Antall József

Antall, József With the defeat of Poland in September 1939 and the subsequent Nazi occupation, thousands of Poles crossed into Hungary and settled there. The Polish refugees were followed by hundreds of Jewish families. More Jewish refugees arrived in 1942 and 1943, when the Polish ghettos were liquidated and Hungary was still relatively safe. Dr. József Antall was responsible for civilian refugees for the Ministry of Interior during the years 1939 – 1944. Dr. Antall worked in cooperation with the Polish Citizens’ Committee for Refugee Affairs in Hungary, headed by Henryk Sławik and Jan Kołłątaj-Srzednicki, which was actually the representative of the Polish government-in-exile. The lawyer Tzvi (Henryk) Zimmerman, who escaped from Poland to Hungary at the end of 1943, later testified that this Polish Committee, together with Antall, greatly contributed to the efforts to rescue Jews who had fled from Poland to Hungary, by disguising them as non-Jews. Dr. Siegfried Róth, a refugee from Slovakia living in Hungary who was active in the underground activities of the Zionist Youth movement, testified after the war that he met with Dr. Antall in his office in 1943, and that Antall offered his help to any of the members of the underground who might need it. Indeed, on occasions when some of Róth’s friends were arrested, Róth went to Antall, who always intervened and sometimes managed to get people released. After the Germans invaded Hungary, the heads of the Polish Committee were arrested by the Gestapo. Some, like Jan Kołłątaj-Srzednicki, were murdered immediately, and some, like Henryk Sławik and Erzsébet Szapáry, were brutally interrogated and deported to camps in the Reich. Antall, too, was arrested in July 1944, but was released some time afterwards thanks to his friends in the Polish Committee, who claimed in their interrogations that Antall knew nothing about their illegal activities. After the war, Antall was appointed as the Minister of Rehabilitation and the Chairman of the Hungarian Red Cross. On December 13, 1989, Yad Vashem recognized József Antall as Righteous Among the Nations. File 4350