Legacy of Rescue : A Daughter's Tribute

Legacy of Rescue: A Daughter's Tribute tells the story of the author's father, Morton (Miksa) Fuchs, and Zoltan Kubinyi, the man who saved him and over 100 other Hungarian Jewish men during the Holocaust. Zoltan Kubinyi was a devout Seventh Day Adventist and a Hungarian army officer who was assigned to be the Commanding Officer of Morton Fuchs' forced labor battalion in the last year of the war. A year later, as Germany was retreating, Zoltan Kubinyi received orders to march the Jewish men from Russia where they were working toward a concentration camp in Germany since they were no longer needed for the war effort. Instead he defied the Nazi orders and marched the men back into Hungary, arranging to have them hidden in farmhouses along the way. In Balassagyarmát, Hungary, Zoltan Kubinyi was taken as a POW by the liberating Russian Army. He died a year later from typhus in a Siberian labor camp and was buried in an unmarked grave. He left behind a young wife and infant son living in Budapest. Upon returning to their destroyed communities, Morton Fuchs, the sole survivor of his family -- his siblings and their children killed in Auschwitz -- and his fellow labor camp members took turns sending monthly care packages to Kubinyi's family. Due to Morton Fuchs' testimony, Zoltan Kubinyi was posthumously honored in 1990 as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem. The story of rescue came full circle in the summer of 2011 when the author and her brother took their children back to Hungary to meet the rescuer's family. The rescuer s son, now in his late '60s, never knew his father, and with his wife and granddaughters the great grandchildren of Zoltan Kubinyi the author s family talked about the heroic actions of his father and how this courageous man none of them knew has made such an indelible impact on all their lives.