Zsoldos Andor

Zsoldos, Andor Captain Andor Zsoldos served as the commander of labor-service company No. 105/6 beginning in 1942. Some 250 Jews served in this unit and were set to work building a military airport next to the city of Zombor / Sombor (today Serbia) in southern Hungary. From the first meeting with their new commander, the Jewish men in the unit realized that Zsoldos was different from the staff that had been in charge of them until that point. Zsoldos treated his Jewish workers as equals, and restrained the antisemitic officers who served in the unit. At one point, Zsoldos saved the lives of two Jews, Izidor Hershkovitz and Salamon Hauer. These two men had been sentenced to harsh physical punishment that would surely lead to their death – for igniting a fire that led to the destruction of a storeroom for work tools. When the sentence was handed down to the unit, Zsoldos declared that the punishment was not feasible, leaving it on paper only. Zsoldos took it upon himself to find comfortable sleeping arrangements and acceptable food for the Jews under his command. When the Jews were to be sent to the Russian front, or to the copper mine in Bor, Zsoldos protected them, convincing his commanding officers at headquarters that it would not be advisable to send such “old and sick” people to the Ukraine, because they would not be able to work productively. After the German invasion in 1944, Hungarian Jews were concentrated into ghettos. Using a forged order, Zsoldos drafted many Jews from the Szeged ghetto into his company, along with members of their families. Zsoldos risked his life and his standing as an officer in the Hungarian Army by disobeying written and verbal orders in order to save the lives of Jews under his command. After the war, Many of Zsoldos’ survivors, including Hershkovitz and Hauer immigrated to Israel. On May 18, 1965, Yad Vashem recognized Andor Zsoldos as Righteous Among the Nations.