Sára Salkaházi

Sára Salkaházi was born Sarolta Klotild Schalkház on 11 May 1899 in Kassa, then a city of the Kingdom of Hungary within Austria-Hungary and now Košice in Slovakia. Her family was of German origin and kept a hotel; her father died while she was still a small child, and she was raised by her mother. In youth she was known as independent and unconventional: she smoked, played sports, and sought paid work unusual for women of her milieu. After teacher training and a short time in the classroom she worked as a bookbinder and then as a journalist and writer for the Hungarian press. She regarded herself as a modern woman of the early twentieth century, became engaged, and later broke off the engagement. She never married.

From the later 1920s she underwent a deepening Catholic conversion. In 1929 she entered the Sisters of Social Service, a congregation founded in Hungary by Margit Slachta whose members lived an active life of social work rather than a cloistered one. She took the religious name Sára. Superiors hesitated over her strong will, and her profession of vows was delayed, but she persevered and eventually took vows. She edited a Catholic women’s periodical, worked with the Catholic Women’s Association, and helped establish hostels and programs for working girls, including a home in Budapest. She combined journalism, administration, retreat work, and direct charity among women and the poor.

After the German occupation of Hungary in 1944 and the coming to power of the Arrow Cross, Jews in Budapest faced roundups, deportation, and murder. The Sisters of Social Service hid Jewish people and obtained protective papers. Salkaházi took a leading part in this rescue work, sheltering Jewish women and children at the congregation’s house on Bokréta Street and elsewhere and helping to provide false identity documents. She is commonly credited with saving around one hundred lives; the congregation as a whole aided still more. She is reported to have offered her own life to God if those in her care might be spared.

On 27 December 1944 Arrow Cross militiamen raided the Bokréta Street house and found Jewish women in hiding. Salkaházi had been away; she returned, did not flee, and was arrested with several companions. That same day the prisoners were taken to the bank of the Danube in Budapest, shot, and thrown into the river. She was forty-five. Her remains were not recovered. Yad Vashem later recognized her as Righteous Among the Nations. The Catholic Church judged her death a martyrdom of charity. She was beatified on 17 September 2006 in Budapest by Cardinal Péter Erdő acting for Pope Benedict XVI. She has not been canonized. Her memorial is kept on 27 December, the date of her death.