Dear Visitor,

In the name of the Carl Lutz Foundation, I am pleased to welcome you on our website, and would be happy to see you in our Memorial Room in Vadász utca 29, Budapest 5th. This house was a safe haven in 1944 for thousands of people, was their sanctuary, a place for their potential survival. Their story is an episode during the worldwide cataclysm, saving few thousand lives against the hundreds of thousands, who were dragged away for liquidation. It is the scene, where a couple of people were brave enough to initiate, direct and carry out salvage operations.

The Budapest based Carl Lutz Foundation was established together with a Memorial Room in order to preserve this unique example of honor, courage and inventive humanism for the generations to come.

Unruffled and fearless the Swiss diplomatic officer, Carl Lutz was negotiating with the Hungarian government. He gave room for the staff of the officially terminated Palestine Office as well as for leading officials of the Glass House, who were, on a constant basis, issuing new emigration lists. The Zionist youth utilized the official cover to distribute real and fake documents and helped people escape.

After Oct. 15, 1944, when the Hungarian Arrow Smith Party came into power, the Glass House was the only fragile island of some relative safety during the raging terror for the persecuted in Budapest. Life was extremely tight in the Glass House: people were living for weeks or even for months in a cellar corner or in a garret nook with a lot of ingenuity and with boundless hope. Misery and desperation brought about loathsome rows herein, while young people had heated debates over their future after the war. Fury slipped away though, dreams were only partially realized when more than two thousand people were liberated in the Glass House January 18, 1945.

We are collecting, systematizing - and if possible, dispersing in our publications - the story of the Glass House and the Swiss salvage operation as well as the list of people, who found asylum in this building. We received lots of support till date to complement the available documents. Often descendants, relatives or friends of the Holocaust survivors continue to remember. Please, support us with potential information and/or remained documents (or their digitalized or copied versions) to help preserve the stories.

György Vámos
Chairman, Carl Lutz Foundation