Hansi Brand

Hajnalka "Hansi" Brand (née Hartmann; 26 August 1912 – 9 April 2000 ) was a Hungarian-born Zionist activist who was involved, as a member of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee, in efforts to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.

Early life Brand was born in Budapest (then Austria-Hungary) in 1912. She was educated there and joined a Zionist youth movement when she was in high school. They accomplished this by bribing Hungarian intelligence officer Jozef Krem.

Hansi Brand and the other committee members tried negotiating with Adolf Eichmann to save (at least some) Hungarian Jews from the Holocaust. Brand and Rudolf Kastner were able to get 1,685 Jews to leave Hungary and go to neutral Switzerland on the Kastner train. In addition, working with the Aid and Rescue Committee, she saved the lives of additional Jews by getting 15,000 of them deported to Strasshof concentration camp (where they had a much greater chance of surviving) than to Auschwitz. Finally, she also tried to save the lives of some Hungarian Jewish children whom the Nazis forced on a "Death March" in November 1944.

Later life

Brand moved from Budapest to Switzerland in 1946, and from there to Palestine in 1947. In December 1946, in Basel, Switzerland, she testified in front of a special committee dealing with Rudolf Kastner's activity during the Holocaust in Hungary. She also testified in the Kastner trial in 1954 and in the Eichmann trial in 1961.

In her final years, Brand worked at the Michlelet Tel Aviv college and on behalf of orphans and Ethiopian immigrants. Her husband, Joel, died at the age of 58 in 1964. Hansi Brand died in Tel Aviv, Israel in 2000. She was survived by her son, Daniel.

Published works In 1960, Brand wrote Satan and the Soul about the couple's activities during the Holocaust and the Kastner trial.