Portrait of Kato Brunner

published 19/12/2013 at 16:28


Portrait of Kato Brunner (later Tamar Benshalom), a member of the Hungarian Zionist youth resistance organization.

The Hungarian Zionist Youth Movement engaged in massive resistance and rescue operations during the Holocaust. Their work included warning other Jews of impending deportations, the manufacture and distribution of false papers and the establishment of safe homes for children. In 1942, Germany began deporting Slovakian Jews to Auschwitz. In response, the Hungarian Zionists illegally assisted Slovakian Jewish refuges who came to Hungary by providing them with them room, board and identification documents. Some 40 activists were caught and sent to either prison or labor brigades. Immediately following the German invasion on March 19, 1944 the Zionist movements decided that its members needed to assume Christian identities in order to carry out their resistance work.

They began the wholesale manufacture of forged documents including identity cards, birth certificates and military documents in a central forgery workshop. Zionist emissaries fanned out to ghettos in the provenances to provide warn Jews of impending deportations and provide them with false documents, money and escape routes. They also smuggled young Jews across border into Romania and Slovakia in an operation called the "Tiyul" or excursion. Many who crossed into Slovakia later participated in Slovakian uprising. After the Arrow Cross coup on October 15, 1944, under the aegis of the International Red Cross, the Zionist youth helped organize more than 50 children's homes saving 6,000 Jews inside from Arrow Cross terror and the traumas of the last weeks and months of the war and forged thousands of fake Schutzpasses.