Rodolfo: Magic, persecution and survival in wartime Hungary — Part One
Rodolfo was one of Hungary’s best-known magicians, a master of sleight of hand and theatrical pickpocketing whose career would eventually span more than half a century. But he was also born Gross Rezső, into a Jewish family in Budapest, and during the Second World War Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws and labour-service system repeatedly took him away from the stage.
This two-part article traces Rodolfo’s journey through persecution and war — and asks what value being a magician could have when performance became something more than a profession.
The wounded man needed treatment. Instead, according to the story he would tell many years later, somebody at the Hungarian military hospital looked at the Jewish labour serviceman and said simply:
“We don’t treat Jews.”
Then another question was asked.
“Which one is Rodolfo?”
The name changed the situation. Someone recognised the injured labour serviceman as Rodolfo, the magician, already a familiar figure from Hungary’s theatres and variety stages. He was admitted and treated, eventually spending several weeks in hospital.
Long before the war, Gross Rezső had created another identity for himself: Rodolfo. During the years when Hungary increasingly sought to define him by his Jewish ancestry, that professional identity could not protect him from persecution. But at particular moments it gave him something useful: recognition, relationships and the ability to make people see him as more than simply another labour serviceman.
It would be too much to say that magic saved him, but too little to say that being a magician made no difference.
The making of Rodolfo
Rodolfo was born Gross Rezső in Budapest on 16 May 1911, the son of Gross Ignác and Wolf Katalin. The surname by which he was later also known, Gács, did not become his official name until 1945. He grew up in a Jewish family in Józsefváros, around Nagy Fuvaros Street, in circumstances far removed from the polished evening dress of his later stage persona.
He was also growing up in a city with one of the largest Jewish populations in Central Europe. Before the Second World War about 200,000 Jews lived in Budapest, the centre of Hungarian Jewish cultural life. They were deeply embedded in the commercial, professional and cultural life of the capital, even as antisemitism remained a persistent force in Hungarian politics.
Magic entered Gross’s life while he was still young. His decisive mentor was Ódry Zuárd, a versatile entertainer who taught the teenager far more than the secrets of individual tricks. Rodolfo would later stress practice, manipulation, timing and the need to adapt an effect to the personality of the performer. There were cards, coins, balls and handkerchiefs, but knowing the secret was only the beginning. The movements had to become natural.
By 1929, Ódry was managing his first independent appearances. It was around this time that Gross acquired the name under which he would become famous: Rodolfo Grosso, soon shortened simply to Rodolfo.
Later accounts give a practical reason for the Italianate name. Gross sounded conspicuously Jewish at a time when that could already hinder a young entertainer trying to build a career. Rodolfo was therefore more than a decorative stage name.
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The point was not simply to puzzle people. Rodolfo understood the importance of personality and presentation. Publicity stunts presented him stealing his way through Budapest before returning the supposedly stolen property. He learnt that a successful magician had to create a character as well as perform tricks.
Variety engagements were uncertain, however, and Rodolfo continued for years to work in the men’s clothing trade while performing at night. The magician in evening dress was building one profession while depending upon another to pay the bills.
In 1935 he married Nádor Olga, who became more than simply the magician’s wife. She learnt enough of the craft to work beside him and travelled with the Rodolfo Revue, sharing the uncertain life of a touring performer. Their marriage would last for more than half a century. When persecution later separated Rodolfo from the stage, Olga remained one of the constants connecting his wartime existence with the life he had built before it.
Politics was meanwhile intruding ever more directly upon both of them.
A Jewish magician in Horthy’s Hungary
Hungary between the wars was ruled by Regent Miklós Horthy. Resentment over the territories lost under the Treaty of Trianon became a powerful force in Hungarian politics, and the desire to recover them drew the country increasingly towards Nazi Germany. Hungary did not, however, need German occupation to begin persecuting its Jews. Anti-Jewish legislation introduced from 1938 progressively restricted employment and economic participation and increasingly defined Jewishness through ancestry rather than religious belief.
Rodolfo had converted from Judaism to Greek Catholicism before the war, later dating the decision to 1936. He was unusually candid about his motives. Growing antisemitism threatened the career he wanted. He wanted to travel, work and become a successful magician; he did not subsequently present himself as a young hero defiantly choosing persecution.
Baptism could not erase the ancestry through which the Hungarian state increasingly defined him.
In 1939 the Second Jewish Law forced a major change in Rodolfo’s working life. He left his employment in the men’s fashion trade and thereafter depended upon magic for his livelihood. Persecution had, ironically, made him a full-time professional magician.
The Rodolfo Revue
For a brief period, the gamble appeared to work.
In 1939 Rodolfo assembled a travelling revue around himself, Olga and female assistants. This was no longer simply the young manipulator moving from club to club with cards in his pockets. The act mixed the skills on which he had made his reputation — manipulation, pickpocketing and sleight of hand — with assistants, comedy and larger stage effects. Olga was part of the working act, while costumes, staging and apparatus turned the solitary magician into the centre of a show capable of travelling internationally.
The political map through which the revue travelled was changing too. With German and Italian support, Hungary acquired territories from neighbouring states between 1938 and 1941, extending Hungarian rule — and its increasingly discriminatory legislation — over ethnically mixed populations.
Rodolfo returned to Budapest in the summer of 1940 and opened a new revue at the end of August. On 11 September 1940, according to his later account, he was taken away for what he called military service without weapons:
munkaszolgálat — labour service.
Less than two weeks after returning to the stage, the state had another role for him.
Magician and labour serviceman
Hungary’s labour-service system was a substitute for ordinary military service for men the state regarded as unsuitable or unreliable to bear arms. Political opponents and members of several minorities passed through it, but Jewish men increasingly became its principal victims.
As Hungary moved into the war in 1941, the system became more openly antisemitic and more dangerous. Jewish labour servicemen were no longer permitted to wear military uniforms and were made to wear identifying armbands. From the summer of 1941 tens of thousands were deployed near the fighting in Axis-occupied eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine, often without adequate food, clothing, shelter or medical care. Around 100,000 Jewish men are estimated to have been forced into Hungarian labour service; between 25,000 and 42,000 had died even before the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944.
Rodolfo nevertheless continued to perform when circumstances allowed. Surviving programmes show him appearing during the war in cities including Kassa, Kolozsvár, Ungvár, Szabadka, Kecskemét and Újvidék, several of them places whose national boundaries had recently changed as Hungary expanded.
There is even moving-film evidence. In 1941, Rodolfo appeared in the short film Mágiától a bűvészetig — From Magic to Conjuring. A surviving print eventually surfaced decades later in Australia. It preserves the wartime Rodolfo himself, moving and working before the camera.
Labour service did not entirely separate him from the profession he had spent years building.
A magician with a wheelbarrow
Perhaps the most evocative surviving image of Rodolfo’s wartime life is not a photograph. In 1944, designer and fellow labour serviceman Vogel Eric sketched Rodolfo performing magic beside a wheelbarrow.
Vogel was not the only entertainer caught in the same system. Actor Básti Lajos, comedian and performer Alfonzó, and Vogel himself appear in accounts of the labour-service world around Rodolfo. For men who had once inhabited theatres, clubs and film sets, performance could be reduced to its essentials.
Rodolfo’s daughter later remembered her father carrying cards and thimbles and performing whenever circumstances allowed. His comrades understood that his hands were the tools of his profession and, where possible, tried to protect them.
A performance could also provide a temporary interruption to the labour. If Rodolfo was performing, other men were watching. Labourers became an audience and a superior or guard might become a spectator.
Rodolfo’s kind of magic was unusually portable. A pianist separated from his piano could no longer play; a grand illusionist without his apparatus lost much of his show. A manipulator carried most of what he needed in his pockets and fingers. Cards required almost nothing. Thimbles fitted in a pocket. Some effects needed no apparatus at all.
The state could take away the stage. It was considerably harder to take away the act.
Novi Sad
One of the most dramatic episodes in Rodolfo’s wartime story places him in Újvidék — Novi Sad — during the January 1942 massacre.
Novi Sad is today in Serbia. In 1941 it lay in Yugoslavia’s Bačka region. Hungary participated in the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia that April and annexed the territory, bringing its Serb and Jewish inhabitants under Hungarian rule.
Rodolfo is independently documented as performing in Újvidék during the wartime period. His memoir places him there as the killings began. He remembered becoming frightened about reaching his accommodation and appealing to an officer he called Zöldy, a man who had already seen his act several times.
The officer recognised him and, in Rodolfo’s telling, helped him get back safely.
There is an intriguing Magic at War parallel. Another Jewish magician, Franz Czeisler, later famous internationally as the Great Tihany, also recalled being caught in the Novi Sad massacre and narrowly escaping death — a story covered previously on this blog. There is no reason to think Rodolfo and Czeisler met there, but both later described trying to survive the same murderous environment.
Professional identity and personal connections could matter in an individual encounter. They offered no general protection.
Read The Great Tihany: A circus impressario’s narrow escape.
A card trick and a posting
He later described working at a military food depot on Lehel út in Budapest when a superior discovered that the labour serviceman in front of him was the famous magician. Rodolfo was told to show him a trick.
He performed an elaborate card effect, repeatedly controlling apparently free choices and defeating his spectator’s attempts to understand what was happening. Afterwards, Rodolfo remained at the depot for another six months and eventually acquired greater responsibility within the unit.
He never quite says that the card trick itself saved him from a more dangerous posting, and there is no need to make the story do more than it does. Once again, a man in authority had discovered that the Jewish labour serviceman in front of him was Rodolfo, and the relationship changed.
By the end of 1943 the name he had spent years creating had sometimes proved useful. Cards could interrupt, however briefly, the normal relationship between a superior and a labour serviceman. His companions valued the hands with which he performed. In Novi Sad, according to his own account, being known as Rodolfo had helped him out of immediate danger.
None of it made him safe
Hungary’s war in the east was collapsing. Soviet armies were moving west, and in March 1944 German troops would enter Hungary itself.
The worst year of Rodolfo’s war was still to come.
Part Two follows Rodolfo towards the Eastern Front and back to Budapest, through German occupation, Arrow Cross terror and the final struggle to survive.
Sources: This article draws principally on Rodolfo’s memoir, Vigyázat, most nem csalok!, together with material from the Rodolfo Collection and Hungarian biographical, museum, film and Holocaust sources. A full source list and note on evidence appear with Part Two.
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