IGAZOLVANY - 'certificate' - Official 'letter of sponsorship' on behalf of the Swiss Embassy's representation of the immigration department for foreigners - the Swiss Confederation. Budapest (Hungary) January 22, 1945. Official confirmation for the Jew Shmuel Palau stating that, according to a confirmation received from the Red Army Command, the aforementioned is an employee of the Foreign Department of the Swiss Embassy, and that he is essential to his work, he must not be arrested on the street, and his work must not be converted to another job, and the competent authorities are obliged to assist him in his work. The approval is signed with the stamp of the "Legation de Suisse, Budapest" [Swiss Legation, Budapest], and hand signature. Through this document and thousands of its kind, the Swiss diplomat, one of the most Righteous Gentile - Karl Lutz [1895-1975], saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Hungarian and Russian.
With the conquest of Hungary by the Nazis in 1944, the systematic extermination and deportation of Hungarian Jews began. Lutz, who supported the Jewish matter during his service at the Swiss Consulate in Jaffa between 1935 and 1941, and was very friendly with Moshe Kraus, director of the Palestine Office in Hungary, who organized the immigration on behalf of the Jewish Agency, responded to his request to help save Jews and began to work for salvation of Budapest Jewry. Among other things, he issued Swiss "sponsorship letters" to Jews with certificates. After negotiations with high-ranking Nazi officials, and with the consent of the Hungarian authorities, he issued about 8,000 letters of sponsorship - one for each aliyah visa holder. He later passed on the sponsorship letters to the entire family of the certificate holder, and thus tens of thousands of Jews were included under the protection of the sponsorship letters. In addition, thousands of sponsorships were forged on paper stolen from the SS office. On another level, Lutz and Krauss worked to make sure that Western governments, and later, public opinion in these countries as well, would understand what happened in the extermination camps. Lutz saved over 60,000 Jews through the sponsorships he provided and the sheltered homes in which he housed the survivors. In 1964, Lutz was among the first to win the title of "Righteous Gentile" by Yad Vashem. In 1991, a memorial monument was erected in his memory at the entrance to the Budapest ghetto.
14x11 cm. Slight stain in the upper part. Good condition.
