Gitta Mallasz has just received posthumously the medal of Righteous Among the Nations to get saved over 100 Jewish women and children in Budapest in 1944. Readers of the Talking with Angels know that she had accepted the command of the uniform workshop of Katalin hoping to save her friends Hanna and Lili, but to her despair, she hadn't succeeded. The fact remains that the 1^er December 1944, the majority of women and children were able, thanks to his skill and composure, to escape arrest and deportation. The Arrow Crosses who came to arrest them only left with sixteen of them, including Hanna Dallas and Lili Strausz stayed voluntarily (see The last convoy).

Father Paul Klinda, behind the creation of the workshop, was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations in 1995, but it was not until 2007 that a French woman living in Switzerland, who says she owes a lot to Her testimony, undertook to recognize the one who allowed this very special workshop to operate for 6 months and to save its residents. Yad Vashem then put her in touch with Imre Boc, a Hungarian Jew, former resistant in 1943-44 in Grenoble, without which it would not have been able to gather the required evidence. It was he who searched the archives and found two witnesses still alive. One of them, Susan Kelvin, née Kis, who lived in London, testified at length:

“We worked in the factory. Anyone who had a sewing machine had to bring it to Katalin. My mother had one at home, and we took it to the factory. We were seated in the workshop, in a row of 5 women. It was a very big room, and there were lots of shirts to make for the army. Some women taught others to sew by machine. So it could be done very professionally. There was a fantastic spiritual atmosphere in the factory. We even made more shirts than planned, and when we were done, we all started singing together! Really, we were working at full speed, and we were having fun… It was like going to the cinema, in the middle of these difficult times that we were going through. »

Beyond the historical testimony, it revives, more than 60 years later, the extraordinary atmosphere that reigned in Katalin, where the joy was palpable despite the heavy threat above their heads. Joy of which she had discovered the source:

“I was part of a small group of girls: Marianne Littkei, Eva Rosenberg and Marianne Fränkel – and the four of us used to go into the garden (it was huge), to try to see, through the bushes, Lili, Hanna and Gitta. They met in Gitta's little cabin. One day, Lili came up from behind and surprised us. She looked at us and said, “So you want to know what's going on? Sit down, I'll tell you. But never again hide behind the bushes to spy on us! ". In fact, it was spiritual times that they lived there in the cabin. From then on, whenever we felt like it, we knocked on the door and asked if we could meditate with them. Sometimes they would say, “No kids, we're busy, don't come in. Somehow, it improved our relationships with others during the week. And we young people were always looking to see this trio of women through the bushes. It was our main conversation, apart from the boys. The boys, of course, was another! It shows that horrible things can happen, but life goes on. And that it is the young people who keep it going. »

The Righteous Among the Nations medal and diploma were awarded on May 13, 2012 in Paris to Andrea Mallasz, Gitta's great-niece, by Mr Sammy Ravel, Minister Plenipotentiary at the Israeli Embassy in France, in the presence of the Hungarian Ambassador, Mr Laszlo Trocsanyi. More than 250 people attended the ceremony, including Juliette Binoche, who did not know Gitta Mallasz but for whom the Dialogues with the angel is "the book of creators", a book which, she says, "sometimes saved her life".

EL