Andrew Stevens, a longtime Beverly Hills resident, successful businessman, active philanthropist and Hungarian Holocaust survivor, is hard to resist. He’s in his late 70s but looks 15 years younger — not because of his hair, which is darker than nature permits, but because of his energy, drive and determination. He has a quality I find hard to describe (but which many, who have had occasion to befriend Holocaust survivors, will recognize) that is annoying yet endearing.
Let me explain: In the course of reporting this column, before I had even had a chance to contact him, he called to ask me why I hadn’t called him yet. Over the next week or so, he called me on my cellphone. He called me at home on the weekend. He invited me to his office.
He faxed me articles about him. He gave me copies of a speech he’d delivered. He invited me to lunch.
He wanted me to tell him “the angle” of this article. He asked if he could see the article before I turned it in to my editors. (I said no.) He also gave me a copy and asked me to mention a book of poems called, “Shoah Never Again” (Jim White Enterprises), written (and self-published) by his friend, James E. White Jr., an African American writer and television producer (OK, now I’ve mentioned it).
And the day the column was due, he called again to say he had “one more input” for me. And he asked again to see the column before I turned it in. (I said no again.)
So why write a column about Stevens? In spite of this barrage, the more time I spent with him, the more compelled I was by the charisma of Stevens and the more I wanted to tell his story.
The ostensible reason for this column is the recently published “Brothers for Resistance and Rescue: The Underground Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary During World War II,” by David Gur (Gefen Publishing House), in which Stevens appears.
“Brothers for Resistance” is an important contribution to understanding the Holocaust in Hungary and the resistance work carried out by so many young men and women. As the foreword notes, Gur, who was himself active in the underground, spent two decades trying to track down as many comrades and fellow resistance members as possible for this work.
The book explains the various political, religious and social factions that operated as part of the resistance. Many are still active in various political groups in present-day Israel, such as Mapai (Labor), Dror Habonim (Zionist-Socialist), Mizrahi (Religious Zionism) and Beitar (Activist Zionist). Gur gives the history of these groups and more.
The book explores the many diverse activities of the underground that Zionist youth groups undertook to save as many lives as possible during the Holocaust. These included sending emissaries to towns and cities to warn and prepare them, smuggling people out of Hungary to safer havens (this mission was called the “tiyul”), the production of forged documents, as well as the building of armed bunkers for hiding people.
He also tells of how children were taken to houses under the protection of the Red Cross, and adults and children brought to buildings that were under the protection of foreign legations. In the course of underground activity, young men posing in uniform risked their lives to free others from labor camps and prisons.
However, the biographical entries are the heart and the soul of the book. As Gur said in the foreword, “The motivation behind the work was the wish to rescue underground activists from all streams from anonymity and to reveal their actions.”
More than 400 men and women are listed, each one a chronicle of heroism.
Gur’s entry on Stevens reveals that he was born Endre Steinberger and was just 16 when the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944. Conscripted into forced labor, he escaped. After receiving forged documents from a friend, he became involved in the manufacture of documents.
Stevens worked out of several apartments in Budapest. However, early one morning, the Hungarian fascist police, the Arrow Cross, knocked on his door and apprehended him. As he was led down the street to prison and certain death, he ran away. They shot at him, and despite taking a bullet to his ankle, he escaped.
Stevens returned to the manufacture of forged documents. Stevens recalled to me that there was a deaf-mute man who worked beside him who, with a penknife, was able to cut rubber stamps to resemble official seals. Stevens’ task was filing out forged documents, and he also often delivered and distributed them, saving many lives, including Laszlo Weinberger, one of his schoolmates.
Stevens recalled that on one occasion, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who handed out Swedish papers to Jews, saving their lives, complained that he had run out of official forms to fill out. Otto Komoly, one of the Hungarian resistance leaders, offered to provide Wallenberg with a stack of forged forms. Wallenberg agreed, and Stevens delivered them to his office.
Stevens’ false papers were also instrumental in saving his mother’s life after she escaped from a death march and hid until war’s end.
For his actions during the war, Stevens received the Golden Cross from Hungarian President Apad Gonz in 1997, following which Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), who is also a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, paid tribute to Stevens in the Congressional Record.
Looking back, Stevens says, he feels those 10 months when he worked in the Hungarian resistance are his “proudest moments.”
He is not just proud that he survived, he told me, but that in a time of crisis, he helped others. “I could have just kept my false papers and sat in a room. Today, I can’t even understand how I could do that.”
He was constantly in danger: “Every hour, you could be next.”
The false papers only provided minor protection.
“If I was caught, all they needed to do [to find out if I was a Jew] was to ask me pull down my pants,” he said.
Yet he traveled all over Budapest without fear.
Stevens still can’t understand how so many of his fellow Hungarian Jews remained blind to the fact of what was happening. “In the beginning, we didn’t believe…. But at a certain point…. By then it was too late.”
Stevens recalled how he personally witnessed the murder of many Hungarian Jews by the banks of the Danube.
“With my own eyes, I saw little kids laughing and then [the soldiers] tossing them into the air and shooting at them,” he said.
Today at the base of the Margit Bridge in Budapest there is a memorial — little bronze shoes stuck in the mud. (Documentary filmmaker Bela Mayer just sent me a short film by Andras Salamon on this subject called, “Tell Your Children” at films.thelot.com/films/17451.)
In 1949, Stevens immigrated to the United States, eventually traveling to California. His first job here was as a busboy at Mama Weiss, a Hungarian restaurant that used to exist in Beverly Hills. He worked as a waiter’s assistant at the Cock ‘n’ Bull on Sunset, pumped gas and worked in a lighting factory. Eventually he became a real estate sales agent, selling graded land for residential development in the east San Gabriel Valley.
Over time, he fielded a team of sales agents who handled large home sites in Big Bear, Montebello, the Salton Riviera and Thousand Palms. Stevens was also instrumental in the development of Lake Havasu, Ariz. His company grew to develop, market and manage properties not only in the United States but also abroad, including Brussels, Hong Kong, Guam and even Budapest.
Stevens has two grown sons, a doctor and a lawyer, from his first marriage, and a 7-year-old son from his second marriage.
His charitable activities are legion (Stevens suggested I refer to him as “Rebel With a Cause,” which he informed me was his trademark), and include ORT, Vista Del Mar, the Beverly Hills Rotary Club, DARE, The Medallions (Cedar-Sinai Medical Center’s fundraising division), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Emanuel Foundation, a charitable organization devoted to restoring and preserving sites of Jewish interest in Hungary, named in honor of Emanuel Schwartz, Tony Curtis’ father (Curtis provided the original seed money).
My mother was active in the Emmanuel Foundation, and many years ago, after I first moved to Los Angeles, she asked me to serve as the L.A. driver/assistant/factotum for the foundation’s executive director, Andor Weiss, a Brooklyn-based Orthodox rabbi and Hungarian survivor.
“You’re my Hollywood connection,” he used to say to me, to which I would reply: “If I’m your Hollywood connection, then you are in trouble.”
The rabbi was about 4-feet tall, bald, smart as a fox and tenacious as a terrier. Whenever he was in town, I had no idea where our adventures would take us, but thanks to him, I found myself in a limo with Guy McElwayne, hearing stories about Frank Sinatra and his daughter, Tina; and schmoozing at the home of Joe Esterzhas in Malibu. And on one memorable occasion, I was greeted at the door of a condo in Bel Air by a bare-chested Tony Curtis, who proceeded to hug me.
The West Coast director of the Emanuel Foundation? Stevens. So, in fact, I knew Stevens, having met him several times a decade ago. But I did not know his story — and I did not really know him.
This Sunday, April 15, Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) will be observed in Pan Pacific Park at the Holocaust Memorial. Stevens will be there in a place of honor. As a survivor, as a member of the resistance, as one of the supporters of the memorial, he deserves it.
To return to my original question: Why write a column about Stevens?
That same spirit that made him run away when arrested by the Arrow Cross and kept him running even when shot; that made him save others, even when his own life was at risk is the same headstrong independent personality that forged a business and a life in this country, and that continues to be charitable. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t say no; so who can say no to him?
At the outset of this column, I said Stevens was annoying. Perhaps I should have said insistent. But I can tell you this: My parents, Eastern European Holocaust survivors, were also each, in their own way, very charming but on occasion extremely annoying people. It was hard to say no to them. So you could say the reason I wrote this column is simple: I miss them.
Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he’s an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.
IN CONVERSATION WITH DAVID MAMET: LIVE AT UCLA
The wonderful folks at Nextbook (www.nextbook.org) are holding a festival in LA , April 21-22 at UCLA, filled with amazing speakers such as Kenneth Turan, Adam Gopnik, Bruce Wagner, and Jonathan Gold (see below) and have invited me to interview David Mamet on stage on April 22, at 11AM. Here’s the link:
http://www.nextbook.org/festivals/la.event1.html
Festival Pass: $20 in advance; $25 at the door ($15 Students)
Optional Box Lunch: $10 in advance; $15 at the door
By Phone:
UCLA Ticket Office
Mon-Fri 10am to 4pm
Sat-Sun 10am to 2pm
310.825.2101
Online:
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