Under Swiss Protection: Jewish Eyewitness Accounts from Wartime Budapest

This volume retraces Carl Lutz's diplomatic wartime rescue efforts in Budapest, Hungary, through the lens of Jewish eyewitness testimonies. Together with his wife, Gertrud Lutz-Fankhauser, the director of the Palestine Office in Budapest, Moshe Krausz, fellow Swiss citizens Harald Feller, Ernst Vonrufs, Peter Zürcher, and the underground Zionist Youth Movement, Carl Lutz led an extensive rescue operation between March 1944 and February 1945. It is estimated that Lutz and his team of rescuers issued more than 50,000 lifesaving letters of protection (Schutzbriefe) and placed persecuted Jews in 76 safe houses―annexes of the Swiss Legation. Based on interviews with Holocaust survivors in Canada, Hungary, Israel, Switzerland, the UK, and the United States, this volume shines a light on the extraordinary scope and scale of Carl Lutz's humanitarian response.

Agnes Hirschi was born in London shortly before World War II broke out. She spent her early youth in Budapest and the last two months of the war together with the Lutz family in the bomb shelter of the former British Legation in Buda. The building was hit by twenty firebombs and completely burned down over their heads. Since 1949, she has lived in Switzerland. She was raised by Carl Lutz, who married her mother Magda in 1949. She has worked as a journalist for a daily newspaper and served as a judge. The occupation with the legacy of her father has become an important part of her life.

Charlotte Schallié is associate professor of Germanic studies at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Her research interests include post-1945 German literature and film, transcultural studies, Jewish identity in contemporary cultural discourse, and Holocaust education.