The following is an edited extract from Erbstein: The Triumph and Tragedy of Football’s Forgotten Pioneer, written by Dominic Bliss and published by Blizzard Books.
Ernö Egri Erbstein was a pioneering coach who created Il Grande Torino, the great side that won five successive Serie A titles. He was killed with the rest of his squad in the plane crash at Superga in 1949. Erbstein was part of the great Jewish Hungarian football tradition of the 20s and 30s and had begun to make a name for himself as a coach in Italy but when the Manifesto of Race was passed by Mussolini shortly before the second world war broke out, the newly appointed Torino coach was forced to flee the country where he had made his home. He eventually returned to Budapest with his wife, Jolàn, and his two daughters, Marta and Susanna, but their lives were devastated when, in March 1944, his homeland was occupied by Nazi Germany.
Almost immediately, it was decreed that Jews would wear the yellow star and in the provinces a round-up of the Jewish population was ordered as the Hungarian Holocaust began. With the support of local functionaries and gendarmes, the SS were able to ghettoise almost the entire Jewish population of Hungary within two months and to begin deporting them to concentration camps.
This was the height of the Nazi genocide, as they streamlined their deportation and execution process with chilling efficiency. More than 400,000 people – old men, women and children, crammed on to fewer than 150 trains – were deported to Poland, where they were unloaded on to a ramp and sorted into those who could work and those who would best serve the Nazi cause by dying immediately. At one stage, 12,000 people were being transported from Hungary to Auschwitz in this way every day.
Budapest would be dealt with last, a decision that ended up saving hundreds of thousands of lives. At this stage of the war, it was no secret to the wider world that Hungary’s Jews were being deported at an alarming rate and several influential figures looked to intervene, pressurising the Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy to call a halt to the activity going on under his command. Pope Pius XII, President Roosevelt and King Gustav, of neutral Sweden, all contacted Horthy and it would appear their overtures had a decisive impact on the regent, whose subsequent order to suspend deportations bought Budapest’s Jews valuable time.
As the net closed in, there were few options open to would-be escapees, even for a man of Erbstein’s considerable resourcefulness. But treatment of Jews could also be rife with inconsistency and there were some places – even in the darkest months of the Budapest Holocaust – where shelter could be found with the right connections.
Among the hilly parkland in the villa district of historical Buda, the unoccupied Katalin Convent had been transformed into a “war-effort plant”. Here, under the supervision of the kindly Catholic priest Father Pál Klinda, and a courageous director, Gitta Mallász, uniforms were being produced on behalf of the War Ministry.
Situated on the leafy Budakeszi út, in a quiet garden next to the Jánoshegy forest, the factory was in a serene part of town, although the young women working hard on the production line were not able to share the calm of their immediate surroundings. Instead, they huddled close at night, hoping not to hear the rumble of approaching military transport, for they were all there for the same reason.
The aim of Klinda’s operation was to protect as many Jewish women as possible from potential deportation by giving them work that was vital to the Hungarian war effort and, crucially, carried out on extraterritorial, Vatican property. For these reasons they hoped not to be interfered with, but they also knew that their fascist foes were not known for adhering to international law.
When Mallász arrived to take charge as director of the production effort in June 1944, she was shocked at what she found. “Mattresses, cots and whatever the inhabitants have been able to save of their possessions are piled everywhere, from the cellar to the attic,” she recorded. “As if that weren’t enough, more and more new refugees are arriving to squeeze themselves into the last tiny cracks of space. This tragic, totally disorganised mass accumulation threatens to endanger the entire operation, whose key to success will be keeping secret the fact that these women are of Jewish origin.”
Among the fortunate few to be stowed away in this Vatican enclave were Jolàn, Susanna and Marta Erbstein. They had been informed of Father Klinda’s factory by the girls’ well-respected dance teacher, Valéria Dienes, who had close connections to the papal nunciature in Budapest and counted Susanna among her star pupils. Dienes secured a place on the workforce for the young dance sensation, who then appealed to Klinda on behalf of her 13-year-old sister, despite the fact that children under the age of 14 were forbidden to work, and later convinced him to take on their mother as a cook. Unwilling to break up families, the priest gave Jolàn a job in the kitchen and accepted Marta into his care, when it was agreed that she and five other children would be kept secret from any authorities – “hidden twice”, as Marta put it.
A factory producing uniforms for the very forces they were undermining – this was an operation shrouded in duplicity. Mallász had applied for the voluntary position as director in an attempt to save two close Jewish friends, whom she immediately added to the list of workers upon her appointment. She had succeeded in getting the job on account of her father’s former high-ranking military office and, in a situation as perilous as this, Mallász and Klinda’s acts of subversion were nothing short of heroic.
One day, Susanna was told there was a call for her. When she rushed to the receiver, she was overjoyed to hear her father’s voice on the other end of the line.
Erbstein had been through hell to get to a telephone. After his wife and daughters had been taken in by Father Klinda, he had reached his lowest ebb, racking his brain for a plan and realising that his only option was to report to a Jewish labour camp, as all men of working age were required to do by law.
It is impossible to imagine how difficult it was for him to accept this harsh reality, but he had to do more than that – he actively had to hand himself in to his persecutors, literally to walk towards his own humiliation. A man who was always led by an idea, on this occasion was led by obligation.
As he made his way into the camp, it seemed that the only way to survive was to call upon his physical, mental and spiritual strength in the hope that it would be enough to keep him sane and fit until the approaching Red Army made the breakthrough that might release them from captivity. An athletic man, he was immediately identified as a useful body by the Hungarian gendarmes who had been ordered to run the camp. He was attached to a workforce charged with laying railroads, a sisyphean task in a city facing constant air raids on its supply lines and the work proved gruelling enough to break many of his fellow prisoners.
However, as he reported for his first work duty in the camp, Erbstein could not believe what he saw. From his place in the line of solemn, disheartened men he was faced with a ghost from the past, a flashback to 30 years earlier when he had been an officer in the Habsburg Army. Standing in front of him, at the head of the line of new inmates, was the man who had been Erbstein’s orderly during his days as a sergeant in the first world war.
The pair had not seen each other since 1919, after going their separate ways following those heady days of war and revolution, but here, in the summer of 1944, on his first day as a prisoner in a Jewish labour camp, the ex-officer came face to face with his former servant, who announced himself as Kapo of the workforce to which Ernő had been assigned. Sergeant Erbstein had always been good to his men and the situation the two of them found themselves in did nothing to stem the emotion of the occasion.
Over the weeks and months that followed, Erbstein rekindled his one-time orderly’s trust in him. The Kapo took Ernö away from his workforce on several occasions, announcing that he needed an extra body to help with some construction work in the city. Having led him from the watchful eyes of the gendarmes running the camp and his fellow inmates, he escorted his man to a public telephone so that he could call the workshop where his wife and daughters were housed. On those occasions where such an operation seemed too risky, the kapo would phone the workshop himself and pass on Ernő’s messages. Thanks to a chance meeting, the communication lines among the Erbstein family were open again.
On 15 October 1944, the atmosphere on the streets of Budapest changed. A clumsy and premature attempt by Horthy’s government to announce a peace settlement with the Soviet Union had proved to be his undoing, as the furious German government immediately stepped in to remove him from the leadership and install the fascist Arrow Cross as the ruling party in Hungary, with the fiercely antisemitic Ferenc Szálasi at the helm.
It was the worst possible scenario for the city’s Jewish population and for several nights after Szálasi’s appointment, emboldened Nyilas thugs took to intimidating the women inside the Katalin Convent by marching up and down the road outside, shouting and firing their guns into the air. They were led by the Catholic priest and former monk, Father András Kun, who had returned to Hungary in 1943 in order to join the Arrow Cross. This man of the cloth was known to keep a basement under his headquarters where he and his followers tortured and killed hundreds of Jews in secret. With word spreading that he led his “Jew hunts” wearing his cassock, with a gun holster on his hip and Arrow Cross insignia on his upper arm, Kun’s presence in the region struck fear into those women under the protection of his nemesis, Father Klinda.
Eventually, the power-drunk Nyilas thugs decided that taunting these virtually defenceless Jewish women was no longer enough for them. They broke down the workshop door and rounded up all the women inside the convent at gunpoint. “You cannot imagine those people, they were monsters,” Susanna recalled. “There was a commander of the whole thing, a military commander, and they took us all in a room where we were waiting for whatever they decided to do. They took us and said: ‘Give us the keys and whatever you have in your rooms.’ Of course, everyone had their most valuable things with them, and so first they took all those valuables from us.
“As it was a Sunday, it was the only day when we could receive telephone calls and maybe visits from our relatives. And they decided, as some kind of joke for them, that when some of us were called to the telephone, they would tell us: ‘Tell the person to come here because there is a party and don’t dare to let them understand that there is anything different here.’”
The Nyilas clearly hoped to tempt more Jews to the convent so they might increase the number of victims from their raid. That Sunday, Ernő’s friend called the factory to tell the girls that their father was unable to leave the camp to speak to them in person. However, he was completely disarmed when Susanna came to the phone and immediately began to speak in a high-pitched voice about a party that evening at the villa.
He listened confusedly while she explained, in uncharacteristically expressive tones, that everyone was invited – himself, her father and any of their Jewish friends who could be smuggled to the villa district that night.
What Ernő’s kapo did not know was that Susanna was being held at gunpoint by a Nyilas mob who were telling her what to say. Meanwhile, the gunmen beside her did not know that, intuitively, Susanna had hatched a plan to speak in this strange, hysterical voice in the hope that her father’s friend would realise there was something amiss.
“After I had talked with this gentleman, I went back into the crowd with all the others and some time later they called me to the telephone again,” Susanna said. “It was my father. Again, the same situation, those men menacing me and saying what I told you before. Of course, with my father I also used my voice like before. But this time in the middle I said – calmly and in my own, deeper voice – ‘Aiuto!’ [‘Help’, in Italian].
“He said: ‘OK, I understand. Stay quiet.’”
In the meantime, Susanna was waiting with the rest of the workforce in the convent, surrounded by brutes with guns. After she had spoken to her father on the telephone, the girls had remained at the mercy of their captors for several hours while they waited for any unwitting invitees to their “party” to arrive. When the Nyilas grew bored of waiting, they forced their victims to line up in columns and marched them out of the villa.
Jolàn, Susanna and Marta filed into the courtyard as all of the women from the Katalin Convent were led into the night, towards an uncertain destination. “We knew that we were going to death because it was so evident,” Susanna recalled. “It was dark and we didn’t know where they wanted to take us.”
In those months in Budapest, Jews were often rounded up on so-called “death marches” and forced to travel on foot, at gunpoint, into Axis territory, unsheltered from the cold, until the vast majority of them simply gave up and were left to die by the roadside. Others were taken to the train station to be deported to concentration camps.
In the same period in which the convent was stormed, hundreds of Jews were led to the banks of the Danube in groups, tied together in pairs, back to back, and shot into the river to drown or die from their wounds.
Knowing about these dark practices and fearing the worst, the women from Father Klinda’s workshop were forced on a harrowing march, until they came to a prolonged halt on a dark road, when a vehicle pulled up next to them and signalled to the men in charge to stop. A conversation went on out of earshot of the women, at the end of which they were ordered to return along the route they had just taken. Confused, they suspected a cruel game was being played on them.
“We were so exhausted, we were saying it would be good if they finished it instead of going on with this torture,” Susanna said. “We thought maybe they’d put a bomb in the villa; that they wanted us all together there and that was how they chose to finish the thing.
“So we entered the villa and, after a certain time, Father Klinda arrived and spoke to us. ‘This time, God wanted to listen to your prayers.’”
The Almighty hadn’t been the only one to heed the cries for help. After Erbstein had put down the receiver following the coded plea for help from his eldest daughter, he had asked his friend, the kapo, to help him leave the camp, using a spurious work detail as a cover story. In town, Erbstein then made a desperate phone call to Valéria Dienes, Susanna’s well-connected dance teacher, urging her to put him through to her friends at the papal nunciature.
Angelo Rotta, the nuncio in Budapest, was one of the senior figures in a group of neutral foreign diplomats who made great efforts to protect Jews in the city. He did his best to keep tabs on situations in which the church might have been able to use its power to help potential victims of antisemitic legislation. To this end, Pál Klinda’s workshop had purposefully been set up on Vatican territory. During Rotta’s visits to the convent with another young member of the nunciature, Gennaro Verolino, he had been shown around the site by Susanna, who had been keen to impress. Speaking to them in their mother tongue, she discussed the condition and spirit of her fellow inmates, as well as her upbringing in Catholic Italy.
It seems she made quite an impression on the esteemed visitors because, when her father managed to get his desperate message through to Rotta, the nuncio quickly responded, using smart diplomacy to throw senior members of the Hungarian government into doubt about their actions – war crimes – on extraterritorial land.
Given the turbulent atmosphere in Budapest at the time, it is little surprise that the neutrality of the Vatican land had been breached by Nyilas troops who had little knowledge of, or interest in, the laws governing international enclaves in their city, but the senior Hungarian officials whose names were likely to appear in diplomatic reports could still act. These men were concerned about the damage any illegal acts of civil violence could do to their reputations at that stage in a war they were certain to lose. One name in particular has become synonymous with these kinds of rescue efforts by neutral diplomats in Budapest: Raoul Wallenberg.
Among the solemnity and the peaceful beauty of the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Garden in the grounds of the great Dohány Synagogue you will find the Memorial of the Hungarian Jewish Martyrs – Imre Varga’s metal sculpture of a weeping willow. Each of the leaves on the tree is delicately inscribed with the name of a person or family killed during the Hungarian Holocaust – an overwhelming representation of loss on such a large scale.
Beyond the shimmering sculpture lies a red marble memorial stone, bearing the names of 240 non-Jews who made efforts to thwart the Holocaust, headed by Wallenberg, the tireless Swedish diplomat. The names listed include Rotta and Verolino, the representatives of the Vatican who sought to protect Erbstein’s family in their workshop in the Katalin Convent.
It was young Verolino – sent by the ageing nuncio – who interrupted the deportation of Father Klinda’s Jewish workforce on that cold night in November. He was the man whose car had sped past Jolàn, Susanna and Marta, carrying an order from a senior government minister to return the women to their workplace. Rotta’s diplomatic threats had worked.
It seems that the minister’s wife, a devout Catholic, had been mortified by the prospect of a breakdown in relations between Hungary and the church and had urged her husband to take action to prevent this impending scandal. And so, with the papal nuncio in one ear and his wife in the other, the minister had been forced to act, handing his order to Verolino to convey to the officer in charge of the operation. Hurrying along the road after them, the Monsignor arrived just in time to prevent more than 70 Jewish women from being killed or deported that night.
As soon as they were returned to the Katalin Convent, the Erbstein women began to plot their escape, fearing that the Nyilas could return at any moment. That night, the three of them dug a hole under the garden fence and tunneled out of the place that had offered them protection for several months before making their way through the night to seek refuge with family in Pest.
Jolàn’s sister was married to a Catholic and therefore exempt from the worst antisemitic measures, as Hungarian legislation deemed that the husband’s racial background should determine the status of a couple in a mixed marriage.
“It was extremely dangerous because we had no documents,” explained Susanna. “If somebody stopped us it would have been terrible. But, after walking and walking – it was very far from the villa – we arrived, and we were accepted at my mother’s older sister’s house.”
At around the same time, Ernő realised the moment had come for him to get out of the labour camp once and for all. As the Red Army closed in on Budapest in December 1944, the camp commandants were beginning to wrap up their operations in the capital and lead their prisoners further into Axis territory, but by the time they were forced to depart, Erbstein and a handful of fellow prisoners had already planned their escape, most likely with the help of their inside man, the kapo.
Among the group of five would-be escape artists was another Jewish-Hungarian football manager, Béla Guttmann, who had been coaching Újpest when the war broke out, but had been forced to renounce his role due to antisemitic pressure. He remained at the club during the early war years, working off the books as a consultant to the management team, before going underground when the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944. Like Erbstein, he had come to the crushing realisation that he had no choice but to report to a labour camp or risk death by trying to hide from the authorities.
The two coaches had encountered each other almost 20 years earlier when both were touring the United States with different teams. “They took us to Vác [a small town north of Budapest],” Guttmann recalled in an interview with his biographer, Tibor Hámori. “From there to Erdőváros, and later to Timót utca. Today’s youth could not understand what a place Timót utca was. Our sergeant served in the French foreign legion and he learned how to torture people there. If he was in a good mood we were ‘only’ required to haul stones for his bunker while shouting: ‘We are a piece of shit, we are a piece of shit.’ The fact that I had been a national team member, a successful coach or even a human being did not matter. And how many more humiliations, my friend. Our unit was put on the train and sent to Germany, but before that five of us jumped out the second floor window and escaped.
“We had been monitoring and studying the movement of the guards for days and arranging the ground to avoid breaking our ankles and then … wait for a second … who were those five?
“Sándor Gál, the actor – I see him in front of me; I wonder if he is still alive. Ernő Egri was also among us … I cannot remember the others, even if you beat me to death. The important thing is that I was saved. There were a few out there who were good people, who took a risk and hid me.”
Guttmann’s account fails to mention Ernö’s friend on the inside, but it is entirely possible that he didn’t remember or simply didn’t know about his involvement. Erbstein had many reasons to keep that friendship secret and he may even have kept the kapo in the dark about an escape that, once discovered, would surely have led to serious punishment for everyone involved. It is also possible that the kapo was one of the escapees that Guttman had forgotten.
Once Erbstein, Guttmann and their fellow fugitives were clear of danger, they went their separate ways. Ernő headed for Pest, joining his wife and daughters at his sister-in-law’s house, where he was kept hidden in order not to arouse suspicion among the neighbours. His wife and daughters, meanwhile, sought to obtain false documentation.
They took real identity papers of deceased or displaced people of similar age to the recipient and, using chemicals, erased the name delicately before replacing it with a new one. Susanna kept the same first name in order not to appear confused if she were stopped and questioned, becoming Susanna Béres for the last six weeks of the war. Jolàn often had trouble remembering her new date of birth, but Marta was not as fortunate as her mother and sister. They could not get their hands on any documentation for a girl of Marta’s age or similar, leaving the family with no choice but to make a forgery from scratch. Although they did their best, they could not create a perfect representation of the identity papers and Marta clung to the hope that she would never have to produce her unconvincing documents for inspection. Susanna was much more fortunate with her false identity, however. She had been able to obtain documentation with the Red Cross stamp on it, giving her an extra degree of protection.
Once the Allied air raids on Budapest became more regular and more devastating, whole apartment blocks of people were forced to take cover in collective cellars, and the Erbstein family were no different. Only Ernö, whose presence in the building was kept a secret from everyone, was unable to join the family in the basement during these raids. Instead he remained in the attic, where Susanna would occasionally bring him food and clean clothing, using her Red Cross accreditation to provide her with a cover story for leaving the cellar during a raid.
However, their routine was interrupted again when a neighbour casually told Susanna that the Nyilas were planning to search the house for hidden Jews. She knew there was no way Ernő could remain hidden there.
By then it was December 1944 and thousands of Jews were being sheltered in houses under the protection of Swedish diplomats or Red Cross workers. These places of refuge were no guarantee of survival – they were only safe as long as the Nyilas thugs were willing to obey international law – but they certainly offered hope.
Susanna recalls the moment she convinced her father that he had to leave his hiding place in the apartment. Picking up her Red Cross accreditation, she led Ernö through the besieged streets under the guise of a nurse taking a wounded civilian out of harm’s way until she reached one of the buildings under Swedish protection.
A little under a month later, following the Soviet occupation of Budapest, he showed up on the doorstep of the family home, exhausted but alive. The family had been through hell but, drawing on each other’s strength, all four of them had survived.
Exactly what happened when the Soviets took the city remains unclear, but the family was eventually reunited and able to return to Italy. In Turin, Erbstein began the most fruitful spell of his coaching career, but it was a period of success that was cut tragically short.
Dominic can be contacted @theinsidelefty
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