The hotel founder
The father of our hero, Mihály Meixner (1856-1909), restaurateur, studied in Szombathely, and after moving to Győr, he initially rented the Hotel Fehér Hajó, and at this moment the idea of building a modern hotel occurred to him.
Built in 1904, the first hotel, named the Meixner Royal Hotel, had a restaurant, café, banqueting hall, upstairs terrace and several guest rooms. The hotel burned down shortly after opening in 1905, but was rebuilt and significantly extended by Meixner and his family with the support of the citizens of Győr and loans.
This is how the Royal became one of the most prestigious and largest hotels in the country by the end of the 1930s.
© Turizmus Online
The building was bombed during the Second World War and reopened in 1945 after repairs. It was owned by the Meixner family until nationalisation in 1949. After nationalisation, the hotel was renamed Red Star, then Hotel Rába in 1968, and it still bears the latter name today.
The building was home to the popular “little Bognár” Restaurant, then the Magyaros Restaurant. A host of celebrities have stayed at the hotel on the edge of the historic town centre, which has been home to the town’s events and balls, from charity evenings to gala dinners and ballet performances. The hotel has hosted Ennio Morricone, film music composer, Ken-Ichiro Kobayashi, conductor, the pop band Boney M, David Murray, jazz musician, Levente Szörényi, rock musician and composer, liqueur producer Péter Zwack, Péter Bacsó, film director.
The lifesaver
“Our” hero, the hotel founder Mihály Meixner’ son, was born in 1893 and deceased in 1948.
Together with his brother Ferenc, he became the owner of the Royal Hotel in Győr after the death of their father.
In his younger years he served as a professional soldier in the Hungarian army and retired in the rank of captain. In May 1944, Mihály Meixner was called up again for military service and appointed commander of the Jewish Labour Service Company 102/301. The majority of the Jews who were drafted into the company were from settlements around Győr, such as Mosonmagyaróvár, Gyömöre, Rajka, etc.
Unlike most of the company’s officers and subordinates, Captain Mihály Meixner treated the Jews under his command with dignity and respect. The majority of the labour company was made up of young men who had been left without families after the mass deportation of Jews from the countryside to Auschwitz.
In the summer of 1944, the company was assigned to clear rubble in Győr. During this time Mihály Meixner managed to provide kosher food for those who strictly observed religious requirements. Using his contacts with nearby villagers, he provided the forced labourers with food in addition to the usual military rations.
During the Jewish High Holidays, he would lead members of his unit into the forest near the camp under the pretext of providing them with work there. In reality, however, the purpose of these ‘forest days’ was to enable the forced labourers assigned to him to have a day of prayer and fasting at least on Yom Kippur.
After the Arrow Cross party came to power, Mihály Meixner learned that the labour camp inmates would soon be deported to the German Reich. At no small risk, he informed his company of what was about to happen and provided letters of departure and military uniforms to all who wanted to escape. None of the Jews were reported to have escaped, nor were they tracked down.
Among the Jews rescued by Mihály Meixner were Michael Röder, Yitzchak (Ignác) Löwinger and Ernő Weisz (later Yehoshua Ben-Ami), who settled in Israel after the war. The survivors did not forget their rescuer and have taken the initiative with Yad Vashem to acknowledge the company commander’s lifesaving gesture.
© Yad Vashem
On September 6, 1998, Yad Vashem awarded Mihály Meixner the Righteous among the Nations title.
The descendants of the Meixner family continue to cherish the memory of their ancestors.
Among them, they can be proud of Mihály Meixner, a man of integrity, courage, honesty and humanity, who was able to resist the howling wolves of evil and hatred. The great-grandson of the hotel’s founder, who lives in Győr, has provided us with a photograph of his grandfather, the lifesaver Mihály Meixner, as a young man, together with his wife. The family has also preserved the story of how Mihály Meixner once, in 1944, rescued a pregnant woman in labour from the Győr ghetto, drove her in his command car to the Győr hospital and “forced” the doctor to deliver her.
The Rába Hotel will be 120 years old next year. We hope that this anniversary will be a worthy occasion to commemorate not only the founder of the hotel, Mihály Meixner, but also the former co-owner, the lifesaver Mihály Meixner.
Information collected by Peter Krausz
Sources
Meixner Mihály, personal exchange
Lakáskultúra és Danubius Hotels
Magyar Nemzeti Digitális Archívum
One reply on “From the Hotel Royal in Győr to the title of the Righteous among the Nations: Mihály Meixner’s story”
[…] a total of 28,486 awards have been presented, 869 of which to Hungarian citizens. One of them was Mihály Meixner from Győr, the late owner of the Hotel Royal, now Hotel Rába, whom we have previously written […]