What would you do if armed men entered your home looking for the person you were secretly protecting?
Today I want to find out a little about Géza Ottlik, a Hungarian writer, mathematician and translator who risked his safety to protect a Jewish friend during the Holocaust.
Géza was born in Budapest on the 9th of May 1912. Alongside his literary career, he became a respected bridge theorist and later translated works by writers including Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw.
But during the final months of the Second World War, Géza and his wife, Gyöngyi Debreczeni, showed extraordinary courage.
From October 1944, they secretly sheltered Jewish writer István Vas in their Budapest apartment, sharing their limited food with him.
When Arrow Cross members came to the apartment after being told that a Jewish person was hiding there, Gyöngyi kept her nerve and confronted them. Remarkably, they left without discovering Vas.
The Arrow Cross Party was a Hungarian fascist and violently antisemitic movement that seized power in October 1944. Its members worked closely with the German authorities and became notorious for persecuting, deporting and murdering Jewish people, particularly in Budapest. For anyone hiding a Jewish person, discovery by the Arrow Cross could have been deadly.
Géza also intervened when Vas’s mother was arrested, helping to secure her release.
Vas survived the war.
In 1989, Géza and Gyöngyi were recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.
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