Kasztner's Train Read online

  With nothing more than words of comfort from the Allies, Warsaw fell to the German forces on September 28. German army recruits, “in the spirit of adventure,”27 murdered Jews in their homes, their synagogues, their villages, and on city streets. They forced them to march naked through village squares, beat them with bayonets and rifle butts, ordered old men to shave their beards, and hanged the reluctant from lampposts when they disobeyed. They shot hundreds of Jews into open trenches, not even bothering to cover the graves. The refugees told horrific stories of atrocities and starvation in the labor camps, where German and Austrian intellectuals had been left to die. By the spring of 1940 there were more than ten thousand refugees in Europe—and, increasingly, fewer offers of employment for them, less food, and little shelter.

  With each German victory—Norway and Denmark in April; Belgium and the Netherlands in May—the number of refugees grew, as did the desperation of those who had seen inside the German Reich.

  On May 10, Germany launched its attack on France. As Europe was overrun by the German armies, the fate of the Jews deteriorated, inexorably, one step at a time.

  ONCE THE IMMIGRATION quota for 1941 was filled, the British began their blockade of Palestine, fearing an all-out Arab attack in the Middle East. Several ships carrying illegal immigrants were apprehended by the Royal Navy. Conditions on others were so squalid that some people who had escaped Nazi persecution at home now opted for suicide by water. The refugees who managed to reach Palestine were herded into detention camps. Those with valid passports were sent back to their countries of origin, where they were later murdered by the Nazis. After arduous negotiations with the governor of Mauritius, a few thousand were sent there in late October 1940.

  On one ship, the Atlantic, a group of Jewish saboteurs, members of the Haganah,28 decided to disable the vessel in order to prevent the British from sending it out of Palestinian waters. Tragically, they caused an explosion that killed 260 people, many of them women and children. To make sure that would-be immigrants were aware of the dangers, the BBC reported the casualties, the deaths, and the redirecting of ships. Not wishing to incite British sympathy for the refugees, however, officials made sure that the details were only in broadcasts to the Balkans and eastern Europe.29

  In the summer of 1940, Hitler, still enjoying a friendly alliance with Stalin, gave the USSR a couple of adjoining pieces of Romania: Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. In the wake of these losses, Marshal Ion Antonescu, who was sharing power with the violently fascist Iron Guard, gained control of the Romanian government. Unaccountably, Antonescu's regime decided to blame the Jews for the territorial losses. The objective may have been to provide the Iron Guard with an incentive—they could now rob the Jews—to continue its support of Antonescu's faction in parliament. Inevitably, pogroms followed throughout the countryside.

  On December 29, the Luftwaffe carried out a massive raid on London.

  ON JUNE 14, 1940, the Eighteenth Army of the German Reich occupied the City of Light. Paris fell with barely a whimper, and the Nazi swastika was hoisted to the tip of the Eiffel Tower. In Új Kelet, Kasztner mourned the passing of an age—in fact, a whole civilization: “History likes to detach itself from its makers and run its own course,” he wrote. “Who could imagine that the rule of common sense, freedom and democracy, the heritage of the French Revolution, would be swallowed up by the victory of a regime that negates all these values?… Once Paris fell… a page has turned in the history of France, Europe and humanity at large.”

  Delighted with his successes, Hitler ordered an all-out attack on Britain to begin in July. The “Blitz,” an almost ceaseless bombardment of major British cities, lasted days at a time. The hunt for British ships in the North Atlantic, Hitler promised, would bring mastery of the oceans in only a few months. Germany, it seemed, was invincible.

  It was time for the Hungarians to press their case. With the stroke of a pen, Hitler accomplished what the League of Nations had refused: on August 30, 1940, under German-Italian arbitration, he returned the northern half of Transylvania to Hungary. In return, the government of Prime Minister Pál Teleki agreed that Hungary's ethnic Germans—the Swabians—would have special privileges, including the right to an independent relationship with the Reich. As icing for the ethnic German cake, he also agreed to the recruitment of twenty thousand Swabian men into the Waffen-SS, the SS's own regular army units.

  Hitler consolidated his power by signing the Tri-Power Pact with Italy and Japan on September 27, 1940. Hungary joined the pact on November 20. As Regent Horthy saw things, the pact did not oblige the country to join Germany's war. The only requirement was for members to render assistance if one of the other partners was attacked.30

  The Jews of Kolozsvár were jubilant to be Hungarians once more. Hungarian Jews had not suffered the kinds of random killings meted out to Jewish villagers in Romania, and there had been little Jewish emigration from Hungary. There, Jews still considered themselves part of the fabric of society. They were patriots. As the declaration of the Jewish Community of Pest expressed it in 1932: “Our course is the inseparably intertwined course of our Jewishness and our Hungarianness. This land, the Hungarian land, is our homeland. We watered this land with our blood and sweat and it is our useful work that brought to fruition the blessed fruits of legal equality. The storms of transitional times may shake or tear off the branches of the Hungarian tree of equality, but the tree itself cannot be toppled.”31

  Jewish ex-servicemen wore their First World War decorations with pride and remained devoted to Hungarian culture. Many Jews had become celebrated writers, artists, newspaper editors, doctors, lawyers, and intellectuals; they were busy rebuilding the economy, founding new industrial enterprises, developing exports and financial institutions. They took an active part in politics. Less than one-third of the Jews in Hungary considered themselves Orthodox, and most viewed themselves as Hungarians who, incidentally, professed the Jewish faith. The largest synagogue in Budapest had been built by the Neolog, or Conservative Jewish community. As some historians have claimed, even this nod to Judaism was superficial. The majority of Jews were indifferent to religion and merely observed traditions.

  Most Jews remained adamantly unconcerned about the rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary. In 1938, when the Hungarian prime minister announced a program of rearmament, he argued that Hungary's military weakness was due to Jewish influence. The “Jewish question” and the “Jewish problem” were debated and reviewed in the press, as were a variety of options and solutions. Gains in popular acceptance and legal status were rapidly being lost in the wake of imposed restrictions on the percentage of Jewish children eligible for higher education, limited entry into the professions, and capped participation in government. But Hungarian Jews were not worried. These laws, they believed, were only temporary; they would be repealed as soon as Hitler was gone.

  During the late 1930s, few thoughtful people took the extreme right seriously. Ferenc Szálasi, a fringe figure with a populist platform of land reform, incoherent patriotism, racist diatribes, anti-Trianon rages, and enthusiasm for the confiscation of Jewish property, was often heard at public rallies inciting his ignorant, uneducated followers to acts of vandalism against Jews. A former army major and practicing spiritualist, Szálasi advocated the creation of a “Hungarist” state encompassing the lands in the Carpathian basin all the way to the Adriatic. He actually believed that the Bible was originally written in some early form of Hungarian and that Jesus was a Magyar. In the “Carpathian-Danubian Great Fatherland,” the unifying language would be Hungarian. His Arrow Cross (Nyilaskeresztes, or Nyilas) Party adopted as its emblem the crossed-arrows design of an earlier Hungarian radical right-wing movement. The government declared his party illegal in February 1938, yet its ideas continued to attract Christian rightists of all parties. Thus, when his followers tossed hand grenades into the Dohány Street synagogue in Budapest, Szálasi was sentenced to two years in jail, but the others got off lightly.

 
The 1939 elections brought in a new government, about 20 percent of its members radical right-wingers. It immediately passed the Second Anti-Jewish Law, which severely limited the number of Jews who could work as doctors, engineers, publishers, lawyers, or journalists. Henceforth, the number of Jews in the professions had strictly to reflect their proportion in the population. The same law reduced to no more than 20 percent the proportion of Jews in financial and commercial enterprises, in theater, film, and the press, and in businesses employing more than ten people. Vocal opposition to these new measures from liberal parliamentarians, members of the Social Democratic Party, writers, and famous musicians such as Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók went unheeded.

  This new legislation, adopted in May 1939, defined Jews as a race, along the lines of the Nuremberg Laws; prohibited Jews who were not yet citizens from obtaining citizenship or holding government positions, and provided for the retirement of all Jewish members of the judiciary. It reestablished the original Numerus Clausus Act's restrictions in higher education. Article 239 provided for the formation of the labor service system that would eventually force more than 150,000 Jewish men into military service, without guns, uniforms, or rights, subjected to the whims of regular army commanders. And, once Hungary reclaimed its Transylvanian territories, all these laws applied to the Jews of Kolozsvár, too.

  By the end of 1940, most young Jewish men in Hungary were in labor battalions, and the young men of Kolozsvár were swiftly called up to join them. For a few months, Kasztner himself served in a labor battalion of mostly Jewish intellectuals, building military fortifications in northern Transylvania, but he managed to negotiate a special dispensation for medical reasons and returned to Kolozsvár, where he continued to work on behalf of the refugees. He found that bribery was still effective with officials, and he managed to win similar dispensations for other men. He obtained exemption cards for the sickly and for the sons of widows. He had connections on the black market, knew where to trade currencies, and kept abreast of the going rates for bribery. Few officials would turn down American dollars or Swiss francs. Local government functionaries, now responsible to Hungary, would still see Kasztner without an appointment. Secretaries to the new representatives treated him with deference. Typically, even after the authorities shut down all Jewish organizations in Kolozsvár, Kasztner was able to convince them that Zionist youth camps were actually sporting camps for kids about to emigrate—a grand idea for both the Hungarians and the Jews.

  In January 1941, members of the Iron Guard launched a rebellion to overthrow Antonescu's Romanian government. Its ranks swelled by patriotic fervor and the hope for easy loot, the guards hunted for Jews in villages and small towns. Thousands, without food or water, were herded into boxcars that were left on sidings for days. In Bucharest, human bodies were hung on meat hooks and displayed in the windows of butcher shops. And, after March 1941, German troops were stationed in Romania, preparing for the invasion of the Soviet Union.

  Still, although the new Hungarian laws affecting Transylvanian Jews were troubling, the Jewish community in Kolozsvár was relieved to be outside the jurisdiction of the Romanian mobs.

  PERHAPS IN preparation for some friendly overtures toward the Allies, Prime Minister Pál Teleki signed “a treaty of peace and eternal friendship” with Yugoslavia. Many Hungarians thought it a hopeful sign, given the bellicose saber rattling of military leaders fixated on the reacquisition of Croatia to fulfill the dream of the former Greater Hungary.

  Before assuming his lead role in the Hungarian political drama, Count Teleki had been a professor of geography at the University of Budapest, a nationalist, a member of the old-world gentry that had run the country for centuries. The joke doing the rounds in Kolozsvár cafés was that the old cartographer was so busy redrawing the map of Hungary and renaming its towns that he had no time for such basic matters of state as the natural flow of the rivers. The rivers, of course, had always run from Germany and from Russia. There was no hope for declaring a neutral position, and even less hope that Great Britain, the particular target of Teleki's fond aspirations, would support such a move.

  A mild-mannered anti-Semite (he claimed he could “in eight or nine cases out of ten recognize the Jew”), Teleki disliked the distinct traditions of eastern Jews, most of whom had come to Hungary over the previous two hundred years. He claimed to prefer the “assimilated,” patriotic Jews of the big cities and to be friendly toward them.

  On April 6, 1941, using Hungary as its base of operations, the German army invaded Yugoslavia. Admiral Horthy, the Regent, though somewhat ambivalent about the action and concerned that it could affect his relations with Britain and the United States, acquiesced. It was, however, an act Count Teleki could not countenance, given his recently signed non-aggression treaty with the Yugoslav government. He committed suicide. In his parting note to Horthy, he wrote, “We have allied ourselves with scoundrels.”

  The Hungarian army crossed the border and joined the German attack. The reward: eleven thousand square miles of Hungary's former territory.

  IN EARLY 1941, when the Hungarian government closed all Jewish newspapers, including Új Kelet, the thirty-six-year-old Kasztner decided to leave Kolozsvár and go to Budapest. Having lost his voice among his people, he was afraid he would also lose his status and influence. He needed a job, and he certainly did not want to accept support from his affluent father-in-law. Once he was established in the capital, they agreed, Bogyó would join him.

  (2)

  The Gathering Storm

  Probably in all 5703 years,1 Jews have hardly had a time

  as tragic and hopeless as the one which they are undergoing now.

  One of the most tragic factors about the situation is that while singled out for

  martyrdom and suffering by their enemies, they seem to have been

  forgotten by the nations which claim to fight for the cause of humanity.

  SENATOR WILLIAM LANGER,

  ADDRESSING THE UNITED STATES SENATE, OCTOBER 6, 1943

  IN THE EARLY spring of 1941, when Rezső Kasztner first went to Budapest, the city seemed deceptively friendly and rather grand. At this time of year the Danube is majestic; its swollen floods rush over the lower keys, and the sound of swirling waters overwhelms the chamber music coming from the musicians in the cafés along the Danube Corso, the main street along the Pest side of the river. Well-dressed couples strolled on the shaded boulevards, and Váci Street, which runs parallel with the Corso, was filled with shoppers. The women preened under their expensive parasols; the men pretended to read their newspapers. Flower vendors offered violets and carnations, the blossoms’ strong bouquet mingling with the river's fishy smells. The massive Parliament Building—the largest in the world when it opened in 1902—with its gothic spires and voluminous baroque base, was still imposing enough to make a young man's ambitions soar. On the Buda side of the great river, the hills were covered in the light greens and yellows of the acacias. At the top of the hill, the Royal Palace gleamed almost white after the heavy rains.

  The economy was booming, the theaters were playing Shakespeare, the stage at the Comedy Theater was taking risks with veiled references to the Nazis, and people were not afraid to laugh at Hitler jokes in revues at the jam-packed nightclubs. The opera season was in full swing with performances of Gounod's Faust and Mozart's Così fan Tutte and The Marriage of Figaro. The cafés and casinos were packed. Ordinary restaurants offered more interesting fare than even the best eateries in Kolozsvár. Here, it was easy to ignore the looming shadow of war. With the arrival of warm weather, people went boating on the Danube, the young filled the dance halls every night, and musicians played new, sad Hungarian love songs. At night, Pest lit up like a Christmas tree.

  Jews were still an accepted presence in the city. Anti-Semitism was there in the newspapers, in cartoons, and in quoted speeches from parliament, where there were regular discussions of “the Jewish problem,” but it was well known that the right-wing press was pa
id by the Germans for its virulent attacks. The Social Democratic Party's Népszava (People's Voice) and the Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation) provided more balanced reporting. Some accommodation was made after the latest round of anti-Jewish laws was announced, and they were more in name than in fact. Legal loopholes allowed most of the business empires to continue. Silent gentile partners were found for the country's ten largest industrial enterprises. All of them had been owned by Jews or, as in the case of most of the Weiss and Mauthner families, baptized Jews. The Weiss-Chorin-Kornfeld-Mauthner dynasties still controlled the Commercial Bank. Together with the Credit Bank, they held over 50 percent of Hungary's industrial production. The Weiss-Chorin group also owned the Weiss-Manfred Works industrial complex and had controlling shares in machinery, food production, armaments manufacture, and textiles.2 Ferenc Chorin, the head of the intermarried family group, was the most influential businessman in the country. The Regent himself, Admiral Horthy, had been wary of replacing the smart Jewish entrepreneurs who had helped rebuild Hungary after the war “with incompetent, vulgar and boorish elements… Such a project requires at least one full generation,”3 he told his Council of Ministers. While some of the ministers may have disagreed with the Regent's crude generalization about the arriviste gentile entrepreneurs who had been hoping to feast on the pickings from Jewish businesses, most of them agreed that the country's wealth had been in competent hands.