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The person in question has given us the following information: At the beginning of October, 1944, I worked for Department “A”, that is, for children’s department of the International Red Cross with its head office in 4 Mérleg Street. My job was to administer less and more dangerous projects. As during this period call-up placards were placed practically every hour on the walls of the houses of Budapest and because (understandably) basically no one felt like being called up it was a part of our activity to produce forged documents including different kinds of baptismal certificates, exemption letters given by ammunition plants and by other organisations, etc. In practice we were manufacturing these documents on a large scale and distributed them to people of all social layers, ranks and religions. From the office we went to brick factories and to other places where the Arrow Cross concentrated masses of Jews. Several times also György Aczél participated in these rescue actions (he is now the local leader of the Communist Party in the 5th district), and in several cases we managed to free the unfortunate Jews, especially women staying in the brick factory. Later, 4 Mérleg Street became a temporary asylum especially for the part of enormous masses of children who were brought to the office or were often just dropped in front of the gate. People, Christians also kept on notifying us about children whose relatives had been taken away by the Arrow Cross and now stayed in abandoned flats lacking any supervision. Most of our energies were spent on collecting these Jewish orphans from the furthest points of the city, from the suburbs, from Angyalföld, etc. I remember a case when in Bulcsu Street we collected a large number of abandoned children and brought them to the office by car. We had so much work to do that we could hardly cope with it. We collected the children with the escort of the police. Soon we had to provide their accommodation. We established a gathering and selecting office in 4 Perczel Mór Street where we took the children escorted by the police to distributed them among the different orphanages that we set up in the meantime. We were bringing and carrying children with no end. Later, we received the building in 16 Teleki Pál Street, where we gathered around 1,000 children. There were other orphanages in 76 Szondy Street, 5-7 and 25 Munkácsy Mihály Street, and at different points of the city in a lot of places. When the surviving Jews of Budapest were put into the ghetto our rescue actions became even more frequent. The building in Mérleg Street was practically attacked by fugitives. Reports about abandoned children got more frequent. As it is well known, they published a decree that all Jews – including the children of orphanages – had to go into the ghetto. Delegate Weyermann managed to get a six- day-postponement regarding the transport of the orphanages, and added to it another 6 days, finally further 12 days. Orphanages functioned relatively well despite adverse circumstances. Naturally, food was supplied by the International Red Cross. In the days before Christmas, we had to take children often for walks with the escort of the police since the Arrow Cross appeared more and more frequently in one orphanage or another and demanded we transported the children into the ghetto immediately. Also on a sad day, just a few days before Christmas, they appeared in the orphanage of 5-7 Munkácsy Mihály Street. Party men of the Arrow Cross with signs of Árpád’s stripes closed the street and surrounded the whole building. The building had military guards, a squad of Auxiliary Force Unit. Invading Arrow Cross men shot among the children killing around 10-15 children and some adults. They justified their act claiming that children defended themselves. The leader of the orphanage was Lajos Kraszner, who was later put into the ghetto. When we returned to the orphanage with delegate Weyermann we found a horrifying scene. For example, in one of the armchairs two children were sitting embracing each other also in death. We found a walled up door barricaded with all kinds of furniture. We managed to save the people who survived uninjured in the room behind. In another case, before this attack happened, the Arrow Cross took children away, claiming they were going to take them into Síp Street, but instead, they took them into an abandoned ruined house in Szív Street - as they claimed - out of mistake. When we were informed we rushed there and demanded the children from the janitor. We managed to get back around 200 children and smuggle them back into Munkácsy Street. Once, Arrow Cross gangsters appeared also in the orphanage of 112 Róna Street. They killed around 50-60 children who were kept there, the rest could run away. Also the officers of the institute, including its head Pál Vidor, lost their lives during this attack. International Red Cross had a so-called “T” (transport) department. We went into the ghetto with this department and smuggled people out into places that had been arranged beforehand. This way we managed to free around 20 people from the ghetto helped by the police inside. It was anyway thanks to the policemen that we could freely enter and leave the ghetto and bring children out into the orphanages. Children in the ghetto lived in terrible squalor. We tried to smuggle out as many as possible but also those who remained depended on our food provisions. I was the link between delegate Weyermann and the leader of Zionists Ottó Komoly. January the first, we were sitting together in the lobby of Ritz, when four men with signs of Árpád’s stripes came to us and grabbed Ottó Komoly giving their word of honour that it was only about an inquiry and that they were going to bring him back in half an hour. Ottó Komoly has gone missing since then. When the international ghetto was established the current ministerial secretary Dr György Gergely initiated to transform two buildings (16 and 23 Pozsonyi Road) into protected houses of the International Red Cross using forged documents. We came up with the idea that the International Red Cross was also a diplomatic institution, and as such we could protect the inhabitants of these houses like the Swiss, the Swedish, the Portuguese, the Spanish, or the papal legate protected others. There were around 1,500 men and women put up in these houses, who we gave excellent food supplies. These protected people were not touched nor molested by the Arrow Cross, they had to go the ghetto only the last week.

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