Nagy Béla

Fekete Nagy, Béla Béla Fekete Nagy was born in Hungary, in 1905, to a conservative Catholic family. Despite his conservative upbringing, he was inclined to be more liberal. As an artist and painter in the 1930s, he was a member of a socialist artists’ association, and that is how he met Éva Barta, his Jewish future wife. In the late 1930s Béla and Éva opened a ceramics studio in Paris, but they returned to Budapest with the outbreak of the war, opening a ceramics studio there. After the Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944, the studio became their workshop for forging documents. They generated all sorts of forged documents: baptismal certificates, birth certificates, military permits, residence permits, and more. Béla knew various scripts and was an expert at creating authentic-looking documents, and Éva devised the official stamps to go with them. Among those whom Béla helped were Laszló Horváth and his brother-in-law Gábor Biró, whose forged papers allowed them to find places to live after they fled from their labor service units. Béla also supplied the counterfeit papers that Gyula Kandó (recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1998) provided to Mrs. Gábor Bíró. The Kandós pretended that Bíró’s newborn baby, Anna, was their child and that her real mother was the baby’s wet nurse. They managed to keep up this pretense until the liberation of Hungary. Béla had a tailor friend who sewed uniforms for the Arrow Cross and provided Béla with uniforms, which he would wear to take Jews out of the yellow-star houses. He then equipped them with false papers to enable them to live elsewhere. He also rented an apartment where he hid many people, including members of the Barta family. At the end of November 1944, after a recipient of their forged documents was arrested, Béla and Éva closed the laboratory. While it was in operation, hundreds of people benefitted from Béla’s generosity and nobility. On October 21, 2012, Yad Vashem recognized Béla FeketeNagy as Righteous Among the Nations.