Pattantyus Imre

Pattantyús-Ábrahám, Imre Imre Pattantyús-Ábrahám, b.1891, a deeply religious Roman Catholic man, was a metallurgical engineer. Not long before World War II, he became the director of the Hungarian Waggon and Engineering Works at Győr. In this factory, which became one of the most important war factories in Hungary, several Jews were working. Among them were Dezső Winkler, the designing chief engineer of the car manufacturing section of the factory and the designer of the Botond tank, and József Lengyel, the leading engineer of the bridge building section. In the summer of 1944, the Jews of Győr were forced to move into the local ghetto. Pattantyús-Ábrahám acted to bring the families of both engineers – Lengyel’s wife and their 15-year-old daughter, as well as Winkler’s pregnant wife and her mother – out of the ghetto by claiming that they were not able to work well if they did not know that their families were safe. Winkler and Lengyel continued working at the factory until December 1944, when Arrow Cross men placed them on a death march towards Germany. They and their families, however, survived the Holocaust and they remained in close contact with the Pattantyús-Ábrahám family. Imre Pattantyús-Ábrahám is one of the protagonists of a novel entitled “Black Winter” (Fekete tél), which was published in 1973. The author, Miklós Gerencsér, was a young worker in the Hungarian Waggon and Engineering Works at Győr in 1944-1945, and wrote about the events of World War II in the town. Besides the novel, there is a documentary film about Pattantyús-Ábrahám, Anna Sárdi’s “The Last Execution, 1944” (Az utolsó kivégzés, 1944), in which for instance Dezső Winkler talks about how Pattantyús-Ábrahám rescued him and his family from the ghetto. Imre Pattantyús-Ábrahám died in 1956. On October 11, 2000, Yad Vashem recognized Imre Pattantyús-Ábrahám as Righteous Among the Nations.