The Glass House
Rosenberg, Erikawith photographs and documents
hardcover with dust jacket
ISBN 978-3-7766-2787-9
August 2016
The Glass House
»IF YOU SAVE ONE PERSON,YOU SAVE THE WHOLE WORLD.«
IT WAS A REFINED SYSTEM OF PROTECTIVE DOCUMENTS and collective passports that made their survival possible. Ever since the invasion of the German Wehrmacht in March 1944, Hungarian Jews were at the mercy of Adolf Eichmann’s murder machinery. But in the summer of 1944, the »Glashaus« (glass house), former office and residential building in Budapest, became the scene of dramatic events. It was there that the Swiss vice consul Carl Lutz introduced a department with the functional name »immigration section«. Together with Zionistic organisations he succeeded in saving about 60,000 people from the extermination camps. Yet, after the war, Carl Lutz became a »forgotten hero«. Erika Rosenberg went in search of his story in Budapest and Switzerland, spoke to survivors of the Holocaust and conducted research into the historical background.
Erika Rosenberg, born in Buenos Aires to German Jewish parents in 1951, is a journalist, writer, translator, and interpreter and used to work as a teacher, e.g. at the Argentinian Department of Foreign Affairs. In 2014, she was awarded the Order of Merit on Ribbon of the Federal Republic of Germany, and in March 2016 she was given the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Award of the Austrian Service Abroad. Erika Rosenberg was a close confidant of Schindler’s widow Emilie and has written biographies of Oskar and Emilie Schindler, among others.