Kasztner's Train Read online

  Rezső grew up in a two-story brick house in the southern part of the city. His father, Yitzhak, a prosperous merchant, spent most of his days in the local synagogue, where he studied the Bible and debated various parts of the Talmud with other Jewish scholars. Rezső's more business-minded mother, Helen, ran the store. She was a born trader, an educated woman who aspired to a good life for her sons. Although she was religious, she decided to send all three of her boys to general high schools, where the curriculum was broad and included the study of languages. She recognized early that her youngest had the sharp mind, quick wit, and imagination to become more than a merchant. He was a slender boy with long, wavy, dark hair, the charming good looks of his mother, and his father's gift for intense concentration. By the time Rezső graduated from high school he spoke five languages—Hungarian, Romanian, French, German, and Latin.1

  Helen Kasztner decided that Rezső would study to be a lawyer, but his passion was politics. He argued with his parents about the nature of Jewish privileges in Hungary, and he insisted that the Hungarian aristocracy, whose fancy carriages still pranced up and down Kolozsvár's streets, tolerated Jews only for their support against the other minorities in the country.2 In 1900, non-Magyar speakers, including the Romanians of Transylvania, were 46 percent of the population. Jews helped to balance the vote in favor of the Magyar ruling aristocracy. The Kasztner family, along with most of the other Jews in the country, ignored the mild, fastidious, often jocular anti-Semitism of the ruling classes as well as the grimmer resentments of the disenfranchised poor. When others talked of the ancient bond between the Magyars and the Jews of Hungary, Rezső scoffed. The bond would last only so long as it was useful, he said. The rancor would remain.

  Like most of the fifteen thousand Jews of Kolozsvár, Helen Kasztner had been a supporter of the 1914–18 war effort, a proud Hungarian citizen. There had never been any doubt that the Jews would volunteer for the army. They fought with uncommon valor by the side of other Hungarians, allied with the Kaiser's Germany. Even the archdukes Joseph and Francis had expressed their appreciation to their Jewish subjects. There were Jewish majors and colonels and a Jewish general. The National Rabbinical Association had called on its members to offer up prayers for an early victory. Rabbis gave their blessings to all those who fought, and they reminded their congregations of their patriotic duty to support the war effort. Rezső's father, who had studied at the Bratislava yeshiva, or religious school, volunteered for the Hungarian army, where he served as a chaplain.

  Many Hungarian intellectuals argued that the war had been the Hapsburgs’ own personal conflict, that the archdukes had dragged Hungary along, and that it was all about territory. Archduke Ferdinand's untimely death at the hands of a Hapsburg-hating Serb in 1914, while unfortunate, hardly seemed a clear cause for war.

  Austria-Hungary lost the war, and the House of Hapsburg had to give up its centuries-old empire. Charles, the last Hapsburg emperor-king, abdicated, and both Austria and Hungary declared themselves republics. Adding to Hungary's woes, returning troops in 1919 were faced with a Communist republic that brought in the government of Béla Kun—a mob of vitriolic Communist reformers who confiscated property, abolished entitlements, nationalized industry, and hanged or shot real and imagined opponents. Kun imposed a range of reforms that echoed those of the Soviet commissars. After just four months (from March 21 to July 30, 1919), the Kun era ended with the arrival—on horseback—of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the former commander in chief of the unimpressive Austro-Hungarian fleet. The Hungarian army of stragglers that accompanied him was supported by a contingent of Romanians.

  For Hungary, the war ended with the June 1920 Treaty of Trianon, a sideshow to the grand Treaty of Versailles of 1919. Hungary was carved up by the victorious Allies, who donated two-thirds of its historic territory and three-fifths of its population to the surrounding countries. The package of punishments included the granting of Transylvania to the Romanians, who had been ably represented at the bargaining table by a brilliant, beautiful, and promiscuous queen, King Ferdinand's wife, Marie.3 When all was done, Romania alone had gained more territory than was left of Hungary.

  By the stroke of a pen, Transylvania became part of Romania, and Kolozsvár was now Cluj. To the Hungarians, the diminution of the country—the loss of Felvidék, or Upper Province, to the new republic of Czechoslovakia, of the Bácska area in the south to Yugoslavia, and of northern Transylvania to the Romanians—was unthinkable and unbearable. No other country had forfeited in such a spectacular way. The sheer magnitude of the loss haunted Hungarians for the rest of the twentieth century. The additional 180 million crowns in war reparations barely registered in the minds of the thousands who demonstrated in rage and disbelief throughout Hungary. Their government appealed in vain to the newly minted League of Nations, to the winning nations of Britain, France, and the United States, and to the neutral powers; it gained no sympathy. Horthy declared himself Regent and promised to return Hungary to its former size. In response, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania signed mutual defense treaties in case the Regent was serious about his intentions.

  The postwar years were a desperate time for the poor: the peasants suffered extreme hardships, factory workers were forced to put in long hours, the homeless knew nothing but misery, and they all lacked food. In these terrible conditions, Horthy's new government was relieved to hit upon the perfect scapegoat for the country's ills—the Jews. With the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany and throughout eastern Europe, the Jews were a natural target. In Lithuania, Poland, and the Ukraine, there were murderous rampages against Jews. In Germany, Julius Streicher launched the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer (The Stormer) in 1923 with the headline, “The Jews Are Our Misfortune.”4 The First Anti-Jewish Law, the Numerus Clausus Act, was introduced in Hungary as early as 1920, the first anti-Semitic legislation in twentieth-century Europe, and the fourteen-year-old Rezső saw it as an indication of the times. It limited the number of Jews at universities to the same small proportion, 6 percent, that they represented in the population at large. The “closed number” law proved to be only a mild rebuff to the success of Jewish students and was allowed to lapse eight years later, but many saw it as a harbinger of tougher laws to come.

  Rezső declared himself a Zionist at age fifteen. For him, it was a romantic rather than a political notion. “Zion” was the biblical name of ancient Jerusalem, where King David had built the fortified temple that was later destroyed by the Romans. The fifteenth-century poet Yehuda Halevi was the first to apply the term to the people of the Diaspora. The idea that the Jews would, one day, return to their ancient lands in Palestine attracted Rezső even before he discovered the writings of Theodor Herzl. The Hungarian-born Herzl wrote of the ingrained, centuries-old anti-Semitism among Europeans and declared that he understood the reasons for it. Although Jews had endeavored to blend themselves into their surrounding communities while preserving the faith of their forefathers, they had not, he said, been permitted to do so. They had continued to be viewed as “aliens,” as strangers. “Old prejudices against us lie deep… He who would have proof needs only to listen to the people where they speak with frankness… My happier co-religionists will not believe me till Jew-baiting teaches them the truth.” Herzl in 1896 foretold the disasters of National Socialism under Adolf Hitler and warned his fellow Jews to found their own homeland before it was too late.5

  In 1919, Britain was mandated by the League of Nations to administer and thus control Palestine. In 1920, following another resolution of the League, the British government agreed to the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in the mandate territory, as spelled out in the Balfour Declaration. The Yishuv, as the Jews already living in Palestine called themselves, would now be represented to both the British authorities and the rest of the world by a new organization, the Jewish Agency, which was composed of the various Zionist factions in the pre-1930s World Zionist Organization.

  Rezső's older brother Gyula, whose
enthusiasm for the land of Zion had inspired young Rezső, emigrated to Palestine in 1924 to work on a kibbutz in the Valley of Jezre’el. Eighteen-year-old Rezső would have accompanied him, but he had not yet finished high school. Instead, he joined a youth group, Barissia, whose Zionist student members were training to become citizens of Eretz Israel, the new Jewish homeland that would rise from the old in Palestine. Within a year, he emerged as the group's leader. For the evening sessions around the campfire, he prepared wildly impassioned speeches about the new promised land. The training was not much different from that familiar to Boy Scouts everywhere; they learned to be comfortable in the uncomfortable outdoors and, in addition, picked up a few Hebrew songs along with some scattered knowledge of Jewish history and basic agricultural techniques. In the new land there wouldn’t be room for merchants or, for that matter, lawyers. Rezső was already a fine writer and a great debater. Even before he entered law school, he wrote articles for the Hungarian-language, Kolozsvár-based Jewish newspaper Új Kelet (New East), reporting on the development of British policies in Palestine.

  Rezső was twenty-two when his father died. It was a perfect death for a religious man: Yitzhak died as he read the Torah in the synagogue on the seventh day of Passover.6 But for Rezső it meant he had to put off any ideas about emigrating. His mother needed him at home.

  UNFORTUNATELY FOR the Jews of Hungary, the only country willing to listen to the Hungarians’ grief over their territorial losses was the other big loser under the Treaty of Versailles: Germany. Throughout the 1930s, as Hungary began to develop closer ties with Germany, discriminatory legislation against certain groups within Germany grew apace. In January 1933 Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist Party, or Nazi Party, was named chancellor by the addle-brained president of Germany, Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) Paul von Hindenburg. In April, Hitler's National Socialists took over the Prussian Secret Police to establish the Secret State Police (the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo) and assumed the powers to arrest, interrogate, and imprison all those they considered enemies, without the benefit of legal process. Violent attacks on Jews, Communists, and rival right-wing party members were becoming the norm in German cities.

  Rezső Kasztner had read Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in its first German edition, long before it was published in Romanian. German newspapers, most of which were regularly available in Kolozsvár, hailed it as the brilliant work of a young genius who had a clear-eyed view of how best to solve Germany's postwar problems. Kasztner found it to be the incoherent ranting of a poorly educated man, full of hate and ambition. Hitler's one consistent thought was his identification of “the Jew” as the chief enemy of his herrenvolk, the Aryan master race. Like David BenGurion,7 the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive in Palestine, Kasztner realized that if Hitler came to power, war was inevitable, and that the Jewish people would bear the burden of much of Hitler's war.

  To anticipate where the Hungarians would stand, all he had to do was listen to the Magyars in Kolozsvár's coffeehouses along the renamed streets, read their imported newspapers, and tune in to their radio. The rallying cry of Nem, nem, soha, “No, no, never,” had become the mantra of Hungarian politicians, who vowed never to accept the postwar settlement. Maps of historical Hungary, with its superimposed, dramatically reduced post-Trianon borders, decorated the walls in Hungarian schools. Even the youngest children were taught patriotic poems and songs about the return of the old territories. If Hitler went to war, Kasztner predicted in Új Kelet, Hungary would become Germany's ally, and Transylvania's Romanian adventure would prove short-lived.

  After he graduated from law school, Kasztner joined the staff of Új Kelet. He was happy to start as a sports reporter, so long as he could write political commentary as well. He wrote about the Kun era's likely effects on Hungarian politics. Kun was from Kolozsvár, and some of his relatives still lived in the city. Unfortunately for all the Jews of Hungary, Béla Kun and many of his associates had been Jews. Traditional anti-Semites saw the whole Kun interregnum as a failed Jewish plot. The fact that many of Kun's victims had been wealthy Jews made no difference to those seeking someone to blame for the Communists’ few months in power.

  Kasztner was hired as an assistant to Dr. József Fischer,8 a member of parliament, lawyer, and president of the Jewish Community of Kolozsvár. Fischer was one of the wealthiest citizens of the city. He was among the first to own a car; his family lived in a spacious villa with a range of housekeeping staff; he supported numerous charitable and cultural institutions, and, as a leading member of the National Jewish Party, he represented Romania's 700,000 Jews in Bucharest. A tall, patrician man with pale-blue eyes and a high forehead, he wore suits made to measure in Berlin or Budapest, hand-stitched shirts, and monogrammed gold cuff links. Fischer was respected in both Romanian and Hungarian society. He had noticed young Rezső Kasztner's articles in Új Kelet and encouraged him to continue his writing, even if his opinions drew few friends. Not only was Kasztner smarter and better read than others, but he also let everyone know that he was superior in wit and knowledge.

  Fischer may have been the only other person whose intelligence the young man respected. Kasztner often dismissed people as stupid, incompetent, or intellectually cowardly. He was intolerant of his critics. “He had no sense of other people's sensitivities, or he didn’t care whether he alienated his friends,” said Dezsö Hermann, who went to law school with Rezső and, despite their ongoing battles, remained a lifelong friend.9 Rezső's sarcastic retorts to those who disagreed with his views about Hungarian feudalism and the old ways were famous even at the University of Prague,10 where his mother sent him to finish his studies. “He was a tough man to argue with,” Hermann said. “Back then, in Kolozsvár, Jews kept their heads down. Not Rezső.” Yet he was one of the few who could deal with the authorities as an equal.11

  In local government, Kasztner was remembered as a “fixer,” a man others trusted to solve their problems, but he was too smart to be much loved even by those he had helped. Still, he was sought out. The Jews of Kolozsvár needed someone like Kasztner to help them survive the difficult years after Transylvania was ceded to the Romanians. They and their ancestors had supported the Hungarians through several centuries. Now they were a minority within the Magyar-speaking minority. They endured not only the wild, enthusiastic nationalism of the newly jubilant Romanians but also the occasional virulent bouts of anti-Semitism by the Iron Guard, a fringe group of fascists whose main objective was to acquire Jewish property and destroy the Jewish presence in Romania.

  Kasztner managed to keep in touch with bureaucrats and gentile functionaries of all political stripes. He knew whom to bribe and how much to offer, whom to flatter and how. He succeeded in securing interviews with leading politicians. Much to the consternation of his readers in Kolozsvár, he interviewed members of the Iron Guard, including dedicated anti-Semites who were keen to share their ideas. Even then, he thought it was wise to know the enemy.12 In addition to his other languages, he spoke the form of courtly Romanian developed under Hapsburg rule that endowed all men in authority with grandiose titles and employed an antiquated form of address that ordinary folk had never learned.

  People consulted Kasztner about small problems, such as not being paid for goods delivered, and large problems, such as the time in 1938 when he persuaded a magistrate to release an elderly Jew charged with attacking two policemen. The beefy gendarmes couldn’t refrain from laughing as they told their tale. The Jew, they said, had lunged at them with his cane. They failed to mention that they had pushed his wife off the sidewalk. Kasztner asked to have his client admitted to the courtroom. When the magistrate saw the frail old man, he knew the score. Yet, this being Romania in the thirties, everyone went on pretending. Kasztner knew how to play this game: he paid off the gendarmes, the charges were dropped, and the old man and his wife went home.13

  Kasztner was outspoken, brash, unafraid. He could be seen striding toward government offices and in
to police headquarters, a pale, muscular, slender man, his dark hair swept back, his well-tailored black suit stark even during the summer heat, his tie loosened over his white shirt, the collar perfectly starched. He was confident, in a hurry, his briefcase casually swinging from one hand, the other ready to wave to all his acquaintances.

  Given his quick rise in society, it was surprising that Kasztner did not leave behind his Zionism. For a Kolozsvár (Cluj) Jewish intellectual in the 1920s and ’30s, it was unfashionable to be a Zionist. The idea of emigrating to Palestine, to live on communal farms and work in hardscrabble fields barely retrieved from the desert, did not appeal to people who had been part of Europe for centuries. Jews enjoyed public life, commerce, banking, the arts and sciences; some of them were noted writers, humorists, historians. They were simply not cut out for farming. Nor was Zionism popular among the religious Jews, who often sought Kasztner's assistance when dealing with the authorities. Most of them, like Rezső's father, did not believe Jews should return to their homeland until the Messiah came.

  When the opportunity arose to join one of the Palestinian Jewish political parties planning to form a government once a new Jewish state was established, Kasztner chose the Ihud14 (later known as the Mapai, or Labor Party). Its leaders, David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, were renowned statesmen who had traveled in Europe and spoken at large gatherings of Zionists. József Fischer had met Ben-Gurion and sent financial support for the agricultural efforts near Haifa. He had also written to Weizmann,15 who headed the World Zionist Organization office in London, reporting on the situation of the Jews in Romania. Fischer encouraged Kasztner to be active in the politics of the Yishuv without losing interest in the politics of Romania and Hungary.