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Charles "Carl" Lutz, born March 30, 1895, in Walzenhausen,
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In 1909 when he was 14 years old his mother died of tuberculosis. At the age of 15 he started working in a training textile mill in.
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He worked in Granite City, Illinois from 1913 1918 to get money to go to college that started to studie at In 1920 lutz found a job in the Swiss consular corps at the Swiss Legation in Washington DC.
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Lutz had served as the Swiss consul to Palestine. Then under British instruction in the 1930's. He was transferred to Budapest in 1942. Hungary had already joined the war on Germany's side in 1941 and in 1944 the Nazis occupied the country.
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Charles was given permission to concern 8,000 passes to individual Jews but he explained this to mean families so he printed and numbered the passes corectly
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Lutz arrived in Budapest in January 1942 to be Switzerland’s vice consul and was put in charge of representing the Unites States, Great Britain and other places that had cut off ties with Hungary several weeks after the Germans occupied Hungary.
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In 1942 Carl Lutz served as the Swiss counsel in Palestine where he was able to stop the deportation of German people that the british thought of as enemies.
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He saved over 62,000 Jews. That was the largest rescue operation of Jews of World war two
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During World War two he set up 76 of these around Budapest declaring them annexes of the Swiss mission and banned to Hungarian forces or Nazi soldiers. About 3,000 Hungarian Jews found refuge at the Glass House and in a nebior building.
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Lutz soon began working with the Jewish Agency for Israel. He issued Swiss safe conduct documents that set up almost 10,000 Hungarian Jewish children to depart and saved over 62,000 Jews.
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Started distributing special diplomatic documents that protected Jewish Swiss citizens from persecution.
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Agnes Hirschi remembers being in the cellars in December 1944 as Budapest was getting ready for a battle with the Soviet Army. "I celebrated my seventh birthday in that cellar" she says.
"And Carl Lutz was a very nice man. He had some chocolate for me, which he had saved.". -
During the war the Russians came down to the cellar and they were terrible looking men. For weeks they didn't shave and they didn't shower. They wanted watches and they wanted alcohol. They even drank the “eau de” which means the cologne of my mother.
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Lutz rescued thousands of Jews in Hungary from concentration camps and death.
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They could finally leave the cellar in February 1945. When the Battle of Budapest ended in Soviet victory.
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In the chaos and violence created by the Arrow Cross thugs and the paramilitary Lutz distributed “protective letters”. To all who kept Swiss papers then these letters were given to Budapest Jews seeking asylum.
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After World War 2 Lutz and his wife returned to Switzerland in January 1945 but divorced in 1946. And in 1949 he re-married to Magda Csányi during the war she asked him to protect her and her daughter, Agnes.
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Lutz was nominated several times for a Nobel Peace Prize and was the first Swiss person to be given the title Righteous Among the Nations.
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After the war they returned to Switzerland, and in 1964 he and his wife Gertrud were labeled as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
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he died in the year 1975 the exact day is not known
