Budapest concierges (in Hungarian: házmester)
The vast majority of the Budapest concierges were not born in Budapest, they picked this position as a beginning of their urban city life, making advantage of the free lodging which by law had to be provided by the landlord. Nevertheless, the free accommodation was compensated by a lower than average basic salary. The tiny apartment provided by the landlord was crucial in a newly built metropolis, where rental prices were rising sharply. In 1921 overcrowding reached a new peak, with an average of six people per room in Budapest. Usually the concierge lived in a lodge next to the entrance gate, from where he or she could keep an eye on everyone exiting or entering the building. The transitional social character of the concierge’s position (being new in the city, with a rather low income) is important to keep in mind when considering why so many concierges and their offspring joined the Arrow Cross party during the war. Joining the Arrow Cross could seem like an opportunity for a radical jump on the social ladder.
At the beginning of the 20th century, being a concierge meant no more than a part time job with a very modest income. They had to keep the entrance of the apartment building closed between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. to prevent robberies. This spatial control was the most important part of the concierges’ role from the very beginning. Later technical developments – the introduction of elevators, central heating, etc. – created a need for a continuous involvement in the life of an apartment house. Changes in social life also pointed towards this direction as the emerging nightlife of the city attracted more and more tenants who did not have a key to the main gate of the building, and therefore had to wake up the concierge if they arrived home late at night. A governmental decree on housing affairs set the minimum fees rewarding the concierge for opening the gate of an apartment building between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M., and providing the elevator on demand. Thus, these supplementary payments, which consisted majority of the concierges’ income, were set by a governmental decree at a minimum level, above which they worked like tips. The landlords’ interest in this was that this system provided external payments for the concierge who was their employee. Since the Budapest night offered more and more entertainment, the concierges received more and more of the so-called gate-money, and thus most of their income absurdly were paid by the tenants and not the landlords. It was also customary to reward with a tip a polite concierge who provided a good service. This interwar tradition of tipping made it almost obligatory to tip the concierges during the war, as well, for providing help for the persecuted Jewish residents.
From the 1930s a very important task of the concierges was taking part in compulsory address registration. Each building concierge had to keep a registry book of residents. This included the tenants’ date and place of birth, religion, the name of their spouse, name and age of children, name of the tenants’ parents, name of the tenants’ visitors, and even the temporary place of residence if a tenant left the building for a longer period. Beside possessing all these personal data, concierges got more and more tasks controlling various areas of wartime daily life. The minister of defense made the concierges responsible for the maintenance of the air-raid shelters. In addition, it was also the concierges’ task to make sure that the “lights-out” was satisfactory in the buildings at night, and warn the tenants to switch off the lights or cover the windows. Also, they distributed to the tenants the food ration cards. They were picked for these roles because of their social position – the same way as they were later named for the guards of the ghetto houses – and it is surprising to see how unconditionally the state officials trusted them, without checking their reliability in-depth. The only condition the Hungarian government made was laid down in the 3.530/1942 B. M. decree, which from the middle of 1942 made illegal the employment of Jews as building managers. Two years later, the Budapest concierges played a prominent part in setting up individual ghetto buildings, the so-called Yellow Star houses across the city.
From this moment, they could directly influence the survival chances of the Jewish Hungarians. At the same time, they could financially benefit from the precarious situation, where, although they did not officially belong to any authority, nevertheless, on a daily basis they were responsible for enforcing discriminative regulations. The empowerment of the concierges happened as a side-effect of the anti-Jewish legislation: while they had held a rather low rank in the apartment buildings’ pre-war social stratification, due to the wartime circumstances, and especially because of the choice of a dispersed ghetto setting, they were handed an unprecedented power. The Nazi authorities could make a good use of these people because they were a perfect fit for a watchdog in a ghetto building: they had extensive practice in territorial control and they knew everything about both the building itself and their inhabitants. However, their social position made them crucially important also in the Jews’ fight for survival. The combination of the anti-Jewish regulations and the tradition of peacetime tipping could turn into the wartime bribing of the concierges, which is why concierges tended to help the richer part of the persecuted than the poorer Jews. For instance, in April 1944, not long after the Nazi German occupation of Budapest, Jews were ordered to surrender their radios. Once the surrender of the Jewish owned radios was ordered, dozens of these machines were donated to the concierges. It happened simply because it made much more sense to give the radio to the házmester than to hand it in to the authorities. In return, the concierges not only allowed the Jewish residents to illegally listen to it from time to time, getting first-hand information about the progress of the Allies, but they also provided preferential treatment to the radio donors.
It is no wonder that after the war they had an extremely poor social reputation, partly because of the actions of corrupt concierges, and partly because of the actions of concierges who had obediently served the Nazis. To illustrate this, it is worth mentioning here, as an example, the concierge of 22 Pannónia Street. On May 16, 1944, the Gestapo was searching for a resident of the building, Mr. Gáspár. The concierge of the building did not warn him about this life-threatening danger. Instead, in the late evening he simply went up to this apartment to make sure that Mr. Gáspár was, in fact, at home. When this tenant opened the door to him, he said, “thank God you’re at home”, but when the Gáspár family members asked him why he was so happy, he replied, “I will only tell you this in the morning”. The next morning, the Gestapo detectives arrived for Mr. Gáspár, they took him away and he was soon deported to a concentration camp. What the concierge did or did not do here was not a crime, but it says a lot about the entire occupational group, and how much they could disgrace themselves when they did not offer help for the ordinary residents of the buildings.
Announcement on the introduction of vouchers. The concierges distributed ration cards on the basis of the list of residents drawn up by the building owners.
© OSZK Térkép-, Plakát- és Kisnyomtatványtár
A cartoon about concierges in the satirical journal Borsszem Jankó, 1915
© ADT
Concierges Mr. Lajos Pusztai (1907-1991) and Mrs. Pusztai neé Gizella Skultéti (1909-1996), rescuers
© Holokauszt Emlékközpont
When they got married, the Pusztai couple started their life in Budapest, because they had some relatives already living in the city who arranged for them to get the concierge post in Falk Miksa utca 6. They hid and helped several of the persecuted in the cellar and other spaces of the building, and safekept the valuables entrusted to them. When the female concierge was interrogated and threatened by the Arrow Cross militiamen, she refused to report on the hiding Jews.