Hansi Brand

Hansi Brand (née Hajnalka Hartmann) (1912 – April 9, 2000), was a Hungarian-born Zionist activist who was involved in rescue efforts during the Holocaust.

Hanjnalka (Hansi) Hartmann 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. Later on, she joined a pioneering village which taught young Jews "agricultural training prior to their immigration to Palestine." Hansi married Joel Brand ("a prominent member of the World Union of Mapai") in Budapest in 1935 in a fictitious marriage in order to be allowed to immigrate to Palestine. Later on Hansi's and Joel's marriage became a "real", sincere one. They established a small glove factory and had two sons, one of whom died young.

Hansi moved from Budapest to Switzerland in 1946, and then from there to Palestine in 1947. In her final years, Brand worked at the Michlelet Tel Aviv college and on behalf of orphans and Ethiopian immigrants. Hansi's husband Joel died at the age of 58 in 1964. Hansi died in Tel Aviv, Israel in 2000. Brand was survived by her son, Daniel.

Between 1938 and 1945, Hansi and her husband were deeply involved in efforts to help Jewish refugees who had escaped to Hungary (which did not deport Jews to concentration camps before the Nazi invasion in 1944). They saved Hansi's sister and her family from being sent to Nazi concentration camps after they had been deported to Poland in 1941. They accomplished this by bribing Hungarian intelligence officer Jozef Krem. Together with some other Hungarian Zionist activists, the couple founded the Aid and Rescue Committee in 1942.

Hansi and Joel Brand were key associates in the Kasztner negotiations with the Nazis. The central part of the deal with Eichmann was the so-called “Goods for Blood” arrangement in which the Nazis tried to barter Jewish lives for money, arms and supplies in the dying months of the war.

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