Bidspirit auction | (HOLOCAUST). TWO Protective Passes (“Schutzpass”)

(HOLOCAUST). TWO Protective Passes (“Schutzpass”) to benefit four members of a single JEWISH-YUGOSLAV family surnamed Krebs. Issued by the Swiss Embassy’s Department of Foreign Interest Section in Budapest, led by Carl Lutz. Two single printed pages with typed entries and stamped endorsements. Specifying that the four named individuals fall under the protection of the Swiss Embassy in Hungary. Each document with two black-and-white portrait photographs. WITH TWO AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURE OF CONSUL CARL LUTZ. Budapest, 14th June, 1944.     These two Swiss protection passports are for a husband and wife and their two older daughters (born 1914 and 1919). The family were of Yugoslav origin and resided in the Serbian town of Szabadka (Subotica). The daughters had been born in the Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia) which in 1920 became the short-lived Free State of Fiume.     Once the Nazis took over Budapest in 1944, they immediately began deporting Jews to Auschwitz. Consul Lutz negotiated a deal with both the Hungarian government and the Nazis gaining permission to issue protective letters to 8,000 Hungarian Jews for emigration to Palestine. Yet he went further, deliberately using his permission of 8,000 as applying to families rather than individuals, thus saving thousands of additional Jews otherwise bound for certain extermination. Furthermore, Lutz set up dozens of “safe houses” throughout Budapest, declaring them annexes of the Swiss legation and thus off-limits to Hungarian forces or Nazi soldiers.     In 1965 Lutz was the first Swiss national honored by Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.”