Lutz & Wallenberg Passes: The Simko Family Testimony
A Steel Executive’s Wife, Two Rescuers, One Unmatched Archive
A Hungarian ID card, a set of business cards from a steel company, and a Hungarian army confiscation protocol do not sound like the makings of a landmark Holocaust document set, until you add two protection passes signed under the authority of Carl Lutz and Raoul Wallenberg. That combination is what makes the papers issued to Mrs. Siegmund Simko, wife of a Budapest steel company director, worth a very close look.
By late 1944, the Germans occupying Hungary were moving Jewish residents of Budapest toward deportation and the concentration camp system on an industrial scale. Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul, and Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat, answered that machinery with paper. Between them, the two men issued roughly 80,000 Schutz-Passes (protection passes) and Schutzbriefe (protection letters), documents that used the protective umbrella of neutral diplomatic status to pull individuals out of the deportation lines.
Where the Idea Actually Came From
Carl Lutz didn’t improvise this tactic in Budapest. He had already tested the power of a protective document during an earlier posting as Vice-Consul in Palestine in 1934, and it was that experience he carried into Hungary a decade later. Wallenberg and the other righteous diplomats who followed essentially adapted Lutz’s method once they saw it working on the ground in Budapest. Lutz, in that sense, is the diplomat behind the underlying idea, even though Wallenberg’s name is the one most widely remembered today.
What Survives in the Simko Set
The documents in question were issued to the wife of Siegmund Simko, and it is most likely, though not itself documented, that Siegmund Simko held equivalent papers of his own. What we do know from the surviving material is that Simko directed a large steel company, a detail confirmed by his business cards preserved alongside the protection documents. Also in the set is Mrs. Simko’s Hungarian ID card, and finally a protocol issued by the Hungarian army recording the confiscation of the Simko family’s flat and its contents, drawn up after the family had managed to flee.
Why Holding Both Documents Is So Rare
It is understood today that a single person could, in principle, have held both a Lutz Schutzbrief and a Wallenberg Schutzpass, but I would treat that as an unusual case rather than a common one. Until this set surfaced, there had been no physical documentary testimony of anyone actually holding both. That absence of prior evidence is what makes this particular archive historically significant: it is, as far as the surviving record shows, unique.
Righteous Diplomats Helping Jews. During the Second World War, a number of ambassadors, consuls, and diplomatic mission staff used their positions, their diplomatic immunity, and whatever resources they had on hand to actively help persecuted Jews, many of them refugees who had already fled occupied Poland.
The Title of Righteous Among the Nations. Israel awards the title of Righteous Among the Nations to people anywhere in the world who provided selfless help to Jews persecuted by Nazi Germany. More than 27,000 people from 51 countries have received the honor, including nearly 7,000 Poles.
I want to be direct about the limits of what this set can tell us: the material establishes Mrs. Simko’s identity, her husband’s profession, and the family’s later loss of their flat, but it does not, on its own, document Siegmund Simko’s personal possession of a matching pass. Where the physical evidence stops, I stop too, rather than filling the gap with an assumption. If you hold related documentation from the Lutz or Wallenberg rescue networks, or you can help pin down further detail on the Simko family, I’d genuinely like to hear from you.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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