Brothers For Resistance And Rescue By David Gur

The Zionist youth movements got organized and soon started their rescue activities. In Hungarythe conditions were not right for armed resistance: there were no important Hungarian anti-Naziresistance groups whom to cooperate with; Jewish men were enlisted in forced labor units; thepopulation was not supportive; there were no forests and mountains that could be hiding placesand, most significantly, the end of the war seemed imminent. The members of the Zionist youthgroups set themselves a goal: to save as many Jews as possible.Missions to the country townsOver one hundred emissaries, members of the youth movements, were sent to two hundredJewish destinations and mainly to the ghettos outside Budapest where the Jews were to bedeported from. The emissaries warned the local Jews of what lay in store for them and equippedthem with forged documents and money to enable them to escape. There was a weak response tothe warnings because the Jews believed that they were being taken to labor camps or being“resettled” and would be able to return to their houses later on. Continuing their activities theemissaries rescued many youngsters from the forced labor units before they were sent westwardsto the German Reich.The production of forged documentsAn intensive operation started which was to obtain Aryan documents from the offices of thePopulation Registry and to produce tens of thousands of forged documents in improvisedlaboratories that were set up by the members of some of the youth movements. The documentswere given for free members of the Zionist Youth Movement and to all who needed them. Thesedocuments included, among others, birth certificates, marriage certificates, identity cards, PoliceResidential cards and later Protection Documents from the neutral countries’ embassies. ManyJews managed to survive thanks to these documents, especially in the capital, Budapest. The mainworkshop for forged documentation as far as the scope, variety and the intended recipients (youth,old people, non-Jewish resistance groups) was unique in all of German occupied Europe.According to a careful estimate, at the time of the liberation of Budapest by the Red Army, everyother Jew was in possession of some kind of document produced in the workshop of the Zionistyouth movements.The “tiyul”The “tiyul” was a nickname for an extensive operation that organized the smuggling of Jews acrossthe Hungarian border mainly into Romania and from there, via the Black Sea ports, to Eretz Israel(Palestine). The Romanian Government was quite flexible and it was therefore possible to carry outthis operation. Attempts on a smaller scale to smuggle Jews to the partisans in Yugoslavia werealso made. The “tiyul” started after the German invasion of Hungary on 19.3.1944, was expandedand became more efficient during the summer months. The candidates for smuggling across theborder were equipped with forged documents, money and relevant instructions. They arrived bytrain in the border towns where they met local smugglers who crossed the border with them. It isBrothers for Resistance and Rescue 14