Reports From a Distant Place

By Frank Shatz

Frank Shatz’s book, Reports from a Distant Place, is about life in the shadow of death. It is a unique portrayal of survival during the Holocaust, by hiding in plain sight. It is also about living, dangerously, under the Red Star. The last chapter, In America, is about hope and a reinvented life.

Frank Shatz is an eye-witness to the horrors and terrors of the 20th century, including the Holocaust and the imposition of an unforgiving communist ideology. But his life is much more than a tale of mere survival. It is, in reality, an affirmation of the human spirit, our universal yearning for freedom and dignity, and the unrivaled promise of the American dream.

Ambassador Mitchell B. Reiss
President Washington College

Frank Shatz is among the last who can explain the Holocaust first-hand. After the war, he promoted the work of anti-communist underground in Eastern Europe. His columns convey insight, courage, luck, hope.

Bill O’Donovan, publisher The Virginia Gazette

Frank Shatz’s tales of resisting Nazism and communism offers not only insight into the past but also inspiration for the future.

Paul Aaron, author of Unsolved Mysteries of History

Frank Shatz’s ability to describe situations such as life under the Nazi’s heel, outside the concentration camps, and living twice under a repressive regime, ushers us into a world where survival was a daily question mark.

His and his wife, Jaroslava’s, escape from Communist Czechoslovakia and journey to the free world becomes an intimate, shared experience for the reader.

Sandy Lenthall, author of Conversations With Remarkable Women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Educational Publisher/Biblio Publishing
• Release date: Apr 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781622490004

Book preview

For some forty years, following the Second World War, I have not talked about how I survived the Holocaust or about the horrors I have witnessed. I willed myself to forget the past and find meaning only in the present and the future. Then, three realizations made me reconsider my attitude toward shunning the past.

First, I came to realize that in America many held the view that Jews in Nazi-occupied European countries went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughterhouse. It wasn’t the case. Those who could, went into hiding, escaped, or joined the anti-Nazi underground. But the vast majority didn’t have this choice. They lived in a sea of enemies, with nowhere to turn for help. I was an eyewitness to this, and I felt an obligation to bear witness.

I have realized also that to most people, particularly to the younger generation, the word HOLOCAUST conveys the image of a monolithic monstrosity. It conjures an image, of concentration camps where multitudes of people -- men, women, and children -- were condemned to starve to death. Or of extermination camps with their gas chambers and crematoriums death factories run for the sole purpose of killing people.

But to me, the word HOLOCAUST is a mosaic that encompasses hundreds of flashes of memory, all of them related to survival during the Holocaust but outside of the concentration camps. I felt a need to demonstrate the complexity of life under a murderous regime and system and show how it affected people on the run.

Lastly, the strongest incentive to speak out was the appearance of Holocaust deniers. They have come out from the woodwork, and their poisonous message has had an effect on people with limited knowledge of history.

I realized that I was among the dwindling number of people who experienced the Holocaust firsthand. After us there will be films, books and museums, but no one who can say, I was there. I felt duty-bound to speak out. In newspaper columns, interviews, at colleges and public forums, I have recalled case histories that depicted the reality of life, on the edge.

But, questions about my life after the Holocaust kept coming. Thus, I have embarked on describing in my columns the second chapter of my life. An article in The Virginia Gazette, reflecting on my stories, noted: Realizing that the Communists installed a system every bit as repressive as that of the Nazis, and recognizing the warning signs, Frank and his wife, Jaroslava, began to take those small steps of mental defiance that eventually led to active participation in the anti-Communist underground.

Resistance to oppression had become a habit, I explained then. We couldn’t sit idly by. I was a journalist, and I used my ability to move around freely to arrange escapes for those in danger.

The telling of the stories of survival during the Holocaust, and living dangerously under the Communists, is the substance of this book.

Part One

Under the Swastika

Wallenberg’s Mission of Mercy

April 13, 1985

This is a chapter in my life that will always remain vivid in my memory. A time, when my very existence was interwoven with the rescue activities of two extraordinary men, Raoul Wallenberg and Dr. Rezso Kasztner, a Zionist leader.

Millions of Americans watched on TV this week the story of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat. During the closing months of World Was II, he saved the lives of thousands of persecuted Jews in Budapest, Hungary.

I was one of them.

Following my escape from a slave camp, I roamed the streets of Budapest in search of a safe haven. I had no identity papers or money. Capture was a constant and imminent danger. Then, incredibly, I bumped into a childhood friend from my hometown. He was a member of an anti-Nazi underground organization. His group had close ties with the rescue efforts spearheaded by the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg.

I spent my first days of freedom sheltered in a Swedish House under the nominal protection of the Swedish government.

In fact, those oases of relative safety in a sea of murderous Nazi mayhem were the result of Raoul Wallenberg’s imagination, daring, and humanity.

My stay in the Swedish House was only temporary. Soon I was provided with fake identity papers and joined a Zionist-led anti- Nazi underground organization.

Raoul Wallenberg didn’t save me, as he did a great many other victims, by a daring personal intervention. As he did so often by prying people out from the jaws of death. Rescuing them from cattle cars and death marches on the way to extermination camps.

Still, I owe my survival to him. He was the one who gave me shelter during my greatest need. And it was Raoul Wallenberg’s courage, diplomatic skill, and plain heroic dedication which inspired some other diplomats of neutral nations and international organizations to apply unorthodox diplomatic methods to help save the multitude of victims destined for the Nazi gas chambers.

The group I was assigned to operated under the aegis of the Switzerland-based International Committee of the Red Cross. It was led by Dr. Rezso Kasztner, a longtime Zionist activist.

Dr. Kasztner’s main efforts focused on buying time. The Russians were already approaching Budapest. But Adolf Eichmann was determined to transport the remaining 200,000 Jews to the extermination camps. It was obvious that delaying the dispatch of transports could save the lives of thousands of people.

In connection with that effort, an obscure and bizarre episode took place involving Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS.

Himmler was interested in making a peculiar deal with the Western powers. In exchange for 3,000 heavy trucks to be used by the German Army on the Eastern front against the Red Army, he was willing to order a halt to the deportations of the Jews from Budapest and the release of unspecified number of concentration camp inmates, to Sweden.

It was a hare-brained scheme with obvious political motives. It was an effort by Himmler to sow discord among the allies. And Himmler’s henchman in Budapest, Adolf Eichmann, pursued it with vigor.

Dr. Kasztner eagerly acquiesced because he considered it as a leverage to wring some concessions out of Eichmann. A Hungarian Zionist activist, with Gestapo consent and assistance, was dispatched to neutral Turkey to conduct negotiations with Western representatives.

To show good faith, Dr. Kasztner delivered $2 million worth of gold in a suitcase to Eichmann at his luxurious villa on Schwabhegy ostensibly to finance the truck deal. In return, about 3,000 Hungarian Jews were permitted to depart to Switzerland.

As a result of the Kasztner negotiations there may have been some temporary easing in the intensity of deportations of the remaining Jews. But Eichmann soon reneged on his promises and the trucks for lives deal also fell through.

What, in the end, remained standing between the very real threat of extinction at the hands of the Nazis and survival for tens of thousands of innocent people was Raoul Wallenberg.

Even his wanton abduction and his disappearance into the Soviet Gulag served as a symbolic reminder and warning to mankind of the evils of all totalitarian regimes.

We who survived because of him can only grieve and say, There, for the grace of God, go I.

Restaurant Played Role in War

July 29, 1992

The script of the movie Casablanca could have been based on the role Gundel, the famous restaurant in Budapest, played in plotting against the Nazis. It was where we, members of the Zionist underground organization met to coordinate our activities.

I received a phone call from the food editor of The New York Times. She was doing a magazine feature on Gundel, known for almost a century as one of the world’s great culinary establishments.

She was interested in details of an unusual event connected with the restaurant. I was able to provide the information.

Gundel’s history reaches into the golden age of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1910 Karoly Gundel opened his restaurant in Budapest, at the edge of Varosliget, a large city park similar to New York’s Central Park. The restaurant became an elegant gathering place for the Hungarian aristocracy and the wealthy. It also served some of the finest food found anywhere in the empire.

When the empire collapsed in the wake o World War I, Gundel remained a culinary heaven with an international reputation. No wonder