Gran’s war secret
NYU prof discovers Holocaust-survivor grandma was spy
Enid Zentelis thought she knew everything about her grandmother, Bella Vital-Tihanyi — a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, mother of two and late-in-life avowed nudist who died in 1998.
“She was my rock,” said Zentelis, who traveled the world with Bella and even lived with her for a time.
Zentelis believed that Bella, born in 1915, had a straightforward war story. A neighbor turned in Bella as a Jew, and she spent several months in a Budapest prison. She survived the Nazi regime thanks to fake papers claiming she was a Swedish citizen waiting to go home.
But Zentelis’ view changed in 2017 when the filmmaker and NYU professor, now 49, was going through her grandmother’s effects and came across a letter dated November 1945. It was from the wartime Allied Control Commission, thanking Bella for her “highly confidential work . . . at great risk to yourself” for British Special Operations. Zentelis couldn’t believe her eyes.
“Had my grandmother been a spy? I needed to know what this letter meant,” said Zentelis, who went on a global investigation into her grandmother’s past — a four-year odyssey that led to the podcast “How My Grandmother Won WWII,” which concluded this week.
Zentelis was able to corroborate Bella’s role during a visit to the British National Archives in London. “I found her name on the list of collaborators and helpers for British SOE,” she said of the Special Operations Executive, a secret organization that conducted espionage. “It was the most exhilarating moment.” Through WWII expert interviews, government archives, distant relatives’ memories and Bella’s unpublished memoir, Zentelis pieced together the secret parts of her grandmother’s life.
The young woman had qualified for the 1936 Berlin Olympics with the Hungarian swim team, but her parents refused to let her go to Germany. College was out of the question for a Hungarian Jew. But her older brother, Zoltan, worked as a postal clerk — and he and Bella established a way to intercept critical intelligence and pass it to Britain’s MI6 secret intelligence service.
Zoltan tracked German positions from the post office, where — according to historians — he likely intercepted audio telegrams. “He would acquire the information and [Bella] would code,” said Zentelis, adding that the siblings shared a childhood code they likely used, before Bella would then decode the intelligence for the British Legation in Budapest.
In 1940, the siblings gathered information that Hitler was going to break the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact with Stalin. “Theirs was one of a handful of intelligence tips about this at the time,” said Zentelis. “This changed the course of the war. Their intelligence was highly valued after that point.”
Still, it was scary business. Based on her memoir, written in French and unread by Zentelis for many years after her grandmother’s death, Bella feared repercussions. “She was afraid that her eyes were going to be gouged out, Zentelis said. “She was torn up about lying to her mother.”
Even more shocking than the spying was the passionate affair Zentelis uncovered.
One of Bella’s British contacts was Eric Shipton, a famous Mt. Everest mountaineer. The married Shipton was an “agricultural attache” to Hungary, though his biographer Peter Steele told Zentelis it was likely a cover for his intelligence work.
“Their relationship was much deeper than a wartime affair,” said Zentelis, noting that Bella’s husband, Laszlo, had been sent to a forced-labor camp and was later murdered. “Shipton helped [her] escape Hungary after the Communists realized she was . . . spying for the West.”
Bella and Zoltan also leveraged their work to help their younger sister, Olga. With only 800 Hungarians allowed into the US, Olga was able to get a visa. “It was currency at the time — you could get someone out of the country in return for information,” said Zentelis.
Bella fled to Belgium after the war, where she met her longtime partner. While she would visit her family in the US, the couple moved to Corsica in the ’60s and lived a rich life, swimming a “perfect crawl stroke” until her early 80s.
Zentelis said learning of Bella’s fascist-fighting role was a “gift. It helped me to understand the power of individual resistance. She survived the Holocaust, she beat Nazis . . . She definitely prevailed.
“I believe she helped to make this a kinder, more just world.”
New York City’s most prestigious apartment buildings sometimes hold dirty little secrets. Literally.
Take what happened at a pad in a tony Emery Roth-designed Park Avenue building last summer. The pad was so full of belongings — about 10,000 books, 300 framed photos, plus old computers and filing cabinets — that the owner tripped on the accumulated mess and died right there among the junk.
Afterward, Raul Toscano’s team was called to clean up — quietly, so as to maintain appearances.
“The person [may have] a good name and they don’t want it thrown out there,” said Toscano, 45, who owns the Queens-based Hoarding Cleaning Specialists and regularly works in high-end buildings around the city. “And a lot of times, [the buildings] don’t want the neighbors freaking out. [It’s bad if] you pay top dollar for a nice apartment, and you’re living next to someone, and you can smell the person’s apartment and you’re wondering where the roaches are coming from.”
Recently, Toscano was hired to help a 90-year-old resident who had books, papers, boxes, clothing and jewelry piled high in her threebedroom apartment at a luxury Central Park West address.
“It was just clutter everywhere,” said Toscano, whose company is an offshoot of Clutter Free Junk Removal
Service and Cleanup Pros.
All told, there was some 18 tons of junk in the pricey apartment.
Toscano said his company deals with situations like this “once, sometimes twice a week.”
The tricky part is that luxury-building management often insists “we’ve got to be discreet,” he added, in an effort not to alarm neighbors.
That means keeping logos on uniforms hidden and obscuring just what it is they’re disposing of.
“We have bins, so people can’t really see what’s coming out, and they’re covered,” said Toscano. “What we try to do is prep everything and get it out [quickly].”
Sometimes that’s nearly impossible. Like the job a year-and-a-half ago at a Central Park South building that stands in the shadows of Billionaires’
Row. Toscano’s team had to rip out the floors of a unit because the tenant’s mess — including multiple piles of paper standing several feet high — also had a bedbug infestation. In one high-end building, there was a woman whose hoarding situation included a husky left dead in its cage for eight months; at another, a man preferred to defecate in the bathtub. “We see it all,” said Toscano. A 2019 cleanup on the Upper West Side meant throwing out bottles full of urine and oodles of sex toys. That assignment ran around $18,000. Toscano, who charges by the job, said his priciest tab was $40,000 for a house in New Jersey; his team removed about 16 tons of trash and repainted the whole place.
Hoarding disorders, which affect between 2 and 6 percent of American adults, know no economic boundaries.
“Oftentimes when you have luxury hoarding . . . people might convince themselves it’s not hoarding,” said Dena Rabinowitz, Ph.D., clinical director of Cognitive Behavioral Psychology of NY. “‘If I’m hoarding 500 Prada bags, well, doesn’t that feel like a collection?’”
For Toscano, the one thing that stands out among classes is that, once a high-end unit’s massive mess is being cleaned out, he “can see the beauty of the apartment.”
Typically, Toscano added, his company receives calls from concerned relatives. The jobs are rarely complete throwaways, though, and the team saves items as instructed.
Toscano started the company, which is one of a few doing this locally, in 2013 after helping clean up houses hit by Hurricane Sandy.
“They were just very straightforward [and] did the job,” said one city resident who called the service to help out a friend on the Upper East Side in the fall. “They just go in and they have a whole routine, like six of them, and they take each room, tear it apart and clean it.”
For Toscano, it’s bigger than just a cleaning job. “I love helping people,” he said, adding that he asks customers to leave while cleaning. “When they come back they’re like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe this is my home.’ ”
IF not for an LSD trip he took in 1968, at age 19, photographer Mick Rock (inset) might never have snapped iconic photos of David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Mötley Crüe and a host of other musicians. At the time, he was attending Cambridge University in England, majoring in literature and harboring no photographic ambitions.
But Rock told The Post that on that night, “I was at the home of a friend who had all the toys, including a great record player and camera. Sitting around his room, tripping on blotter acid, I picked up the camera and began playing with it. Every time I clicked, there was an explosion and I saw a lady’s faces in a million iterations.” Rock fell in love with photography and went from shooting girlfriends to capturing rockers for London publications and Rolling Stone. “It was a different time,” he said. “I picked up what I needed to know as I went along. I realized that you didn’t need to know much when it came to photography.” Still, Rock went on to become an image-maker of choice for stars from Freddie Mercury to Joey Ramone. The West Contemporary Editions (west-contemporary.com) gallery in London is in the midst of a sale that includes a dozen of his favorite prints. Here are a few of his top shots and the stories behind them.