Suave hero who saved hundreds of Jews from the Nazi gas chambers Film reveals ‘Ireland’s Oskar Schindler’
Travelling extensively in Eastern Europe he saw similarities between Ireland and Croatia, which had just come out of the Austria-hungary empire.
With the rise of Hitler, Butler, who spoke Serbo-croat, worked closely with the Quakers to get dozens of Jews out of Vienna before they were rounded up by the Nazis.
Journalist Fintan O’toole tells the programme Butler used his suave manner to get into numerous embassies looking for help with visas and got enormous pleasure in being able to “hussle, hassle, manoeuvre and manipulate to get things done”.
O’toole says: “He got a lot of people out of Vienna that otherwise would have died. There’s no question of that.
“In the end Butler had to break the law by shipping people out of Austria, getting them to England and having his wife Peggy meet them and take them illegally to Bennettsbridge [their Kilkenny home] and getting them onwards from there. He was operating on his own initiative”.
Butler called in favours to shelter adults and children at a time when the Irish Government’s official line was only to take in Christian refugees.
After the war he clashed with the Church when he revealed its close ties with the murderous Ustasa regime in Croatia which had slaughtered 500,000 Orthodox Serbs, Jews and gypsies.
The Church supported forced conversions to Catholicism telling the people: “As Catholics you will be able to stay in your home and carry on your husbandry.
“As Catholics you will be able to save your immortal soul.”
One notorious Catholic law student was rewarded for slitting the throats of 1,360 Serbs who refused to convert.
When Butler tried to tell a public meeting about the conversions in 1952, the Papal Nuncio Archbishop Gerald O’hara walked out sparking a backlash against Butler for “insulting Rome”.
Newly-released Government papers reveal officials even debated whether to allow him a new passport and he was effectively blacklisted by President Sean T O’kelly. Butler highlighted the fact that Croatian war criminal Andrija Artukovic had been allowed to live quietly in Dublin after the war with false Irish papers before fleeing across the Atlantic.
Few people knew of the writer – who grew vegetables and always referred to himself as a market gardener – until his work was published when he was 85.
RIGHTS
The Nuncio And The Writer reveals Butler’s story only came to prominence when Antony Farrell set up Lilliput Press and published several of his works before putting him in touch with companies in London, New York and Paris.
Writers John Banville and Roy Foster describe Butler, who died in 1991, as “one of the great Irish writers” as well arguably our greatest human rights campaigner. A primary exponent of the genocide in Croatia, Butler also denounced France for helping to round up Jews in its Nazi-occupied zones to be sent to Auschwitz.
He said Parisians had seen children torn from their mothers’ arms to be put on cattle trucks but did not speak up and argued millions could have been saved if they had.
The Nuncio And The Writer is on RTE One on Tuesday at 10.35pm.
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