Yom HaShoah in Wartime: Survival Has Always Been an Act of Will
This Friday, days before Yom HaShoah, I walked through the door of a building at 29 Vadász Street in Budapest while Israel is at war.
The building is called the Glass House — Üvegház — a former glass wholesaler that became, in the winter of 1944, one of the most unlikely sanctuaries of the war. Thousands of Jews crowded into its rooms, sleeping on floors not built for human habitation, surviving on almost nothing, listening to a city in which the men outside had been granted license to kill them.
I was greeted by Mr. Miklós Szedő — the quiet, dedicated custodian of this place and its history. The Carl Lutz Foundation Memorial Room he tends opens just three hours a day, charges no admission, and operates on resources so minimal they barely cover part-time care of a site whose rescue operation — centered on this building — has been called the largest and most successful of the entire Second World War. Forty to sixty thousand thousand Jewish lives. Almost half of all Jewish survivors in Budapest. And almost no one knows it exists.
Standing there with Mr. Szedő, I thought: if ever there were a metaphor for how the world treats inconvenient acts of heroism, this is it. A building that held thousands when the world wanted them dead, now tended by one man on almost nothing. The Glass House deserves better. So does its story.
My mother was one of the people inside that building. She did not simply hide there. Her story sits at the heart of what Yom HaShoah was always meant to honor: not only the six million lost, but those who, in the middle of their own struggle to survive, summoned the extraordinary courage to help others, to resist, and to act with dignity in conditions designed to strip them of all three. That lesson — that survival is an act of will, not of waiting — is the inheritance they passed to us. No generation has needed it more than those now in harm’s way, facing an enemy whose objective is not victory but our destruction — and drawing on the same fierce refusal to surrender that has always been, and remains, the deepest source of Jewish survival.
What Brought Her There
Before the Glass House, there was Klauzál tér.
Klauzál Square sits in Budapest’s seventh district — the historic Jewish quarter, a neighborhood of 19th-century apartment buildings around a central square. My mother and her family were assigned to a building there in June 1944, when Budapest’s mayor decreed that nearly 1,950 buildings across the city would become compulsory Jewish residences, each marked with a canary-yellow Star of David. Some 220,000 Jews — a quarter of the city’s population — had days to relocate. Those in the seventh district were crammed into the buildings around Klauzál tér and its surrounding streets, living under curfew, stripped progressively of what remained of ordinary life.
They could not know what that square was about to become. In November 1944, the Arrow Cross sealed the Jewish quarter into a walled ghetto — wooden palisades enclosing barely a third of a square kilometer, forcing more than 70,000 people into it. The daily bread ration fell to 150 grams. Between 80 and 120 corpses were removed from the streets every single day. By the time Soviet forces liberated the ghetto in January 1945, some 3,000 unburied bodies lay in the streets — and in Klauzál tér itself, the square my mother’s building had faced, the dead were buried in mass graves dug into the ground where children had once played. The green space at the heart of the Jewish quarter became a field of the dead.
My mother did not stay to see it. She was saved — because of a man named Mr. Boldizsar.
He was the building’s házmester — the superintendent, keeper of the keys, every door and hidden passage. A non-Jewish Hungarian man with no obligation and every reason to do nothing. When the Arrow Cross swept my mother’s family to the Nagybátony-Újlak Brick Factory in Óbuda — where more than seventy thousand Jews were packed into open industrial sheds awaiting deportation east — Mr. Boldizsar did not look away. He went to the Brick Factory. He found my mother among the thousands. And he walked her out, and brought her himself to Vadász Street 29. To the Glass House.
Mr. Boldizsar is not commemorated at Yad Vashem, as far as I know. He did not survive into legend. He is one of the countless ordinary people — a man with a key ring and a conscience — whose acts of decency in conditions of mass indecency are mostly lost to history. My mother remembered his name for the rest of her life. I am writing it here so it will not disappear entirely: Mr. Boldizsar. Klauzál tér, Budapest, 1944. He saved her life.
She crossed Budapest — a city where a Jewish face on a sidewalk was an invitation to execution — and found her way to Carl Lutz, the Swiss Vice-Consul who had negotiated permission to issue protective letters to 8,000 Jews, then deliberately interpreted that number as applying to families rather than individuals, issuing tens of thousands of letters and establishing 76 safe houses across the city. The Glass House was his most famous. A diplomatic seal on a door was all that stood between the people inside and the Arrow Cross men who periodically gathered on the street outside, weapons drawn.
That seal held. Barely, and not always. But it held.
What She Did Inside
My mother sat at a table inside that building and forged documents.
The Zionist youth underground operating within the Glass House produced tens of thousands of false papers — protective letters on Swiss letterhead, Aryan identity documents, passes that could move a person through a checkpoint or out of a death march and into one more day of life. The work carried the death penalty if discovered. In December 1944, the main forgery operation was found and its members arrested. My mother kept working until they weren’t.
Decades of studying trauma resilience has shown me that purposeful action under conditions of helplessness is one of the most powerful protections against psychological collapse. My mother may not have known the literature. But she understood, in her bones, that to do something — anything that mattered — was to refuse the erasure the men outside intended. She was making false identities for strangers. Handing them a name that wasn’t theirs so they could live.
And then she learned that her young brother was among the Jews being marched from the Brick Factory through Budapest’s streets toward Austria on foot — the rail lines having been disrupted by Allied bombing, the deportations continuing by death march instead.
She went back out.
She walked alongside that column until she found his face. And then — on a Budapest sidewalk, in November 1944, with armed Arrow Cross escorts watching — she reached into the column and pulled her brother out by the arm. And walked him back to the Glass House.
I have no clinical framework adequate to that moment. That is not a trauma response or a resilience factor. That is love in its most absolute form — the kind that has already calculated the cost and decided the cost doesn’t matter.
The conditions inside the Glass House that winter were barely survivable. My mother contracted a severe kidney infection on those overcrowded, freezing floors — inadequately treated in a place where treatment was nearly impossible. She spent years afterward in medical care for what that winter did to her body. In her fifties, her kidneys failed. She fought what followed with the same refusal to surrender that had characterized everything she did in that building — fifteen years of dialysis, fifteen years of the particular endurance that belongs to people who have already survived the unsurvivable.
The Holocaust did not kill my mother in 1944. It killed her slowly, across decades. The floor of that winter got her in the end. The Holocaust is patient in ways its perpetrators never fully calculated.
This Yom HaShoah, This War
I am a psychologist, the son of Holocaust survivors, and a child who fled Hungary in 1956. I do not write about this Yom HaShoah from a neutral distance.
For decades, the annual commemoration has done essential psychological work. The siren, the testimonies, the names read aloud at Yad Vashem — these are not merely ritual. They are carefully built mechanisms for collective mourning, for giving form and address to events so catastrophic that, without structure, they remain forever formless, forever present, forever raw. They allowed Israelis to approach the abyss of what happened without being consumed by it. There was grief. And gradually, around the grief, something like the capacity to endure it.
October 7th broke that architecture.
What clinicians call traumatic telescoping — the collapse of past and present into a single undifferentiated terror — happened to an entire nation in a single morning. For the children and grandchildren of survivors, October 7th did not merely echo the Holocaust. For many, neurologically and psychologically, it became it. The body does not easily distinguish between then and now when the pattern of threat is sufficiently similar. Families burned in their homes. People paraded through streets while crowds cheered. The specific grammar of annihilation, repeating.
This Yom HaShoah, the sirens will sound in a country that is not pausing to remember its dead. It is simultaneously burying them — soldiers, hostages, the 1,200 murdered on October 7th. Young men and women who stood at Yad Vashem in previous years now stand in uniform, their fallen friends layered beneath the memory of the six million. Parents light memorial candles while waiting for news of children who are still fighting.
The psychological risks of this moment are real. Grief cannot complete its natural cycle inside active threat — mourning requires a degree of safety that war denies. There is also what I call confirmed hypervigilance: the shattering moment when a people told that their fear was excessive discover it was warranted all along. That wound is deep and rarely named.
And yet the psychological necessity of Yom HaShoah this year is greater, not lesser, precisely because of the war. Communities with strong narrative identity — a coherent story of who we are and what we have survived — show measurably greater resilience under sustained threat than communities without it. The story Yom HaShoah tells is not only a story of annihilation. It is a story of people who acted in conditions designed to make action impossible. Who forged documents. Who pulled brothers out of death march columns. Who held on through winters that should have finished them.
Israel needs that story right now. Not as consolation — nothing about this moment deserves easy consolation — but as testimony to what the human will can do when the alternative is unacceptable.
Inside the Door
I stood at 29 Vadász Street this Friday, days before the world pauses to remember six million dead while Israel fights for the living — and I did not stand there alone. My two adult children were beside me.
Mr. Szedő walked us through the Memorial Room — photographs, documents, the evidence of what happened in these rooms eighty years ago. He spoke with the quiet authority of a man who has devoted himself to a story the world has not adequately stopped to hear. He is not entirely alone in that devotion: a small group of volunteers helps him keep the memorial open, including a woman whose own mother was among those saved within these walls. She tends the building that saved her mother’s life, so that others will not forget what happened here. If there is a more powerful act of living remembrance than that, I have not encountered it.
The Glass House is named for what it was built as — a glass factory whose architecture was saturated with the company’s product. There is an unintended metaphor in a building made of breakable material that became the thing that held. In conditions designed to shatter everything, it held.
Not only the breaking. The holding.
My mother held. Through the yellow-star house on Klauzál tér, the Brick Factory, the Glass House floor, the kidney infection, the fifteen years of medical battle that followed, the 1956 revolution, the crossing at Andau in the snow on Christmas Day. She held until the last of what that winter had done to her body finally prevailed.
A man named Mr. Boldizsar walked into a Brick Factory and brought her out. A Swiss diplomat reprimanded by his own government for saving too many lives gave her shelter. A table in a room full of frightened young people gave her purpose. And a boy who was her brother lived because she walked back into the street to get him.
Then Mr. Szedő led us to a ladder. After signing a release, I climbed into the attic.
It was the attic my mother had described — a space so low, so dark, so stripped of every human accommodation that I could not imagine a mouse surviving there comfortably. And yet at the peak of the crisis, more than 3,000 people were crowded into the attic, stairways, corridors, basement, and the small yard that served as both kitchen and bathroom — all within this small, nondescript structure on Vadász Street, its gate bearing the lifesaving seal of the Swiss Embassy.
As I held a flashlight into that darkness, her words came to me — words from her letter that I had carried without fully understanding them until that moment — not as something read, but as something heard. Her voice, in her space, eighty years later.
I have spent decades studying what trauma does to the human mind. None of it prepared me for that attic.
My vision clouded with tears. And through them, Never Again was clearer to me than it has ever been — not as a slogan, not as a historical lesson, but as an order, issued in that darkness, that I had no choice but to carry back out into the light.
Never Again. Not a promise. An order.
And Israel, right now, is keeping it.
Then I came back to my hotel and wrote this — because bearing witness, insisting that what happened be said plainly and completely, is the only form of remembrance that actually fights back.
If you can support the Carl Lutz Foundation and the Glass House Memorial, please do. The building that saved tens of thousands deserves more than three hours a day, one devoted man, and a handful of volunteers running on almost nothing. It deserves the world’s attention. Especially now.
Am Yisrael Chai.