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

I wanted to march straight back and shake his hand and say, "Thank you, thank you for your father. Thank you for helping me believe there is goodness in the world." It would take so long to get all the way back to him, yet I felt time and history pushing me to reach out for the goodness this man represented. I tried to soften the clicking of my heels as I moved across the concrete floor and to contain the feelings swirling within me. I could barely breathe. The son's eyes, like mine, were filled with tears, and I thought, "Neither of us knew your father, but both our lives have been defined by him." We shook hands, and he leaned down and kissed mine in the age-old tradition of gentility. "I am happy to meet you. We will talk afterwards, at the dinner," I said.

AS WE SAT together later, my words in Hungarian came out haltingly as I tried to express my gratitude mixed with sorrow for the loss of his father and the hardships he, a fatherless child after the war, must have had to endure. A myriad of questions I had long wanted to ask him clamored in my head as I fought against my instinct to protect him and not intrude. Had he known anything of his father's story before he received my father's letter? How much had he already known from letters his mother received from the labor-camp men when they sent the care packages after the war?

Yes, he had known about the events of the war, not from letters his mother received, but from a few soldiers who came back from captivity in Russia, bringing with them his father's dog tags. But his mother never received official notification of his father's death. Only recently, after an appeal to the Hungarian government for some restitution, did they find out that his father had died of typhus. The Red Cross helped in obtaining the information and verification.

How did he feel when he received Dad's letter and the documentation? I asked. "I cried right away," his wife answered. I thought about how mixed his emotions must have been. "He was very angry at times that he didn't have a father, that his mother quit her job and, as a result, he had to quit school and start working at age 14," his wife explained. "And his mother became quite fanatical, praying all the time for her husband's return. My husband has been a bus driver in Miskolc for many years. He has worked hard all his life. That's how he knows how to do everything, like all the building that we are doing on our house," his wife proudly stated. "And I do the letter writing he doesn't like to do," she added, chuckling.

Finally, I asked the crucial question that had been haunting me for years: "Why didn't your father take off his uniform and save himself as he had saved so many others? Was it his feeling of honor as a military officer and a deeply religious man? Was it pride in having used his Nazi-allied uniform for the higher good? Did he really believe that nothing would happen to him--that the Russians would follow the Geneva Convention protocols for humane treatment of prisoners of war? Was it principle above pragmatics? Did his fundamental respect for others, the honesty, integrity and conviction which must have compelled him to act with such courage, transcend any consideration for himself and his family?"