Rescuer Tibor Baranski Saved Hungarian Jews

Note from Phyllis Zimbler Miller: I met actor Nick Williams through a Zoom acting class held by coach Stephen Snyder. Nick mentioned that he had lived next door to someone who had saved Jews during the Holocaust. I asked Nick to share information about this hero, and here is what Nick emailed me:

The man I mentioned, Tibor Baranski, happened to be my neighbor in Buffalo when I was growing up. The facts about him are summed up here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibor_Baranski.

He was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1979 and was appointed as a member of the Holocaust Memorial Council by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. Despite everything he went through, he lived to 96 years old and was blessed to be surrounded by friends and family at the end.

I knew none of this when I met him. We first met him as we were shoveling our driveway after a snowstorm. He was in a trenchcoat, fedora, and leather gloves, shoveling snow off his garage roof. My dad and I walked over to see if he wanted some help; he insisted he was fine, but that he would be down shortly to help us finish our driveway. At the time, he was 87 but called himself the 2,000 year old man.

As my family and I got to know him, he was a man of indomitable spirit even at such an advanced age. His stooped shoulders were deceiving, as he still had the handshake and powerful eyes that clearly were able to bluff their way through Nazis and Soviets alike. We didn’t believe half the stories he told us until we looked him up, and realized how little of the man we actually knew. We were lucky to know him as our neighbor.

I drafted the attached focusing more on his exploits against the Nazis. I did my best to tell it clearly but reminiscent of the style in which he told stories.

Nick Williams’ first-person account of Tibor Baranski:

My name is Tibor Baranski, and I am the 2,000 year old man. I am blessed to have lived as long as I have, God’s most useless servant that I am. At the onset of World War II, I was a young man in seminary, but the rise of the fascists in my country of Hungary forced me back to our capital Budapest on October 20, 1944.

My struggle with the Nazis began on behalf of Jewish friends of my aunt; she asked me to seek the intervention of the Catholic Church. At the time, the church in Hungary was able to provide protections issuing from the Papal Nuncio’s office, the office of the diplomatic representative of the Pope himself. Naturally, these protections were highly sought.

God had blessed me with confidence befitting a more accomplished man, and despite the crowd outside the Vatican embassy, I simply walked through dressed in my priest’s cassock, insisting I was there on official business.

The Papal Nuncio, Monsignor Angelo Rotta, was impressed by my boldness, and I became one of his men to protect and rescue the Jews of Hungary.

My first mission was to rescue 50 Jews who had been provided with baptismal papers; this was in direct violation of the protections of the church. The Nazis were holding them in a factory prior to deportation. I was able to convince Monsignor Rotta to give me the Papal Nuncio’s official Rolls Royce as well as a team from the Papal Nuncio’s office.

The Nazis, however, were not holding 50 Jews. They were holding 2,000. While I recovered the 50 we had papers for, distracting the Nazis, my assistants were able to pass information to the remaining Jews on how to contact the underground.

This made it clear that the efforts of the office to recover and rescue Jewish people were insufficient. We had to be bolder. Completed papers would not be enough.

With Rotta’s blessing, I began carrying blank letters of protection, traveling as far as I could and securing the release of as many Jewish people as I could. We pulled every trick we could think of: we used official letters, we used not so official letters, on occasion I used meaningless documents that simply looked official.

By the grace of God, we were able to hide many thousands of Jewish people in the protected apartments of the Vatican, and in wine cellars. My aunt was able to help provide medicine, food, and supplies. The Nazis could not understand this work.

With a gun to my head once, they asked me why I did this. I simply replied you are either silly or an idiot. It is because I am Christian that I help the Jews. We were able to rescue, hide, and protect some 7,000 to 12,000 people this way.

I would have done more, could have done more, were it not for our supposed allies and liberators. The Soviets invaded Budapest, and arrested me as a Nazi sympathizer on December 30, 1944. My forced march to the prison in Russia nearly killed me. I was only able to return to Hungary after the war had ended.

There was more work to be done. To me, the communists and Nazis were the same. And certainly the communists proved that. I spent the next few years of my life fighting their actions, in the clergy, in prison, as a resistance fighter. Hitler and Stalin were two cherries on the same tree; there was no difference.

I was forced to flee in 1956 after I was unable to gather Western support against the Soviets during the Hungarian revolution. My people were crushed under communist rule.

So when I am saying I am 2,000 years old, maybe you believe me. I am here only by God’s grace to tell this story. Perhaps the world will learn something.