Pál Szalay was born in
Budapest on 3 September 1915.
The Wallenberg-Szalai connection In the Hungarian
Boy Scouts in 1929 Szalay became friends with
Károly Szabó. This friendship continued in the critical months 1944 - 1945 while Pál Szalai, high-ranking member of the police force supported
Raoul Wallenberg. Szalai was from 1939 to 1942 an idealistic member of the
Arrow Cross Party. He left the party in 1942 disillusioned, and returned to a high-ranking police force position in October 1944 to help people in mortal danger from the
Holocaust. Szalai's friend Károly Szabó was an employee of the Swedish Embassy. Dr.
Otto Fleischmann Doctor of Medicine and psychologist of the Swedish Embassy motivated Károly Szabó to play active role in the rescue actions of
Raoul Wallenberg. Pál Szalai supported his friend with important personal documents, signed from the German command in the
Battle of Budapest. Szalai agreed to meet
Raoul Wallenberg at the Swedish Embassy in the night of December 26, 1944.
The ghetto in Budapest Szalai provided Raoul Wallenberg with special favors and government information. In the second week of January 1945, Raoul found out that
Adolf Eichmann planned a massacre in the
Budapest ghetto. The only one who could stop it was the man given the responsibility to carry the massacre out, the commander of the German troops in Hungary, Major General
Gerhard Schmidhuber. Through Szalai, Wallenberg sent Schmidhuber a note promising that he, Raoul Wallenberg, would make sure the general was held personally responsible for the massacre and that he would be hanged as a war criminal when the war was over. The general knew that the war would be over soon and that the Germans were losing. The massacre never took place. According to
Giorgio Perlasca, who posed as the
Spanish consul-general to Hungary in the winter of 1944 and saved 5218 Jews, Pál Szalai lied to save his life during his criminal trial, and the history of the saving is different. Raoul Wallenberg saved hundreds of people but was not directly involved in the plan to save the ghetto. While Perlasca was posing as the Spanish consul-general, he learned of the intention to burn down the ghetto. Shocked and incredulous, he asked for a direct hearing with the Hungarian interior minister Gábor Vajna, in the basement of the Budapest City Hall where he had his headquarter, and threatened fictitious legal and economic measures against the "3000 Hungarian citizens" (in fact, a much smaller number) declared by Perlasca as residents of Spain, and the same treatment by two Latin American governments, to force the minister to withdraw the project. This actually happened in the following days.
Emigration and death Szalai emigrated in 1956 to the United States and lived in New Jersey, then moved to California. He died on January 16, 1994, in
Los Angeles, California, under the name "Paul Sterling". ==See also==