A MOST UNLIKELY HERO : A Fascist who saved Jews - Giorgio Prelasca

Commonweal, Dec 3, 1999 by Gregory Conti

December 1944. A bitter cold day in Budapest. A tall handsome man in a dignified but tattered suit, his eyes alert and searching, is peering down the loading dock as long lines of men, women, and children are being pushed toward waiting freight cars by German soldiers and Hungarian police. Behind the man is a black Buick sedan with a Spanish flag flying from its aerial.

Suddenly the man rushes forward, grabs two young boys by the collar, drags them back down the platform, and throws them into the back seat of his car. A German soldier runs over and pulls his revolver, gesturing to the man to put the boys back in line. The man refuses. "This car is foreign territory," he shouts at the soldier. "The boys are under Spanish jurisdiction and you'll be violating international law if you so much as touch them." The two men begin to scuffle and a German lieutenant colonel comes over to investigate. He tells the soldier to leave the man and the boys alone. "Go ahead and take them," he says to the man, barely glancing toward the back seat of the car. "Their time will come."

Just a few steps away, another man stands in front of a car bearing a Swedish flag. He is Raoul Wallenberg, sent to Budapest by the king of Sweden on a mission to buy safe passage out of Hungary for as many Jews as possible. After the scuffle, Wallenberg walks over and, with mixed concern and irritation, says to the Spaniard, "You realize who that was, don't you?"

"No, who was it?"

"That was Adolf Eichmann."

Wallenberg thought he was speaking to Jorge Perlasca, the Spanish consul in Budapest. But in fact, the man who had pulled the two boys out of line was not Jorge but Giorgio Perlasca; not Spanish but Italian; and not a diplomat but a buyer for an Italian livestock importing company, recently escaped from a German internment camp. Perlasca had named himself Spanish consul, without any authorization whatsoever, on December 1, 1944, when the real Spanish ambassador fled to Switzerland. For the next two months, Perlasca would be in charge of the embassy, and his management of Spain's protection program for Hungarian Jews would save some five thousand of them from certain death in the gas chambers.

In many ways, Giorgio Perlasca was an unlikely candidate for heroism in the Holocaust. A dedicated Fascist, he fought for Mussolini during Italy's invasion of Ethiopia and again in the Spanish Civil War in support of Francisco Franco. He dissented a bit too vocally, however, from the Fascist anti-Jewish racial laws of 1938, and when the war with the Allies broke out, he was given an exemption from military service. In September 1943, when Italy signed its separate peace with the Allies, Perlasca was in Hungary, where he was promptly arrested by the German SS and sent to an internment camp. He escaped, found his way to the Spanish embassy, and, in recognition for his service to Franco, was given Spanish citizenship and a passport. Unable to get back to Italy, Perlasca signed on as a volunteer in the Spanish effort to protect Hungarian Jews and, when Spanish ambassador Angel Sanz-Briz fled to Switzerland, Perlasca announced that he was the new Spanish consul.

Perlasca's diary of his two-month consulship, contained in Enrico Deaglio's The Banality of Goodness (University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), recounts the extraordinary exploits of Perlasca and a small group of collaborators on the embassy staff: churning out thousands of false documents, setting up and defending eight "safe houses"under Spanish jurisdiction, finding food and medicine on the black market, negotiating with the Hungarian authorities, and, together with Wallenberg and representatives of other neutral countries (Portugal, Switzerland, and the Vatican), pulling innocent victims from freight cars bound for the death camps. Through it all, Perlasca showed himself to be an ingenious organizer, a convincing "diplomat,"and a truly magnificent impostor.

At war's end came the long trip home and more than forty years of silence- until 1987, when he was discovered by a group of Hungarian Jewish women (young girls in 1944) who owed their lives to him. Perlasca was then a seventy-seven-year-old man living a modest life in Padua. In 1989, the first time Deaglio went to visit the rescuer at his home, Perlasca didn't even have a telephone:

To communicate with him you had to go through his sister, who lived next door. When someone called for Giorgio, his sister would hang a newspaper out on the terrace with a clothespin, so when Giorgio went out for a walk he could look up and see the signal. Then he would ring the doorbell and his sister would come out on the terrace and yell down to him that someone had called. It wasn't long, however, before so many people were calling that this makeshift system was no longer able to handle the phone traffic. Over the next four years, Perlasca would be decorated with honors by Israel, Hungary, Spain, the United States, and, finally...by Italy as well.

When Perlasca was asked what episode he remembered most, he always cited "the case of the twin boys" he had snatched from Eichmann. "I took them over to one of our safe houses and, once we were there, I realized that they weren't two boys after all. They were brother and sister. They had those little differences that begin in the development phase; the boy a little bit of hair on his upper lip and the girl just the first signs of breasts. We kept them for a few days and then we handed them over to the Red Cross. I never saw them again. I don't know what finally became of them, although I think they made it. But I'll always remember when I saw them walking forward together in that line. I think I'll remember them rather than so many others because they were so strikingly alike, because they were alone, and because they were so beautiful."