Kanczler Katalin

Karády, Katalin Katalin Karády (née Kanczler), the famous actress and singer, was the seventh child of a petty bourgeois family, which lived in Kőbánya, Budapest. In the early 1940s, she was one of the most celebrated movie stars in Hungary. Her anti-German stance was well known and as a result, she was constantly being attacked by the extremist rightwing press. Using her connections, she was able to bring Jewish lyricist György G. Dénes back from the eastern front in 1942, where he was taken as a forced laborer. G. Dénes had written many of her famous songs, including Hamvadó cigarettavég (“A Cigarette-end turning to Ashes”). “I helped and hid people, since I had three apartments then, and when someone was taken away, I went after him and got him back even from [the] Kistarcsa [internment camp],” said Karády to András Mezei in an interview. Soon after the German occupation in March 1944, Karády was arrested by the Gestapo. After being tortured and held in prison for three months, she was released. In the winter of 1944, during the Arrow Cross reign of terror, Katalin Karády saved a group of about 20 Jewish children from being murdered on the bank of the Danube. She bribed the Arrow Cross men guarding the children and took the children to her own villa in the neighborhood called Városmajor. She hid them in the cellar and provided them with food. After the capital was liberated, Karády searched for the surviving relatives of the children so that she could reunite them. János Gömöri, who later became a journalist, was among the children saved by Karády. In 1951, Karády emigrated from Hungary. Not settling in one place, she lived in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, and in São Paulo, Brazil. In 1968, when she was finally granted an entry visa, she immigrated to the U.S.A. There, together with her lifelong friend, Irma Frank, she opened an elegant millinery in New York City. She died in 1990. There is a memorial plaque on the wall of her last home in Budapest and shewas buried in Budapest as well. On March 22, 2004, Yad Vashem recognized Katalin Karády as Righteous Among the Nations.