Kasztner's Train Read online

  KASZTNER's TRAIN

  KASZTNER's TRAIN

  The True Story of RezsŐ Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust

  ANNA PORTER

  Copyright © 2007 by Anna Porter

  07 08 09 10 11 5 4 3 2 1

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

  without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from

  The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright

  license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

  2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201

  Vancouver, British Columbia

  Canada V5T 4S7

  www.douglas-mcintyre.com

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Porter, Anna

  Kasztner's train: the true story of Rezső Kasztner, unknown

  hero of the holocaust / Anna Porter.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-55365-222-9

  1. Kasztner, Rezső Rudolf, 1906–1957.

  2. World War, 1939–1945—Jews—Rescue—Hungary.

  3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Hungary. 4. Journalists—Hungary—Biography.

  5. Lawyers—Hungary—Biography. I. Title.

  D804.6.P67 2007 940.53’1835092 C2007-904392-5

  Editing by Rosemary Shipton

  Copy editing by Wendy Fitzgibbons

  Jacket design by Peter Cocking

  Text design by Jessica Sullivan

  Map by C. Stuart Daniel/Starshell Maps

  Every reasonable effort has been made to locate and acknowledge

  the owners of copyrighted material reproduced in this volume.

  The publishers welcome any information regarding errors or omissions.

  Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens

  Printed on acid-free paper that is forest friendly (100% post-consumer

  recycled paper) and has been processed chlorine free.

  We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the

  Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council,

  the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit,

  and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry

  Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.

  This book is dedicated to the survivors

  and the victims of the Holocaust in Hungary

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  [ PART ONE ]

  THE JEWISH QUESTION

  1 ] Desperately Seeking Palestine

  2 ] The Gathering Storm

  3 ] A Question of Honor, Law, and Justice

  4 ] The Politics of Genocide

  5 ] Budapest: The Beginning of the End

  [ PART TWO ]

  THE KINGDOM OF THE NIGHT

  6 ] The Occupation

  7 ] Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann

  8 ] In the Anteroom of Hell

  9 ] Bargaining with the Devil

  10 ] The Auschwitz Protocols

  11 ] The Reichsführer's Most Obedient Servant

  12 ] Mission to Istanbul

  13 ] A Million Jews for Sale

  14 ] A Game of Roulette for Human Lives

  15 ] Rolling the Dice

  16 ] Blessings from Heaven

  17 ] Strasshof: The Jews on Ice

  18 ] The Last Train

  19 ] The Memories of Erwin Schaeffer

  [ PART THREE ]

  THE HIGHWAY OF DEATH

  20 ] The Journey

  21 ] The End of the Great Plan

  22 ] Still Trading in Lives

  23 ] The Bridge at Saint Margarethen

  24 ] The End of Summer

  25 ] The Dying Days of Budapest

  26 ] In the Shadow of the Third Reich's Final Days

  27 ] Budapest in the Throes of Liberation

  28 ] Nazi Gold

  [ PART FOUR ]

  DEATH WITH HONOR

  29 ] In Search of a Life

  30 ] The Jews of the Exile

  31 ] The Prince of Darkness Is a Gentleman

  32 ] Letters to Friends in the Mizrachi

  33 ] The Price of a Man's Soul

  34 ] The Consequences

  35 ] The Aftermath

  36 ] The Banality of Evil

  37 ] Other Lives

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  KASZTNER's TRAIN

  Preface

  In the summer of 1944 in wartime Budapest,

  two men, a Nazi and a Jew, sat negotiating through a fog of cigarette smoke.

  One was notorious: Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust.

  The other was less well known: A Hungarian lawyer

  and journalist called Rudolf [Rezső] Kasztner… The topic of their

  discussion was a train to be filled with Jews.

  ADAM LEBOR, “EICHMANN's LIST: A PACT WITH THE DEVIL,”

  THE INDEPENDENT, AUGUST 23, 2000

  THE TRAIN WOULD CARRY 1,684 passengers out of German-occupied wartime Hungary. They were a motley group: industrialists, intellectuals, and Orthodox rabbis, Zionists and anti-Zionists, Polish and Slovak refugees from pogroms and concentration camps, the oldest eighty-five, the youngest a month old. The wealthy Jews of Budapest paid an average of us$1,500 for each family member to be included; the poor paid nothing. The selection process was arduous. Its memory is deeply distressing to those whose relatives did not survive the Holocaust.

  It was a deal that would haunt Rezső Kasztner to the end of his life.

  There were others he saved, too. In addition to those on the train, Kasztner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to keep twenty thousand Hungarian Jews alive—Eichmann called them “Kasztner's Jews” or “the Jews on ice”—for a deposit of approximately $100 a head. And in the final weeks of the war, Kasztner traveled to several concentration camps with SS Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Andreas Becher to try to prevent the murder of the surviving prisoners.

  As he fought fearlessly for Jewish lives during the Holocaust, Kasztner met many of the now recognized heroes of wartime Europe, including Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and Carl Lutz. But his most fateful meetings were with Becher, Eichmann, and members of the SS Sonderkommando, whose chief purpose was to rob and murder all the Jews of Europe. These connections with high-ranking Nazis were to cost him his own life—and, for decades, his reputation too.

  Introduction

  I FIRST HEARD OF Rezső Kasztner in 1999 from Peter Munk, a Canadian businessman-entrepreneur. Munk's energy and charm are legendary, as are his successful business ventures. And he owes his life to Rezső Kasztner.

  We sat in a dark room with leather furniture, Persian rugs, heavy silk drapes, paintings that looked old, and bronze statuettes that looked recent. There were some faded black-and-white prints on a low-slung coffee table. I noticed pictures of a five-story, white-painted brick house, a shaded garden with puffball flowers, and a small, slanting lawn. Then a picture of his grandfather, Gabriel Munk, in the garden, hand resting on a brass-handled walking cane, dressed in a three-piece suit, with a gold watch-chain and a white kerchief neatly triangled out of his top jacket pocket. Next, Peter's father, also with felt hat and walking cane, and Peter's stepmother—“a great beauty,” as Peter said. Her face half in shadow, her chin raised, her short, flared dress a fashion statement of the early forties, she seems to be flirting with the photographer.

  “I’ve been sorting some boxes,” Peter sai
d, almost apologetically. “I don’t think about the past much, but we have to pack some of these old things…” He picked up another photograph, showing “the most elegant man I have ever known.” In this picture Grandfather Gabriel is framed by an ornate doorway. He stands next to a slight woman whose hand rests on his forearm.

  Gabriel Munk had purchased seats on the last train from Budapest transporting Jews not destined for the death camps. The train left Budapest on July 1, 1944, three and a half months after the German occupation of Hungary, two and a half months after the first deportations of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau.1

  Munk showed me a photograph of gray and white people standing around a railway carriage. They seem aimless, as people often do when they are waiting. Some are lining up at metal steps, and one woman in a light, two-piece suit with padded shoulders and high-heeled shoes is looking back at the camera. A man in a long, belted raincoat is helping her up with one hand while holding her small valise in the other. In the background stands a German soldier, his rifle at ease. The woman is smiling.

  It seems a very ordinary picture, except that this photograph was taken in the summer of 1944, at a time when Hungarian Jews were brutalized, robbed, beaten, and shot, and when many witnessed the slaughter of their children. It was the summer when 437,402 of them were packed into cattle cars destined for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most of them were murdered.2 At the time the photo was taken, Peter Munk's family was boarding a train toward the west.

  It was Kasztner's train.

  LIKE PETER MUNK, I was born in Budapest. My early education about the war years, however, was somewhat different from his. Although mine was full of detail about the Soviet “liberation” of the country in 1945, it contained few references to the victims of the Hungarian Holocaust. Searching for Rezső Kasztner, I read all the books I could find that dealt with the years leading up to the war.

  I met Erwin Schaeffer, Munk's business associate in Budapest, who took me to the Great Synagogue on Dohány Street and told me the story of how his father had been thrown off the Kasztner train and murdered by the Arrow Cross Party's thugs, the Hungarian Nazis who assumed power in October 1944. I visited libraries and archives in Budapest, New York, Washington, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. I read everything I could find about Kasztner, only to become more confused by the irreconcilably different versions of him presented in memoirs, documents, letters, and testimonials. Adolf Eichmann described him as “an ice-cold lawyer” and talked of their mutual deals. Hansi Brand, Kasztner's lover, spoke of a “passionate believer in human values.” Tomy Lapid, a former colleague, remembers his extraordinary facility with words and his devastating wit. American script-writer Ben Hecht saw him as a smug Nazi collaborator. Thousands owe their lives to Kasztner. But thousands still decry his “deal with the devil.”

  I listened to the stories of survivors. Some still remembered Rezső Kasztner, the brilliant raconteur, the idealistic Zionist, the humanist, the writer, the politician, the resourceful negotiator, the inveterate gambler, the romantic, the sarcastic critic of everyone less intelligent and less well informed. I met his daughter, Zsuzsi, who adored her father's warmth and humor. I had tea with Sári Reuveni, who said Kasztner could not have dealt with Eichmann without the support of Hansi Brand. “She was his soul,” she mused, his partner in saving lives, his lover during the months of the German occupation of Hungary. I met Hansi's son Dani in Tel Aviv. He talked about his strong, spirited mother, who had hidden him during the siege of Budapest. He was proud of her fearlessness, her extraordinary empathy for others. We did not talk about Hansi's affair with Rezső.

  In New York, Egon Mayer, a director at the Center for Jewish Studies at the City University of New York, collected a massive archive of Kasztner information. He had a special interest in the train: his parents were on it, and he was born six weeks after its second detachment of passengers arrived in Switzerland. It was Mayer who first told me that Kasztner had supplied the funds to feed and clothe Oskar Schindler's Jews.3

  Schindler, I discovered, had gone to Budapest in 1942 to meet Kasztner. Both men had powerful egos; both believed they were the only ones who could outwit the Nazis. Schindler, the big-boned, rough-talking Sudeten German industrialist, and Kasztner, the soft-spoken Jewish intellectual, had not liked each other, but they shared a passionate belief that one man could make a difference. During subsequent meetings, exchanging letters, cash, and information, Schindler grew to admire Kasztner: “He was utterly fearless,” he wrote in a postwar memoir, and “his actions remain unsurpassed.”4

  After the war, Schindler was recognized as a Righteous Gentile, supported by grateful survivors, celebrated, and lionized. Kasztner, in contrast, became a symbol of collaboration with the enemy.

  The deals Kasztner made with the SS (Schutzstaffel), the Nazi Party's protection and security service, raise questions about moral choices, courage in dangerous circumstances, the nature of compromise and collaboration, and how far an individual should go to save other people. These questions are as valid now as they were in the 1940s. They continue to haunt the world today.

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  This is a work of popular history. I have done my best to be accurate but have allowed myself the leeway to reconstruct scenes and dialogue based on the diaries, notes, taped interviews, courtroom testimonies, pretrial interrogations, and memoirs—both written and oral—of the participants in Hungarian, English, German, and Hebrew. My primary sources are listed in the bibliography. Where I have attributed emotions or thoughts to people, I based these on published and unpublished sources. I interviewed more than seventy-five people—those who remembered most clearly are credited in the text, notes, and acknowledgments. Discerning the truth is never an exact science when relying on people's memories, but I have done my best to cross-reference wherever possible, and only when convinced of the credibility of the testimony did I use it. Is it possible that some of my judgments or reconstructions are mistaken? Of course. But I do not consider anything in this book to be simply speculative.

  After all the reading, listening, and searching, I feel I have discovered the real Rezső Kasztner—an extraordinary man who played a high-stakes game of roulette with the devil. And won. In the only game he cared about, that of saving human lives, he achieved more in his way than any other individual in Nazi-occupied Europe.

  In the end, all he lost was his own life. Kasztner would have considered that a small price to pay.

  [ PART ONE ]

  THE JEWISH QUESTION

  All that is necessary for the

  triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

  EDMUND BURKE1

  Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name

  of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency… We should

  there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization

  as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact

  with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence… We should form

  a guard of honor about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfillment of this duty with

  our existence. This guard of honor would be the great symbol of the

  solution of the Jewish question after eighteen centuries of Jewish suffering.

  THEODOR HERZL, THE JEWISH STATE, 1896

  (1)

  Desperately Seeking Palestine

  The ideals which characterized the great era

  of the individual, such as humanism, justice, freedom and rationalism,

  will give way to other slogans… and Judaism, which

  has been attached to these ideals, will move on its road of agony.

  REZSŐ KASZTNER, ÚJ KELET, JUNE 28, 1940

  REZSŐ KASZTNER was born in 1906, in Kolozsvár, Hungary—soon to be Cluj, Romania, as the aftermath of the First World War divided and redivided the borderlands of the once powerful and widespread Austro-Hungarian Empire. This part o
f Transylvania had belonged, variously, to Romans, Saxons, Magyars (as Hungarians call themselves), and Romanians. Mindful of the surrounding history and their own Jewish ancestors, Rezső's parents blessed him with three names right from the start: Rudolf, with a nod to the German Saxons; Rezső, for the Magyars, and Israel, the name the biblical Jacob received when he fought the Dark Angel and won. It was a prophetic name for Rezső Kasztner, though he would have little time to savor his victory.

  Kolozsvár, the largest city in Transylvania, has always had grand cultural and historical pretensions. In the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains that form Hungary's ancient protective border, Kolozsvár was cosmopolitan, its wealthy merchants reaching out east and west to fill the shops with Oriental silks and carpets, French and English antiques and formal wear, Belgian lace, Indian spices, and handcrafted musical instruments from Russia. Its grand avenues, shaded by plane trees, featured the yellow stone houses of the rich. Its main square boasted the largest church in Transylvania. Built in the fourteenth century, the church's massive walls were used to display the flags of the local Catholic nobility who had paid for its construction. Outside, there was an imposing statue of Hungary's last Magyar king, Mátyás, his bronze horse trampling on Turkish flags, celebrating his fifteenth-century victory over the invading Turks. Mátyás and his Black Knights were the embodiment of Magyar romantic pride, and the city of Kolozsvár was King Mátyás's birthplace.