Deák Ferenc tér: Pastor Sztehlo and the Children

Why is it significant?

Find the bronze figure of a man in a long coat near the Lutheran church on Deák Ferenc tér, with children close around him. Trams screech, the metro breathes out crowds, and almost nobody stops.

Key Facts

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Find the bronze figure of a man in a long coat near the Lutheran church on Deák Ferenc tér, with children close around him. Trams screech, the metro breathes out crowds, and almost nobody stops. This is Gábor Sztehlo, a Lutheran pastor, and he is the right person to open a walk into the Jewish quarter of Budapest. In the spring of 1944 Germany occupied Hungary, and within weeks the deportations of Jews from the countryside began. By the autumn, Budapest's Jews were the last large Jewish community left in the country, and after the Arrow Cross seized power in October, nowhere in the city was safe. Sztehlo, working under the protection of the Lutheran and Red Cross networks, began renting villas and flats, mostly in Buda, and turning them into children's homes. Into those homes went Jewish children with false papers and Christian names, mixed in with genuine orphans and refugees. Sztehlo and his helpers moved them from house to house as raids came closer, forging papers and begging for food. Accounts usually say he saved around fifteen hundred children and a few hundred adults. He was not alone: diplomats, nuns, priests and ordinary neighbours did the same, and you will meet some of them on this walk. After the siege, he gathered war orphans into a children's republic in Buda that he called Gaudiopolis, the City of Joy, where the children elected their own parliament and ran their own courts. It lasted until 1950, when the communist state took it over. In 1972 Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recognised him as Righteous Among the Nations, and he died in Switzerland in 1974. Keep him in mind as you go. Now cross the busy junction and walk east into Király utca, the long street that leads into Erzsébetváros, the seventh district. At number 13, on your right, an archway opens into a chain of courtyards.