Rezsõ Kasztner Unknown Hero of the Holocaust

Kyt · Sep 23, 2007

KASZTNER'S TRAIN: The True Story of Rezsõ Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust By Anna Porter

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Prior to Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961, the most sensational judicial proceeding in Israel was the trial, in 1954-55, of the Hungarian Jew Rezsõ (Rudolf) Kasztner (or Kastner). But, whereas in the case of Eichmann the target of the proceedings was one of the fiercest enemies of European Jewry, the Kasztner case was that of a suspected collaborator. In Judge Benjamin Halevi's view, Kasztner considered the chance of saving a few prominent people a fair bargain for abandoning the vast majority of his fellow Jews. Thereby, he "had sold his soul to the devil."

True, three years later, the Supreme Court of Israel proclaimed Kasztner the victim of a judicial error, but it was Halevi's original charge that even today casts a dark shadow on Kasztner's historical legacy. What makes the Kasztner affair so particularly dramatic is that he could no longer listen to the supreme court's favourable ruling because, in the meantime, he was murdered by a fanatical Israeli nationalist.

A Transylvanian native and a successful lawyer, Kasztner moved to Budapest in 1941, where he continued his activities in the small Hungarian Zionist movement. Then, on March 19, 1944, the German army marched into Hungary to prevent its leadership from deserting the Nazi alliance and to deal with the question of the nearly 800,000 Jews or converted Jews whom the country was harbouring.

Because the Zionists understood better than the German-appointed Jewish Council that the new Hungarian government, appointed at the behest of Hitler, was interested only in delivering its Jews to the Nazis, Kasztner and friends endeavoured to deal directly with the Gestapo and, in general, with the SS. Their aim was to save as many Jewish lives as possible, a move that was not completely hopeless in view of Heinrich Himmler's inclination to seek a secret understanding with the Western powers, and the greed and corruptibility of some SS officers.

While the Germans and Hungarians deported about 430,000 Jews to Auschwitz, where the great majority were gassed, the SS and the Zionists engaged in long-drawn-out negotiations on such topics as the exchange of 10,000 Allied trucks for a million Jewish lives (if one can call it a negotiation when both Eichmann and the Zionists were bluffing); the "putting on ice" of 20,000-odd Hungarian Jews in Austria, where most of them survived, and, last but not least, the setting-up of the "Kasztner Train," which ultimately took almost 1,700 Jews to Switzerland. The book's emphasis is on this train, an event somewhat similar to the creation of Schindler's List. Anna Porter conducted some of her most stimulating interviews centring around Kasztner's Train.

Kasztner's feverish activity inevitably caused many people to feel that, in order to save himself, his family and his protégés, he had committed grave crimes, the worst being his deliberate neglect in informing other Jews of the true goal of the deportations. But Kasztner's silence regarding the deportations was less harmful (how many Jews outside Budapest would he have been able to reach, and how many people would have believed him?) than the near-paralysis of the Hungarian Jewish community's official leadership and that of the non-Jewish world.

The fact is that the Jewish community leaders, Hungary's pre-1944 conservative government, the pope, the governments of the neutral countries in Europe as well as the British and U.S. leaderships, were all unquestionably informed of the systematic extermination of the European Jews well before the arrival of the German troops in Hungary.

There had existed other reasons, too, for suspecting Kasztner's wartime record; for instance, that he had facilitated the arrest, by Hungarian authorities, of two of the three Hungarian Jews from Palestine whom the British army had parachuted into the region. (One of the two actually survived.) It seems, however, that at worst, Kasztner was willing to surrender the parachutists in order to save the thousands of other Jews he had been protecting.

While there have been several books and many articles on Kasztner, Porter's is the first attempt in English to present a truly comprehensive account of a life that Porter sees as both heroic and tormented by false accusations. Porter, a well-known Canadian writer, editor and publisher, is of Hungarian background. All the more difficult, then, to understand why she allowed so many shortcomings to remain in her book. She writes well, with a sharp eye for the absurd, yet her many factual mistakes and the fictional character of some of her descriptions will do more than annoy the specialist: They are misleading. Furthermore, she shows a lack of understanding for the history of the region. And as for the references in the endnotes, they are so grievously incomplete as to be useless. What is one to do with a quote whose source is indicated merely as "Wisliceny's testimony at Nuremberg"?

Porter often makes clear whose memoirs or whose historical study has served as the basis of one or another of her chapters; the trouble is that no two sources agree on the same event or on individual responsibility for the extermination of more than half a million Hungarian Jews so near to the end of the war. Nearly every memoir writer - whether a Zionist, a former member of the Jewish Council, a Hungarian politician, military man or police officer, a diplomat from a neutral country or a German SS commander - takes credit for saving the lives of thousands, if not hundreds of thousand of Jews.

Conversely, nearly every writer blames his former colleagues for the failure of one or another rescue effort. Kasztner himself knew well how to play the boast-and-blame game, and so, incidentally, did Kurt Becher, one of Kasztner's major negotiating partners in the SS and a confidant of Heinrich Himmler. Unavoidably, some see Kasztner and Becher as heroes, others as scoundrels, their judgment often depending on whether they and their families had benefited from the Kasztner-Becher partnership.

Porter's is an attractive narrative of events, but precisely because of the running disputes over Kasztner, Becher and the other main participants, the author should have been less categorical in her favourable judgment of her hero. Consider only that Kasztner and several other Zionist leaders were exempted from wearing the Star of David; that they had been issued German passports by the Gestapo; that the SS sent one of Kasztner's fellows to neutral Turkey; that Kasztner himself made several SS-sponsored trips to Switzerland; and that he lunched, dined and gambled with SS officers.

It is also true, however, that Kasztner and other Zionists were arrested and beaten from time to time by Hungarian counter-intelligence officers anxious to know what the Zionists and the SS had been talking about. As for Eichmann, he often stated that he was prepared to crush Kasztner and company like the worms that all Jews were in his eyes. Small wonder, then, that historians continue to be uncertain about how to handle the memory of Kasztner.

Still, this reviewer - who was "there" during those insane months - tends to agree with Anna Porter that Kasztner did more good than harm, mainly because he dared to act when others were quiescent.
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