Kasztner's Train Read online

  Kasztner's fortunes gained a brighter patina when he married Fischer's daughter, Elizabeth. Fischer had allowed his spacious living room to serve as a meeting place for Kasztner and his group of young Zionists. Elizabeth—her nickname was Bogyó, or “Flower Bud”—used to hide behind the banister of the receiving rooms, waiting to see Rezső, who was ten years older. He would arrive in his overly formal suits late in the evening, long past her bedtime. In her lacy white nightgown, she had looked every bit the angel in her father's gold-framed Titian adorning the wall. Rezső felt a generation away from the fragile eighteen-year-old girl who became his bride in 1934. A pretty brunette, with milky skin and dark, curly hair that she wore stylishly long, Bogyó was quiet and shy in public. The fact that he had known her since she was a child would influence their relationship in the coming years. He was intensely protective of her, and she admired him unconditionally.

  Bogyó had their new apartment decorated with skill and taste, then settled into the social life of Kolozsvár. She had studied ancient history, and she left political science to Rezső. Yet she said once that not even after he had read Mein Kampf could Rezső imagine how the next few years would affect their lives—and Rezső was better informed than most people in Kolozsvár. When Hitler became chancellor, Mein Kampf sold over a million copies, but the worst that Kasztner predicted was that Hitler would demand that all Jews leave the German territories.

  Before the end of 1933, Jews in Germany were excluded from the universities and from most professions. On May 10, in the square next to the State Opera House in Berlin,16 a massive bonfire, accompanied by a long, hysterical speech by the future propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, incinerated thousands of books by Jewish authors deemed unfit for the new German ideology.

  The September 1935 Nuremberg Laws, designed to protect “German blood and German honor,” defined Jews as a race, not as adherents to a religion. Henceforth, a Jew was a person who had two or more Jewish grandparents. Jews were no longer German citizens, and marriages between Jews and Germans were expressly forbidden. The British and American press found the new laws barbaric, even though polite anti-Semitism was accepted in both countries.17 The international community raised no voice of protest. Nor did any outside government interfere when, in defiance of the rules set out in the Versailles Treaty, German law forbade Jews from participating in trade and industry. As Kasztner saw it, the plans set out in Mein Kampf were inexorably being implemented.

  By 1936 Hitler's anti-Jewish policies ensured that Jews in Germany had lost all their economic power. They were selling their businesses and real estate to non-Jews at ludicrously low prices. The World Jewish Congress reported that Germany wanted all its Jews to disappear. Almost a quarter of a million of them were already fleeing, exchanging their possessions for slips of paper that allowed them out of Germany and gave them permission to enter Palestine. In Palestine, the Hebrew-language newspapers talked of deals between Nazi officials and Jewish leaders that allowed German Jews to transfer at least a portion of their wealth if they left for Palestine. The notion that Germans would systematically murder innocent people seemed far-fetched. József Fischer maintained that a civilized nation like Germany, the home of Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, and Thomas Mann, would not, could not tolerate acts of murder. Germans had been one of the most cultured peoples of the world, he said, quite unlike those peasants to the east who habitually committed atrocities against their Jewish neighbors.

  Alarmingly, 1936 also marked the beginning of widespread riots in Palestine by Arabs protesting against the influx of Jews. By the 1930s, about 400,000 Jews were living in Palestine, and their number rose as the German persecutions escalated. In the face of Arab opposition, the British began to vacillate between appeasing the Arabs and increased Jewish immigration. When Rezső's brother Gyula went to Kolozsvár to visit his family in late 1936, the picture he painted of his new homeland was anything but the bucolic scene his mother had imagined.18 He had joined the Yishuv's underground army, the Haganah, as a small-arms instructor, to take part in the defense against Arab attacks on Jewish civilians. He anticipated that Britain would hesitate to live up to the promises of the Balfour Declaration.

  In 1937 the Iron Guard bombed a Jewish theater during a performance in the Romanian city of Temesvár (Timisoara), a few hours’ journey from Kolozsvár. There were anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev and Bucharest, where indulgent policemen looked on and chose not to interfere. The persecution of Jews continued in Poland and the Ukraine. By 1937, almost 400,000 Polish Jews had emigrated. Winston Churchill, in the British House of Commons, spoke of Europe “drifting steadily… towards some hideous catastrophe.”19

  On March 12, 1938, Germany occupied Austria in what Kolozsvár radio reported as a friendly, brotherly way, with cheering crowds welcoming the invading army. It was now the Austrian Jews’ turn to prepare for the Nazis’ expropriation policies. Over five hundred Jews committed suicide during the first few weeks of the Anschluss, the term by which the annexation of Austria became known. Új Kelet picked up the story from British newspapers about a family of six Jews in Vienna who, unable to face the fate of German Jews, chose instead to shoot themselves. Within a year, over 100,000 Austrian Jews had been “emigrated” by the well-oiled German state machinery. Some went to camps, some to Palestine, and others to the United States, Hungary, and other countries. Austrian villagers whose families had lived side by side with their Jewish neighbors for hundreds of years now proudly raised white flags declaring themselves Judenfrei—free of Jews.

  In Nuremberg, a new exhibition opened under the title The Eternal Jew. It denounced Jews as a disease, a virus that infected Aryan races, and equated Judaism with Bolshevism. A film of the same title, featuring Jews as plague-carrying rats, went into production.

  IN 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt bowed to public pressure in the United States and called for an international conference to facilitate the emigration of refugees from Nazi-controlled Germany and Austria. As a result, in July that year, representatives from thirty-two countries met for nine days at the luxurious Royal Hotel at Évian-les-Bains on Lake Geneva. Most of the delegates availed themselves of the excellent sporting facilities offered by the hotel as they hiked, fished, golfed, swam, and played tennis.

  Two weeks before the conference, sixteen thousand German Jews had been arrested and sent to concentration camps. The prison camps for Jews and those in opposition to the government were full: Dachau near Munich, Oranienburg near Berlin, Buchenwald near Weimar. In the Buchenwald camp a recorded voice announced over the loudspeaker every night: “Any Jew who wishes to hang himself is asked first to put a piece of paper in his mouth with his number on it, so that we may know who he is.” Yet, as all the finely dressed gentlemen grandly assembled at the Évian Conference in France made sympathetic speeches to each other about the Jewish problem, immigration quotas at home stayed in place, and not one country offered asylum to the Jews of Europe. Later, those nations claimed they had had no idea how terrible the situation had become.

  Canada had been reluctant even to attend the Évian Conference and, once there, committed to take only “certain classes of agriculturists.” In practice, that meant no Jews. Brazil would accept only those who could show certificates of baptism. Australia agreed to accept up to fifteen thousand Jewish immigrants over the following three years, but its delegate explained: “As we have no real racial problems, we are not desirous of importing one.” The British representative had similar concerns. Britain had already taken eight thousand, most of them children.

  Only three small countries—Holland, Denmark, and the Dominican Republic—offered limited temporary asylum. The conference participants examined a proposal for a “large-scale settlement” in British Guiana that could accommodate up to 5,000 carefully selected “young people” at a cost of £600,000. Rhodesia could make room for up to 500 families over a “period of years.” Ambassador Myron Taylor of the United States announced that his country's full quota of 27,730 Ge
rman and Austrian immigrants would be admitted. It was a ridiculously low number from the nation that had called the conference, but U.S. State Department officials later made sure that the rules were applied so rigorously that even this quota would not be met; fewer than 15,000 managed to gain entry. At that time, there were about 625,000 Jews under Nazi rule in Germany and Austria. When Germany invaded Poland, there would be another 3.5 million souls. There were more than 800,000 in Romania and hundreds of thousands in neighboring countries.

  Having accomplished nothing, the delegates at the Évian Conference passed a unanimous resolution that they were “not willing to undertake any obligations toward financing involuntary immigration.” For Kasztner, the conference confirmed his suspicions that, other than Palestine, there would be few safe havens for Europe's Jews. And even there, the doors were closing.

  AT THE END of September 1938, Hitler won another major victory without bloodshed. He convinced the British, French, and Italian leaders of Germany's right to the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia. The latter had mobilized its army after Hitler asserted this right, but a Munich gathering of “the great powers” accepted the reversion of Germany's agreements with the Czechs and its immediate occupation of the Sudetenland. The Czech government was not consulted and had little choice but to abide by the so-called Munich Agreement. On his return home, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain made his infamous announcement that he had achieved “peace with honour.”

  On November 9, a new wave of violence swept over Germany. During the night, 191 synagogues were burned down or destroyed with axes and hammers. Tombstones were uprooted, homes were smashed, shops were looted, and Jews found in the streets were beaten. The Nazis called it Kristallnacht—Crystal Night, or Night of Broken Glass. In response to this brutality, the British government organized a series of children's transports out of Germany. Almost ten thousand children were taken into temporary homes in Great Britain. Most of them would never see their parents again. Within three months, in one of his characteristically shrill speeches, Hitler declared that war would lead to the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”20

  On March 15, 1939, the German army occupied Bohemia and Moravia, the two western provinces of Czechoslovakia. In Hitler's view, this territory (including Czechoslovakia's capital, Prague) was part of the historical German Reich. Slovakia, which had been part of Hungary, thereupon seceded from Czechoslovakia and formed an independent nation under the protection of the Reich. It would now be governed by the fascist “People's Party,” split between the clerical, fascist, ultranationalist faction of Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, and the pro-Nazi group of Vojtech Tuka, who became the first prime minister. Both factions were enthusiastically and bitterly anti-Semitic.

  The partition of Czechoslovakia was celebrated by the Romanian and the Hungarian press as a way to end Germany's search for lebensraum, or “living space,” as outlined in Mein Kampf, providing new land and raw materials. Kasztner wrote in Új Kelet that he had foreseen it all: the acquisition of the Sudetenland was clearly outlined in Mein Kampf as a prerequisite to Hitler's vision of a vast, unified territory of German-speaking peoples. Hitler would be reaching out next to the more than 100,000 German speakers in Hungary. Meanwhile, like tossing a bone to a dog, he gave Hungary a chunk of Magyar-speaking Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. Perhaps in gratitude for the gift, the Hungarian government enacted a stronger version of its lapsed First Anti-Jewish Law.

  The Italians, encouraged by Hitler's success, invaded Albania. Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Italy whose ridiculous demeanor was fashioned after the rulers of ancient Rome, signed the pretentiously named Pact of Steel with Hitler in late May 1939.

  PALESTINE HAD been the one sure destination for Jews fleeing from Europe, but, as German enthusiasm for Jewish emigration grew in the early years of the Reich, so did Arab resistance to Jewish immigration. The sporadic riots that began in Palestine in 1936 soon culminated in a full-scale Arab rebellion. About 600 Jews and some British soldiers were killed, and thousands more were wounded. The British government, determined to protect its access to the Suez Canal, “the jugular vein of the Empire,”21 and to appease the Muslims in its colonies to the south, commissioned a White Paper on a new policy for Palestine. Its effect was to limit Jewish immigration to 12,000 people a year. Peace with the Arabs was of greater strategic importance to Britain than peace with the small number of Jews in Palestine or the powerless Jewish population of Europe. The British authorities soon amended the number to a maximum of 100,000 immigrants over five years, including refugees who arrived without appropriate entry certificates, but after 1941 the Arabs would have a veto over any further Jewish immigration.22

  It was a pitifully small number seen from where Kasztner kept watch over the rising tides of anti-Semitism in Europe. “Perfidious Albion,” he thundered in Új Kelet.23 In exchange for political expediency, Britain had closed the door to the only land still open to the Jews. On May 19, Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons and accused his own country of setting aside “solemn engagements” for “the sake of a quiet life.” Britain, he charged, had capitulated to threats from an Arab population that had been increasing at a rate faster than that of Jewish immigration. “We are now asked to submit to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and fascist propaganda.”

  Refugees from Poland, Slovakia, Austria, and other countries, with little more than the clothes on their backs, poured over the borders of both Hungary and Romania. There were no particular rules affecting the fleeing Jews, though some pedantic border guards insisted on hearing a recitation of the Lord's Prayer to test whether a person was a genuine refugee or just a Jew.

  Despite specific government orders forbidding any aid for refugees, Kasztner set up an information center in Kolozsvár. He solicited help from local charitable organizations, seeking temporary accommodation and collecting clothing and food, but his main concern was to provide Jewish refugees with a safe destination. As a Zionist leader, he sent telegrams to the Jewish Agency's Labor Zionist leadership in Tel Aviv, asking for help and funds to buy passages on ships and to pay bribes to local officials. The Jewish Agency's staff were much more sympathetic to refugees than their British-authorized administrative functions allowed, but they could not issue more Palestinian entry visas than the imposed limits, and these were never enough. The solution, they agreed, was to encourage illegal immigration. The Agency's Executive had already set up an office in Geneva to monitor the situation in Europe, and Chaim Barlas,24 head of its Immigration Department, moved to Switzerland to help with both legal and illegal immigrants. After the British White Paper, all Yishuv leaders supported illegal immigration, or aliya bet, as it became known.

  To get people out of danger in Europe, the Jewish Agency paid the going rate for passage on forty-five ships between 1937 and 1939.25 In 1939 alone, thirty ships, legal and illegal, sailed from Romanian Black Sea ports through the Bosphorus and on to Palestine.26

  Ever the brilliant fixer, Kasztner obtained exit visas from the Romanian government even as Britain stepped up its efforts to persuade officials not to allow the departure of the overcrowded boats. Kasztner was certain that the British would allow the refugees to land once they arrived in Haifa's harbor. Of course officials and shipowners would have to be bribed, and ships in the Romanian port of Constanta were still willing to sell passage to Istanbul and thence to Palestine.

  Refugees continued to set out down the Danube and from ports on the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. As it happened, several thousand German Jews ended up in Shanghai, where no one had thought of setting immigration limits.

  THE GERMAN-SOVIET Pact of August 1939 between Hitler and Russian leader Joseph Stalin turned out to be the prelude to the organized massacre of the Poles. Hitler cut off their escape route. It was a tricky situation for Hungary, now leaning on German might for its territorial and industrial ambitions but historically allied with Poland. After much h
and-wringing, the Hungarian government decided not to join in the attack on Poland and hoped that Hitler would be forgiving.

  On September 1, 1939, German armies attacked Poland. The Luftwaffe, the German air force, dumped bombs on both military and civilian targets. The grotesque carnage left behind on the battlefield proved to the rest of Europe that old-fashioned warfare had no chance against German steel. Thousands of Poles joined the armies of refugees flooding over the borders into Romania and Hungary.

  In defiance of the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary launched a massive re-armament program. The Romanians, expecting an attack, began to build new fortifications and increased their already significant armed presence on their western borders, including in the city of Kolozsvár. Their open hostility to the Hungarians in the region added fuel to the saber rattling on both sides. Hungary began to talk about liberating its fellow Magyars.

  Britain and France, obliged through their nonaggression treaties with Poland, declared war on Germany on Sunday, September 3. That day, close to midnight, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service reported that a German submarine, without warning or provocation, had torpedoed and sunk the British liner Athenia, which had been en route from Liverpool to Montreal. There were 1,400 passengers on board, and more than 100 perished. British parliamentarians were outraged, though the German naval commander later insisted it had been an innocent mistake. In fact, Germany was determined to disrupt British shipping lanes and had been building a range of submarines for that very purpose.

  On September 21, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Office, called all senior SS men in his special police force to a conference to tell them the process that had been decided on for eliminating the Polish Jews. Given the very large number of about 3.5 million, the German officers were to implement a staged plan, first to concentrate the Jews in designated areas in large cities, close to the railway lines; then to appoint Jewish councils made up of respected elders to ensure that German orders were followed, and finally to confiscate all Jewish belongings and show no mercy when inflicting pain.