While staying one step ahead of the Nazis who targeted him for extermination, Rav Aharon of Belz spent 8 months in Budapest in the home of Reb Yosef Reiner. “I promise you that the entire family will reach Eretz Yisrael,” the Rebbe told his host as he made his final escape from Europe. The Rebbe wrapped his hand in a handkerchief, and passed from child to child. Over 6 decades later, David and Avraham Reiner can still feel the Rebbe’s caress; can still bask in the promise that was miraculously fulfilled.
Avraham and Chaim David sons of Reb Yosef Reiner (today they go by the last name Ra’anan) were five and seven years old when the Belzer Rebbe arrived in their city of Budapest. He was fleeing from Poland to Hungary where the Germans hadn’t yet arrived and Jews still enjoyed relative freedom. Although the Jews were drafted into the German forced labor camps around Budapest they were still able to return to their homes at night and there wasn’t yet a ghetto. Because of this Budapest had become a city of refuge; hoards of Jewish refugees from all over Eastern Europe poured into the city to find shelter.
Meanwhile Rav Aharon of Belz was at the top of the Gestapo’s wanted list of rabbis targeted for extermination. He and his half-brother Rav Mordechai of Bilgoray managed to stay one step ahead of the Nazis. The two rebbes were smuggled from town to town across Poland into Hungary. In their most dramatic escape the brothers were driven out of occupied Poland and into Hungary by a Hungarian counter-intelligence agent who was paid $5 000 for his efforts. At the border the Rebbe his attendant and Rebbe Mordechai shorn of their beards and peyos were disguised as Russian generals who had been captured at the front and were being taken to Budapest for questioning.
Getting across the border was just the first stage. Entry to Budapest was forbidden to anyone who wasn’t a resident but Jewish minds found ways to solve this problem. First they got the Rebbe and his entourage in by presenting them as patients from a hospital in one of the surrounding villages. Gradually as their “illness” progressed they were brought to the hospital in Budapest traveling in a Red Cross vehicle whose driver had been bribed. “The Rebbe lay in the hospital for some days ” Reb Avraham recounts. “Broken crushed and shaven he really did look ill. It was told that a Polish-born Jew who saw him lashed out ‘Why are you putting on an act that you’re a Jew? You’re a Pole and you just want to stay here.’ Weeks later the man discovered whom he had taunted. Beside himself with shame he hurried to beg forgiveness.”
In Iyar 1943 the Rebbe arrived in the Jewish Quarter of Budapest. Initially few people knew that he and his holy brother the Rebbe of Bilgoray were given accommodations in the local Talmud Torah. But gradually the rumor spread that these two tzaddikim were sojourning in the city.
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