Friedrich Born (June 10, 1903, Langenthal, Canton of Bern – January 14, 1963) was a Swiss delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Budapest between May 1944 and January 1945, when he had to leave Hungary following orders of the occupying Red Army.
He already lived in the Hungarian Capital city before his appointment by the ICRC, working as a trader, and originally came to Budapest as a member of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Trade. He quickly became aware of the deportation of Hungarian Jews, which began after the German Putsch in spring 1944. Following the strategy of Carl Lutz (the Swiss vice-consul), he recruited up to 3,000 Jews as workers for his offices, granting them protection, and designated several buildings as protected by the ICRC. He also managed to distribute about 15,000 Schutzbriefe, protection documents issued by the ICRC that prevented the deportation and death of many Hungarian Jews.
He is credited with rescuing between 11,000 and 15,000 Jews in Budapest.
After the war, as most of the saviours of Budapest, such as Carl Lutz and Giorgio Perlasca, he returned to his normal life, and kept the rememberings of his actions for himself. Twenty-four years after his death, in 1987, he was designated as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
Famous quotes containing the word born:
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)