SUSANNE WENGER It was winter 1944/45 and a battle was raging in German-occupied Budapest. Every time the air-raid siren sounded, six-year-old Agnes Hirschi held on to her doll and hurried into the dark, dank cellar with her mother. “We never left the cellar for two months after Christmas, because it was no longer safe at ground level,” she recalls. Hirschi is now 85 and lives near Berne. She is one of over 20 people profiled in a new book called “The Last Swiss Holocaust Survivors”. But what happened to her was different to the stories of those who survived the concentration camps. “I was lucky, because my mother and I found refuge,” she says. It was diplomat Carl Lutz, Swiss Vice-Consul in Budapest from 1942 to 1945, who gave them refuge – and whose memory Hirschi wants to keep alive most of all. The cellar was at Lutz’s own address, where little Agnes and her mother Magda Grausz were housed in the staff quarters. Magda, a young Hungarian Jew, was employed as housekeeper at the Swiss embassy. It was thanks to this working relationship that Lutz was able to protect her and her daughter from persecution by the Nazis and Hungarian fascists. Lutz became Agnes’s stepfather after the war, after he and Magda fell in love and got married in 1949. It was the second marriage for both of them. Courage in the face of barbarity The newly-weds moved to Berne with Agnes after the war. Agnes learned German, went to school, completed commercial training, started her own family, worked as a journalist at the “Berner Zeitung”, and later got involved in the Reformed Church. The fact that she came from a Jewish famA promise at her stepfather’s deathbed Agnes Hirschi from Berne escaped the Holocaust in Hungary as a child – thanks to the Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz, who later became her stepfather. She is now fulfilling her pledge to tell others about what Lutz did in saving her and thousands of others from Nazi brutality. “I was lucky, because my mother and I found refuge,” says Holocaust survivor Agnes Hirschi, 85. Photo: Danielle Liniger ily and had fled the Holocaust in Hungary was a secret she kept to herself for decades. And it was only gradually that she realised the scale of what her stepfather did in Budapest. Lutz not only saved her and her mother but prevented an estimated 50,000 Hungarian Jews from being deported, shot dead or sent on brutal death marches. In his job at the Foreign Interests Service in the Swiss legation in Budapest, Lutz was responsible for issuing visas to Jews emigrating to Palestine (a British protectorate at the time). He was able to take advantage of this. Following Germany’s invasion of Hungary in March 1944, terrified Jewish men and women gathered in front of the Vice-Consul’s bureau in Budapest, called the “Glass House”. The diplomat was at his wit’s end. What should he do? After wrestling with his conscience for a few days, he Swiss Review / May 2023 / No.3 22 Society
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