Margit Slachta

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Margit Slachta (photo from 1946)

Margit Slachta (also Margit Schlachta ; born September 18, 1884 in Kassa , Austria-Hungary ; † January 6, 1974 in Buffalo , New York ) was a Hungarian founder of the order and, as a Catholic politician, the first woman elected to the Hungarian parliament . During the German occupation of Hungary by the Wehrmacht (March 1944 to April 1945), she saved the lives of many Jews . Posthumously in 1985 she was honored as Righteous Among the Nations and in 1995 was honored by the Hungarian state for her courage.

Origin and education

Margit Slachta's parents had aristocratic roots. Her father Kálmán Slachta (1857-1936) had ancestors in the Polish aristocracy , her mother Borbála Saárossy von Sáros (1855-1936) was the daughter of a landowner. Margit was the second of six girls from her parents' marriage. From 1907, her father ran the savings bank von Kassa. Due to its business policy, it had to file for bankruptcy. In 1908 he emigrated to the United States with his wife and three young children .

Margit Slachta attended the elementary school teacher seminar in her hometown from 1901 to 1903, then until 1906 the teachers seminar of the Missionary Sisters of Our Lady in Kalocsa . There she completed her training as a secondary school teacher with the subjects German, French and history. During her training, Slachta was already inspired by the organized Catholic social work (Caritas) that gained a foothold in Hungary at the turn of the century. She joined the Szociális Missziótársulat (Social Mission Society ), a Catholic order that allowed secular activities. After taking a study trip to Berlin in 1908 and completing a course there at the Social Women's School , she gave up her job as a teacher in order to devote herself entirely to social work.

Social work, journalism, politics

Her activities initially focused on youth work and prison chaplaincy . At the same time, Slachta was active as a journalist in magazines of Catholic organizations and social work. From 1915 to 1920 she published the Catholic association's journal A Keresztény Nő (The Christian Woman) , which was renamed Magyar Nő (Hungarian Woman) in 1918 and now saw itself as a political paper. In parallel to her journalistic activities, she developed training programs for social workers.

Margit Slachta's political career began with the introduction of women's suffrage in Hungary after the end of the First World War . She led the Keresztény Női Tábor (League of Christian Women) , the female section of the Christian Democratic Party. In the by-elections to the Hungarian parliament in 1920 she won a mandate with a clear majority as a candidate for the subsequently ruling Keresztény Nemzeti Egyesülés Pártja party (Party of the Christian National Association) . Slachta was the first woman who could win a parliamentary seat in Hungary. She held the mandate until 1922 and concentrated in her parliamentary work on social issues and women's rights . Due to internal differences within the social mission society about the necessity of political-parliamentary work, she did not receive permission from her order to run again in parliamentary elections. On May 5, 1923, Slachta left the social mission society together with other sisters who were also considered too radical.

Establishing an order and saving the Jews

On May 23, 1923, Slachta founded the Szociális Testvérek Társasága (Order of the Society of Social Sisters) . She held the office of superior of this community until 1963. She toured the United States and Canada between November 1924 and December 1926 and lectured on Hungarian history there . In the 1930s she continued training social workers in Hungary and published the magazines A Lélek Szava ( The Voice of the Spirit , 1938–1944) and A Dolgozó Nő ( The Working Woman , 1939–1944). She also turned back to politics - in 1933 she founded the Szentlélek Szövetség (League of the Holy Spirit) party .

In the 1930s Margit Slachta made a name for herself as a staunch opponent of fascist and anti-Semitic currents. For example, she was one of the few voices that rose against the adoption of Hungarian Jewish laws in 1938 and 1939 . In the summer of 1941 she protested vehemently against the deportation of “foreign” Jews from Hungary to Galicia , which was driven by the Hungarian Aliens Police and resulted in the Kamenets-Podolsk massacre . Slachta formed an investigation team with Károly Pakocs, Imre Szabó, György Apponyi, and Erzsébet Szapáry that tried to get to Kamenez-Podolsk to investigate reports of the massacre. Except for Szabó, however, they were forbidden from entering the region.

In 1942 Slachta in Bratislava got an idea of ​​the increasing discrimination and persecution as well as the beginning deportations of Slovak Jews . Subsequently, she unsuccessfully requested, in letters to high dignitaries of the Catholic Church in Hungary and to personalities of secular life, an intervention in favor of the Slovak Jews. Between March 1942 and March 1943 around 58,000 Slovak Jews were deported to the extermination camps. Slachta and her nuns offered shelter and hiding place to Jews who were able to escape to Hungary from Slovakia. When the deportation of the remaining 25,000 mostly baptized Slovak Jews was foreseeable, Slachta again tried to get the church to intervene. Due to her good connections in liberal and conservative circles she managed to get an audience with Pope Pius XII. to obtain. He finally asked the seven Slovak bishops to write a joint pastoral letter condemning further deportations and to have it read out in all churches in Slovakia. This announcement of March 21, 1943, together with other factors, stopped the deportations until further notice.

After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, in which Hungary participated, Slachta protested against the many thousands of forced recruiting of Jews for so-called labor service in the Hungarian army . Jews were forced to work there, which entailed a high risk of injury and death.

After the Wehrmacht invaded Hungary (March 19, 1944), the institutions of the order of the Society of Social Sisters for Jews developed into places of refuge. Shortly after the invasion, Slachta had sworn the sisters of her community to stand by the threatened Jews. It is estimated that the order helped around 900 to 1000 Jewish men, women and children in Budapest and in the countryside to evade the threatened deportations by hiding or obtaining false papers. A member of the Order, Sára Salkaházi , paid with their lives in Budapest in 1944 for her efforts to save the Jews. She was beatified in 2006 .

Post-war period and exile

After the end of the German occupation in 1945, Slachta received a parliamentary seat as an independent candidate on the list of the Polgári Demokrata Párt (Civil Democratic Party) . In 1947 she was re-elected, this time as a candidate for the Keresztény Női Tábor (League of Christian Women) . Even in the post-war period, she did not deviate from her Christian convictions. Because of her anti-Soviet and anti-communist standpoint, she was dismissed by many parliamentarians as the representative of a bygone era. Their parliamentary speeches were often interrupted, not infrequently with contemptuous and vulgar heckling. On June 16, 1948, she gave her last speech in parliament. She spoke out against the planned nationalization of church schools. In protest against the parliamentary decision, she remained seated when the national anthem was played at the end of the session . This behavior was acknowledged with a one-year ban from all parliamentary sessions.

In 1949, the authorities refused to allow her to run for the Hungarian parliament again. Fearing arrest, she fled to a monastery of the Dominicans . Despite the threat of imprisonment, she appeared at the ballot box on May 15, 1949, but left the country on June 22, 1949. She entered the United States under the name Etelka Tóth .

Slachta worked in American exile with the pseudonym Borbála Nemes for Radio Free Europe and, out of fear of the Hungarian authorities, used the code name Margit Nemes in her correspondence . In 1951 she went to Vienna in the hope that she could travel to Hungary. When these hopes were dashed, she returned to the USA on May 5, 1953, this time under her real name.

Honors

Memorial plaque in Budapest in memory of Margit Slachta and the order she founded

Margit Slachta was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 1985 because of her commitment to threatened Jews . Ten years later, the Hungarian state honored her for her bravery.

In Budapest the quay along the banks of the Danube on the Buda side between the bridges Árpád-híd and Margit-híd is named after her. The Hungarian capital honors people who had saved Jews during the Holocaust (including Raoul Wallenberg , Carl Lutz , Angelo Rotta ) by naming the quay sections .

literature

  • Maria Schmidt: Margit Slachta's Activities in Support of Slovakian Jewry 1942–1943 . In: Holocaust Genocide Studies . Volume 5, 1990, No. 1, pp. 67-72.
  • Ilona Mona: Slachta Margit . Corvinus Kiado, Budapest 1997.
  • Margit Balogh, Ilona Mona: Slachta, Margit (1884–1974) . In: Francisca de Haan, Krassimira Daskalova, Anna Loutfi (eds.): Biographical dictionary of women's movements and feminisms. Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe. 19th and 20th centuries . CEU Press, Budapest [u. a.] 2006, ISBN 963-7326-39-1 , pp. 521-525.
  • The spirit of Margaret Slachta lives on . Buffalo, NY: Sisters of Social Service, [1994]

Web links

Commons : Margit Slachta  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On Slachta's origins and training see Margit Balogh, Ilona Mona: Slachta, Margit (1884–1974) .
  2. ↑ Susan Zimmermann: Women's movements and women's aspirations in the Kingdom of Hungary , in: Adam Wandruszka [Hrsg.]: The Habsburg Monarchy 1848-1918. 8. Political public and civil society. Teilbd. 1. Associations, parties and interest groups as carriers of political participation . Verl. Of the Österr. Akad. Der Wiss., Vienna 2006, p. 1373.
  3. ↑ On Slachta's social, journalistic and political activities see Margit Balogh, Ilona Mona: Slachta, Margit (1884–1974) .
  4. ↑ Lat. Societas Sororum Socialium .
  5. ↑ a b c d e Margit Balogh, Ilona Mona: Slachta, Margit (1884–1974) .
  6. ↑ Jessica A. Sheetz: Margit Slachta and the early rescue of Jewish families, 1939–42 ( Memento of October 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF, 73 kB); Randolph L. Braham : The politics of genocide. The Holocaust in Hungary , 2 vols., Columbia University Press, New York 1981, ISBN 0-231-05208-1 ; here volume 2, p. 1030.
  7. ↑ Canon of Sathmar .
  8. ↑ Szabó became bishop of Esztergom in 1951 . For Szabó's biographical data, see the tables on catholic-hierarchy.org.
  9. ↑ On Apponyi's life data, see files of the people's court trial against Franz A. Basch, ethnic group leader of the Germans in Hungary, Budapest 1945/46. Taking into account the work of Friedrich Spiegel-Schmidt and Loránt Tilkovszky. Edited by Gerhard Seewann and Norbert Spannenberger, Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, p. 42 f, footnote 51 , ISBN 3-486-56485-4 .
  10. ↑ See Tamás Majsai: The Deportation of Jews from Csikszeresa and Margit Slachta's Intervention on Their Behalf ; in: Randolph L. Braham (Ed.): Studies on the Holocaust in Hungary , Columbia University Press, New York 1990, pp. 113–163, here pp. 153–155, ISBN 0-88033-198-4 . See also Jessica A. Sheetz: Margit Slachta and the early rescue of Jewish families, 1939–42 ( Memento of October 21, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF, 73 kB).
  11. ^ Margit Balogh, Ilona Mona: Slachta, Margit (1884–1974) ; Maria Schmidt: Margit Slachta's Activities in Support of Slovakian Jewry 1942–1943 , p. 69 f.
  12. ^ Margit Balogh, Ilona Mona: Slachta, Margit (1884–1974) ; Mordecai Paldiel : Churches And The Holocaust: Unholy Teaching, Good Samaritans And Reconciliation , Ktav Publishing House, Jersey City 2006, pp. 291-293, ISBN 0-88125-908-X .
  13. ↑ Biography at www.salkahazisara.com (English) Retrieved June 24, 2019.
  14. ↑ List of Beatifications, vatican.va . Retrieved June 24, 2019.
  15. ↑ Margit Slachta on the website of Yad Vashem (English)
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on November 1, 2013 .
personal data
SURNAME Slachta, Margit
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schlachta, Margit; Nemes, Borbála; Nemes, Margit; Tóth, Etelka
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Hungarian founder of the order and politician, member of parliament
DATE OF BIRTH September 18, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Kassa , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH January 6, 1974
Place of death Buffalo , New York , United States