely upon magic, while labour service repeatedly took him away from the stage. Yet he continued to perform, even among his fellow labour servicemen.
Being Rodolfo had sometimes proved useful. It had not made Gross Rezső any less Jewish in the eyes of the Hungarian state.
In 1944, that distinction became a matter of life and death.
Towards the front
For a Jewish labour serviceman, being sent east meant entering a world that had already killed tens of thousands of men like him.
Hungary had joined Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. In 1942 alone, some 45,000 Jewish men were deployed through the Hungarian Labour Service to the Eastern Front in support of Hungarian forces. They constructed roads and fortifications, carried supplies, cleared mines and performed other dangerous work, often with inadequate food, clothing or shelter and under brutal treatment.
They went east alongside the Second Hungarian Army, which advanced towards the Don. In January 1943 a Soviet offensive shattered much of the Hungarian force. Labour servicemen suffered appallingly in the fighting and retreat, exposed to combat, the Russian winter and sometimes brutality from the Hungarian troops they served alongside. More than 40,000 Jewish labour servicemen ultimately lost their lives.
By 1944 the direction of the war had reversed. Soviet armies were driving west through Ukraine towards Hungary. Family testimony places Rodolfo heading towards Galicia, the historic region north-east of Hungary in territory now divided principally between Poland and western Ukraine.
His precise movements during these months are difficult to reconstruct. Rodolfo’s later account supplies vivid episodes, but the labour-service records needed to trace his unit from posting to posting have not yet been identified. What is clear is the danger of the world into which men such as Rodolfo were being sent.
The international touring magician who had once crossed borders with his wife Olga, assistants, costumes and a stage show was now travelling as a Jewish labour serviceman.
1944
German forces occupied Hungary on 19 March 1944.
Until then the Hungarian state had imposed its own anti-Jewish legislation, exploited Jewish men through labour service and committed serious atrocities. Yet most of Hungary’s Jewish population remained alive, and the Hungarian government had resisted German demands for wholesale deportation. German occupation transformed the situation. Systematic ghettoisation and deportation followed, carried out with extensive Hungarian participation.
The process moved with devastating speed. Between 15 May and 9 July 1944, approximately 437,000 Jews were deported from Hungary on 147 trains. About 420,000 were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where approximately three-quarters were murdered in the gas chambers.
Budapest was temporarily different. Its Jewish population escaped the principal May–July deportation operation, leaving the capital by the end of July as virtually the only substantial Jewish community remaining in Hungary.
Rodolfo remained in labour service. His memoir calls this part of his life “In the depths of hell.”
On 1 May 1944, he remembered, hundreds of Budapest labour servicemen were sent towards the fighting. Rodolfo said that he was showing a card trick when an explosion struck nearby and wounded him in the leg.
Then came the hospital — and the encounter with which this story began (see Part 1).
As Rodolfo remembered it, the initial response was brutally straightforward:
“We don’t treat Jews.”
Then someone recognised him.
“Which one is Rodolfo?”
He was treated.
Hungarian racial law saw Gross Rezső through his ancestry. Years on the stage meant that some of the men administering that system knew him differently. They knew Rodolfo.
That did not overturn the system surrounding him. On this occasion, it changed the behaviour of the person standing in front of him.
In 1944, that could matter.
Olga was meanwhile facing the persecution of Budapest’s Jews herself. Family accounts place her among those caught up in the round-ups of 1944 and remember her being taken to the Óbuda brickyard, She escaped deportation from there through an intervention associated with Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman and diplomat who became one of the most important rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.
She survived the war.
Another name
Eventually Rodolfo returned to Budapest.
The city was becoming increasingly dangerous. Jews were concentrated into designated yellow-star houses, subjected to curfews and deprived of property while news arrived of the destruction of Jewish communities elsewhere in Hungary.
In October 1944, after Horthy attempted to take Hungary out of the war, Germany backed the installation of Ferenc Szálasi and the fascist Arrow Cross. Tens of thousands of Budapest Jews were seized for forced labour. Beginning in November, many were marched west towards the Austrian border; others were confined in ghettos or sought refuge in internationally protected houses. Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, Jewish organisations and others issued protective papers and created safe houses, but documents could be challenged or simply ignored by armed Arrow Cross men.
Rodolfo later said that he survived for a time using false papers in the name Vastagh Rudolf.
Gross Rezső had become Rodolfo partly to build a career in a society where a Jewish name could be an obstacle. Now Rodolfo had to become somebody else because the danger was no longer merely to his livelihood.
He remembered false documents helping him through at least one Arrow Cross encounter while others were taken away.
Rodolfo survived. People close to him did not.
No trick
The fate of Bánó Dezső, Rodolfo’s father-in-law, and his family provides a necessary corrective to any temptation to turn Rodolfo’s survival into a story of the ingenious magician outwitting persecution.
Rodolfo remembered members of the family being seized by Arrow Cross men during the final months of 1944 and murdered. Independent Hungarian research confirms that Bánó Dezső, his wife, his son-in-law Dr László Somogyi and Somogyi’s wife — Bánó’s daughter — were shot by Arrow Cross members, although the precise circumstances remain uncertain.
Rodolfo’s wider family experienced several of the dangers then engulfing Budapest’s Jews. His brother Ádi survived in the Budapest ghetto. Ádi’s wife survived deportation to Bergen-Belsen. His sister Emma and her husband survived in hiding with false documents.
Rodolfo was dexterous and quick-thinking. He cultivated relationships, could entertain people and make himself useful. At particular moments those qualities may have improved his circumstances.
Thousands of equally resourceful people were murdered.
There was no trick for that.
Siege
By the end of 1944 the war itself had reached Rodolfo’s city.
Soviet forces began their assault on Budapest on 2 November 1944 and encircled the city during the winter. German and Hungarian forces fought to hold the capital while civilians endured artillery, air attack, hunger and urban combat. At the same time, Arrow Cross militias continued murdering Jews, including victims shot on the banks of the Danube.
For Budapest’s Jews, liberation and battle arrived together. Soviet troops liberated the international ghetto on 16 January 1945 and the main Budapest ghetto on 17–18 January. Fighting elsewhere in the city continued into February, with Budapest finally falling to Soviet forces on 13 February 1945.
Approximately 119,000 Jews were liberated in Budapest.
Rodolfo was one of the survivors.
Post war
In 1945, Gross Rezső officially became Gács Rezső.
His post-war career could fill another article. He became one of Hungary’s most familiar entertainers, performed internationally, appeared repeatedly on television and taught generations of younger magicians.
Rodolfo died in Budapest on 25 January 1987, aged seventy-five.
Did magic save Rodolfo?
No — at least not in any simple sense.
Magic did not prevent Hungarian law classifying Gross Rezső as Jewish. It did not stop his repeated conscription into labour service, protect his family or explain why he survived when so many others did not.
But it mattered.
We know that he continued performing between periods of labour service. Film survives of him performing in 1941. His comrades remembered his magic and tried to protect his hands. In 1944 Vogel Eric drew him performing beside a wheelbarrow.
Before the war Rodolfo had travelled with Olga, assistants, costumes and apparatus. Labour service stripped almost all of that away. What remained was unusually portable: trained hands, a few objects that fitted into a pocket, and years of experience in holding an audience.
Sometimes that changed the behaviour of the people around him. A superior became a spectator. Exhausted labour servicemen became an audience. The man assigned to the wheelbarrow could, briefly, become Rodolfo again.
He could still be Rodolfo.
Read the first part of this article here.
Want to read more about Rodolfo? Check out this article from the House of Houdini Budapest: Investigating Houdini - A mystery name, Rodolfo!
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