Zsigmond Varga

Zsigmond Varga (born September 9, 1919 in Debrecen ; † March 5, 1945 in Gusen concentration camp ) was a Hungarian Reformed preacher and resistance fighter against National Socialism .

Life

Zsigmond Varga was the son of an eponymous professor of religious history. He first studied theology at the University of Debrecen . In 1942 he published his dissertation , in which he dealt with the cultural influences of Hellenistic papyri on the New Testament between the first and third centuries. He spent the academic year 1942/1943 in Switzerland , where he attended lectures by Karl Barth . In 1944 Varga came to Vienna . He had a scholarship as a student at the Evangelical Theological Faculty of the University of Vienna . Because he already had a completed theological training, he was commissioned by the Reformed Church of Hungary to provide pastoral care to the Hungarian Reformed in Vienna. He held his Hungarian-language services in the Reformed City Church . He was arrested by the Gestapo on October 19, 1944, because he preached and wanted a quick end to the Second World War , which he believed was likely due to the bombing of German cities, which he found out by illegally listening to enemy broadcasts . Varga fell ill with typhus in the Rossauer Lände police station . At the beginning of February 1945 he was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp and finally came to the Gusen concentration camp . There he officially died of heart failure , one of the ten permitted types of death in concentration camps.

Memorial plaques in Gusen concentration camp (1997) and in the Reformed City Church in Vienna (2005) commemorate Zsigmond Varga. The Reformed Church of Hungary included him in its list of witnesses and martyrs of the last 400 years.

literature

• Albert Stein : Zsigmond Varga, a Viennese theology student as a victim of fascism and a witness of the gospel . In: Yearbook for the History of Protestantism in Austria 97 (1981) pp. 124–132.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Sarnyai Csaba Máté: Hellenizmus, zsidóság és az Újszövetség kapcsolata ifj. Varga Zsigmond gondolatainak turquoise . In: Orpheus Noster . II / 2 2010 ( online version ; PDF; 101 kB), pp. 113 and 116.
2. ^ ^{A b} Peter Karner : Church between cross and swastika . In: Peter Karner (Hrsg.): The evangelical community HB in Vienna . Deuticke, Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-7005-4579-7 , p. 206.
3. ↑ Zsigmond Varga (1919–1945) ( Memento of the original from March 1, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Website of the Reformed City Church, accessed on September 6, 2012.