Community Honours Italian Schindler
Giorgio Perlasca Saved 5,000 in 1944
by Martin Knelman
Toronto Star
April 10, 2004.

Back then, they called him the Italian Wallenberg.

Today he might be known as the Italian Schindler. Or the great impostor who outwitted Adolf Eichmann.

"My entire family looked at Giorgio Perlasca as a great hero," says Mary Siklos of Thornhill.

Her relatives were lucky enough to be on Perlasca's list.

A meat importer posing as a Spanish diplomat in 1944 Nazi-controlled Hungary, Perlasca saved her mother, Susie Konigsberg Hoppe, her grandmother and three aunts, as well as about 5,000 other Hungarian Jews, from Hitler's gas chambers.

"He risked his own life roaming around Budapest in 1944 protecting Jews from Nazis," Siklos explained the other day. "Then he just vanished and no one knew where he was — until more than 40 years later."

Her mother, who still lives in Budapest, was able to meet Perlasca (who died in 1992) and thank him when he resurfaced after a mysterious decades-long disappearance.

Siklos, who had moved to Canada in 1985 with her husband and daughter, never got the chance to meet Perlasca and thank him.

But on April 19, she will finally get a chance to meet and thank Franco Perlasca, the son of this most self-effacing of all Holocaust heroes, as well as Zsuzsi Gelleri-Dear, who, after being saved by Perlasca, worked with him to rescue others.

The two are coming to Toronto for a fundraising tribute reception and screening of Perlasca — An Italian Hero, made for Italian television.

The event has been jointly organized by prominent members of Toronto's Jewish and Italian communities, including Onex Corp. CEO Gerald Schwartz, media mogul David Asper, Royal Bank CEO Gordon Nixon and aviation entrepreneur Walter Arbib.

The movie will be shown to students the afternoon of April 19 at the Varsity theatres on Bloor St. W., with public screenings that evening. Tickets to the evening screenings are $25, but there will also be a $1,000 per person reception at Royal Bank headquarters. The event will benefit various charities.

It is bound to be an emotionally charged occasion, especially given recent anti-Semitic incidents that have made Toronto and Montreal in 2004 seem a lot closer to Budapest, 1944, than anyone would like to think.

"For a long time, no one knew what happened to Perlasca," Siklos said, "but then a group of Holocaust survivors located him in the town of Padua in the 1980s. And in 1990, the whole story came out when there was a big article about him in Parade magazine. Apparently, he had never told the story of what happened to anyone, including his wife."

After decades of silence, Perlasca reluctantly told the tale of how he once crossed paths with both Raoul Wallenberg and Adolf Eichmann.

Perlasca had gone to the train station in Budapest where the Nazis were cramming cattle cars with Jews being deported to death camps. In the long line of people he spotted two identical-looking children, about 12. He took an instant liking to them and thought, "I can't let them go."

So he approached them and said, "You see that big black car over there? Open the door and get in. The driver knows what to do."

An SS officer tried to get the children out of the car.

Perlasca — who was then in his mid-30s and looked as formidable as John Wayne — planted himself in front of the car and said, "No. This car is extra-territorial. It has diplomatic immunity. Look at the licence plates. Look at the flag of Spain."

The Nazi pulled out his pistol.

That's when Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who became the world's most revered Holocaust hero, came over and said, "Watch what you're doing. This man represents the Spanish government. This is a diplomatic car."

The SS man said, "You're interfering with my job."

To which Perlasca retorted: "You call this a job?"

The argument escalated, other officials got involved, and finally a Nazi colonel came over and told the SS man, "Let them go. Their time will come."

The incident is dramatically recreated in the movie, a small-screen companion to the Oscar-winning Steven Spielberg movie Schindler's List. The Perlasca movie is absorbing and riveting, even if certain details have been criticized for historical inaccuracy.

Recalling his confrontation with the SS for a journalist decades later, Perlasca said: "The Nazis went away and I got the kids. Then I turned to Wallenberg and said, `Who was that man?'"

Wallenberg, looking surprised, replied: "You don't know? That was Adolf Eichmann."

It was indeed the notorious Nazi who masterminded the Final Solution that resulted in the slaughter of 6 million European Jews. Years later, Eichmann would be brought to justice in Israel and tried for "crimes against humanity" in the most important trial of the 20th century.

Eichmann had come to Budapest almost exactly 60 years ago, when everything changed. Before the spring of '44, Hungary, though allied with Germany, protected its Jews. Then the Nazis seized control. In less than a year, about 500,000 Jews were murdered — more than half the Jewish population of Hungary.

Why would an Italian Catholic and one-time fascist who fought for General Francisco Franco (for whom his son was named) in the Spanish Civil War risk his life for Hungarian Jews he had never met?

His only answer was: "I had opportunity and I took it."

Because of his war record, the Spanish government had given him a document entitling him to diplomatic protection in any Spanish embassy in the world. That's why he went to the Spanish embassy in Budapest, where he was given a diplomatic passport. While there, he noticed a lineup of Jews outside seeking letters claiming the bearers were Spanish citizens under the protection of the Spanish government.

The Spanish tried to help, until things got so tense they closed the embassy in October, 1944. At that point, Perlasca began impersonating a Spanish diplomat, keeping Jews under his protection at many so-called safe houses.

The relatives of Mary Siklos lived in one such place, a small apartment crammed with 90 people. (All were women and children; Jewish males over 16 had already been rounded up.)

In January, 1945, Perlasca visited them for the last time and said, "The Russians are in the city. You don't have to be afraid. You don't need me any more."

Then he disappeared for more than 40 years.

In the final years of his life, Perlasca was honoured at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and at the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

Tickets to the April 19 screening are available online or by phone at 416-872-1212.