Sharing a legacy of rescue - commanding officer Zoltan Kubinyi, who helped rescue Jewish men during World War II

Christian Century, Nov 13, 1996 by Marta Fuchs Winik

My father immediately wrote to the son, sending him a copy of the documentation we had submitted to Yad Vashem. For verification, the son sent back a copy of his father's identity card which featured the same photograph my father had shown me. Alongside it was a copy of his own card. As I looked into the eyes of Marton Gabor Kubinyi--only six months old when his father went off to war--I wondered what it must have been like for him not- to know his father and now to learn, nearly 50 years later, how much he had meant to others.

In February 1994 in a nationally televised ceremony in Budapest, Marton Kubinyi received the Medallion of Honor on behalf of his father, posthumously honored as a "Righteous Among the Nations." A tree had also been planted in Kubinyi's memory in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem.

IN MAY 1994, at a 50th anniversary commemoration in Tokaj in memory of the Tokaj Jews who were destroyed in 1944, I spoke about Kubinyi and finally met his son. More than 200 people gathered on the top floor of the Tokaj Synagogue, under reconstruction to be a cultural center, for whet was the town's first Holocaust commemoration. Attending were Miki and Lajcsi, along with their families, the only Jews who remain in Tokaj. Born after the war, like my brother Henry and me, they are our childhood friends. Some survivors from the surrounding area came, but the majority were the non-Jewish townspeople.

Why did they come? Partly out of curiosity, I imagine; partly because it was a big event in a small town; and partly to mourn the loss of their Jewish friends and neighbors, who before the war had composed almost one quarter of the town's population. Jews and non-Jews had lived side by side in harmony in Tokaj, a beautiful little town world-famous for its wines, and a pocket of sanity in a country that became fiercely anti-Semitic. Out of 1,400 Jews in a town of 5,000 fewer than 100 survived the Holocaust. And most of these, like us, left in '56. In the words of Tokaj's young mayor, Janos Majer, "TD this day, the town has not been able to recover from this loss of blood. The region had lost its intellectual and economic leadership which kept this town among the most outstanding ones nationwide."

The program began with the unexpected. A local rabbi asked all the Jewish men present to join him up front for afternoon prayers. It had been decades since the century-old synagogue had reverberated with the ancient sounds of Hebrew. As I watched my brother davening alongside the dozen or so men, I wondered what the townspeople thought. This must have been so strange and foreign to them, particularly to the younger generation.

When my turn to speak came, I couldn't keep the papers of my speech from shaking in my hands. Complete silence fell as I began to tell the story of the man who rescued some of the few Jewish men from this town who survived. When I said that Marton Gabor Kubinyi recently had received the commendations on behalf of his father, everyone burst into applause--which spontaneously became rhythmic, indicating that he should stand up. From the front row, the mayor threw me a worried look. In all the frenzy of preparations, no one had remembered to check to see if the son had even arrived for the commemoration. I finished the last line of my speech and, taking a chance, asked if Marton Kubinyi would please stand up. Far in the back a man's head slowly appeared, barely visible above the crowd.