Magic at War

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. Image: Rodolfo and his wife, Olga performing the card in balloon trick. 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 ...

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. Image: A young Rodolfo at the start of his magic career. 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, a...