Kasztner's Train Page 5

  Although Protestant bishop László Ravasz's resounding radio sermons were heard all over the country on Sunday mornings, Kasztner found that they seemed less threatening here than in Kolozsvár. When the good pastor reached the inevitable anti-Semitic accusations in his lengthy orations, the big city did not appear to listen. Ravasz's obsession with the Jews killing Christ seemed more symbolic here than real. Perhaps because Ravasz was from Transylvania, he was taken more seriously there.

  Budapest was a cosmopolitan city. Kasztner was sure it would provide the assistance he sought for the refugees who were streaming over the borders. His letters home expressed guarded optimism about the possibility of employment and the new life that Bogyó would join him to share.

  He rented a small, two-room flat in a pension on Váci Street near Vörösmarty Square and the legendary Gerbeaud Restaurant. The pension was in a lovely old building: the guest lounge had well-worn Turkish carpets, soft armchairs, and on the walls romantic paintings of prettified landscapes. In the large communal dining room, a gourmet cook served hearty Hungarian and German meals on white linen tablecloths that were changed every day. There was a cards room for gin rummy and bridge in the evenings, and the pension's owner, Elizabeth Zahler, played the piano and sang popular love songs on some evenings. She was a beautiful woman, an occasional actress, a recent divorcée. Her pretty teenage daughter, Eva, danced for the guests when she was in the mood. Rezső, who had an eye for attractive women, always listened to the singing with rapt attention.4

  Eva Berg (née Zahler) remembers that her mother found Rezső fascinating. Here was a well-read, highly educated man who seemed delighted with Elizabeth's company and eager to tell her about politics and even to share his interest in Zionism, a subject about which she knew little. Elizabeth was impressed by his broad-ranging knowledge of Hitler's record and his predictions for the future of European Jewry. Budapest, he believed, would remain the safest place in eastern Europe, and he repeated what he had been saying in Kolozsvár: the spreading of this war to the Soviet Union was inevitable. A dictatorship of the right could not allow a dictatorship of the left to continue as an ally—indeed, to continue at all. For a few weeks while Bogyó was still in Kolozsvár, waiting for word from Rezső, he and Elizabeth met every day, talking, going for long walks along the Danube Corso. She showed him Buda, the Castle District, the grand old houses, the gardens around the Royal Palace, the lovely Coronation Church.

  Elizabeth and her father, a highly respected surgeon, were already donors to charities supporting the refugees. From the time of his arrival in Budapest, Rezső was dogged in his pursuit of assistance for the thousands of people streaming into the city. He went to the offices of all the Jewish organizations—the Orthodox, the Conservative, the Zionists—and to the cultural societies and the charitable foundations.

  Kasztner had a letter of introduction from József Fischer to Ottó Komoly, the president of the Budapest Zionist Association and author of two books about the future of the Jews. Kasztner had read neither of them but was ready to compliment the author, should the occasion arise. A heavyset man in his forties, Komoly was an engineer, a decorated war veteran, a reserve officer in the Hungarian army. He was socially well connected and a committed Hungarian patriot, despite his support for a Jewish homeland. “It is not a contradiction,” he insisted. “There must be a Jewish homeland, but I am not likely to live there myself.” In that, Komoly was prophetic. He had been introduced to Zionism by his father, a close friend of Theodor Herzl, but he had not applied for an entry visa to Palestine.

  As the two men drank ersatz coffee in tiny, elegant Herendi cups, Komoly confided that he felt comfortable in Budapest, though he warned Kasztner that the time would come when no Jew would find comfort there. “Too many of us have been in the window of social life,” he mused. “We have attracted the attention of other, less-fortunate segments of the population. A person is inclined to believe in the permanence of favorable conditions and is reluctant to pay attention to warning signs.”5 And that group, he thought, included himself.

  Here, as in Kolozsvár, the Zionist movement had divided along the same lines as in Palestine and, eventually, as it would in Israel. On the left were the Ihud (later the Mapai), the Israeli Labor Party that had been running the Jewish Agency, in effect the government in Palestine; the socialist Hashomer Hatzair, a youth organization with small clubs (called “nests”) throughout Europe; the Maccabee Hatzair, another socialist youth movement that had been organized at Jewish high schools in the late 1930s; and Dror (affiliated with the Ihud), which, with its leadership in Poland, had been active on Hungary's eastern borders, helping to bring across refugees from both Poland and Slovakia. On the right was Betar, the youth wing of the Revisionists, which, led by Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky, a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Palestine, fought bitterly with the Mapai leadership. Jabotinsky fostered armed resistance to the British in Palestine and to the Germans in Europe (though he, too, became involved in deal-making to save lives). In addition the Klal, or general Zionists, tended to focus on emigration to Palestine, and the Mizrachi, the religious Zionists, who saw themselves as the only intellectually qualified leaders of the Zionist movement. Despite all the alarming outside threats, the Zionists remained deeply divided along religious and political lines, each passionately opposed to the others’ points of view.6

  Komoly encouraged Kasztner to seek out Miklós (Moshe) Krausz, the Jewish Agency's man in Budapest. If Kasztner's refugees needed Palestine entry visas, Krausz was the one to see. He was the undisputed boss of the Palestine Office and a convinced Mizrachi. “It would be best,” Komoly warned, “not to tell him of your own Labor sympathies.”

  The Palestine Office was on Erzsébet Boulevard, near the National Theater. When Kasztner arrived, he had to fight his way up the wide staircase through the scores of people who stood waiting, leaning against the wall, squeezed along the iron handrails, talking in Polish, Slovak, Croatian, or Yiddish. He met a group of young Zionist pioneers, or halutzim,7 from Slovakia, who wanted everyone to hear of the brutal deportations they had witnessed in their own country. When the roundups began, they said, the old and the families with young children were lined up, and they all did exactly what they were ordered to do. Only a few young people tried to escape: they had heard stories from the Polish refugees, and they suspected a fate that their parents refused to believe. They hid in closets, cellars, and lofts, or in bushes along the riverbanks. They found the Hungarian border during the night.

  Kasztner talked to one young girl who was crying, her soiled handkerchief bunched into her mouth to quiet the sound. Her younger sister, ten years old, a dreamer, she said, had been caught just steps from the border and thrown into a waiting truck by Hlinka Guard militiamen—Slovak fascists. The older girl had promised their mother she would not let go of her sister's hand, but she had been so nervous that she needed to pee all the time, and she had to be alone when she did it, that's how shy she was. Suddenly there had been searchlights and dogs barking, men shouting, and her little sister's shrieks, “Run! Run!” Now the older sister wanted to know how such a little girl would find her way out of a Polish concentration camp. “Have you ever heard of Treblinka or Sobibór?” she asked. No one, so far, had come back from those places. And how would she explain to their mother that she had let go of her little sister's hand?

  Upstairs, the large auditorium was jammed with noisy, desperate people, waiting, hoping to be on the lists of those who had been chosen for the few Palestine entry certificates that were still available. Would there be more certificates, Kasztner wondered, now that most of the Palestine offices in other countries had been closed? Was there still an office in Prague? The one in Warsaw, he knew, had been closed by the Germans. Surely the British would open the borders to Palestine now that Europe was in flames?

  After two hours of waiting his turn in the line, Kasztner, ignoring protests by Krausz's busy secretaries, barged into the great man's office. He was greeted by a huge desk completely covered with piles of paper, letters spilling off the surface onto the floor, where hundreds of unopened envelopes lay in mountainous heaps. Boxes of papers lined the walls.8

  Krausz, a thin, bespectacled, middle-aged man with an unusually large head balanced on a long neck, popped up from behind the desk. He looked like a distressed turtle forced out of its shell and outraged at the unusual interruption. When Kasztner explained why he was there, Krausz said he was much too busy to discuss the problems of the Kolozsvár refugees. He had his own people to cope with; as Kasztner must have seen, there were more than a hundred of them on the stairs and more in the waiting rooms.9 Surely he was aware of the difficulties, Krausz complained. “Once the British mandate certificates are in hand,” he continued, “we need exit visas and official transit visas from neutral countries. Turkey will grant only forty to fifty a week. Yugoslavia has become impossible now that the partisans have made a few successful strikes against the Wehrmacht [the German army]. Italy refused.”10

  “Spain?” Kasztner inquired.

  “None for now, but maybe they will once the new consul arrives.”

  When Kasztner asked about illegal immigration, Krausz countered angrily that nothing should be done to jeopardize the Agency's good relations with Britain and that the refugees would be processed strictly according to his instructions. Kasztner argued that there had been some contact between the Germans and the Revisionists and that the Ihud had been successful with a few shiploads of refugees—it was just a matter of funding the ships and bribing everyone along the way. Once the Jewish families reached Haifa, he was sure that the British would allow them to land.

  Krausz was adamant that his office would abide by the rules. He had taken an instant dislike to the forceful, loud, and insistent K
asztner. He was used to the begging and cajoling of supplicants, not the aggressive, commanding tones of the young lawyer from Kolozsvár who thought he knew how to deal with functionaries. The dislike was mutual. Kasztner despised Krausz as a little man overly taken with the importance of his own position, one who paid more attention to bureaucratic minutiae than to the real plight of his people.

  Kasztner offered to help with processing applications and seeking exit visas from the Hungarian government, an offer Krausz considered ludicrous. He didn’t need a coworker, and if he ever did, Kasztner would not be on the shortlist. Later, when Kasztner urged him to include entire families in a single certificate, Krausz complained to his superiors. He was not going to bend the rules, he proclaimed righteously. He had held his position in the Palestine Office for several years, and in all that time he had kept the peace between the religious Mizrachi and the Hashomer Hatzair by fairly apportioning certificates between the two factions. He was not about to change how he handed out the documents. Until recently, he had been reasonably comfortable in rewarding those he agreed with and in denying those he disliked. Kasztner was going to be in the second category.

  Having failed with Krausz, Kasztner spent hours in waiting rooms on the various levels of 12 Sip Street, the headquarters of the Neolog Jewish congregation in Budapest and of the National Bureau of Hungarian Jews, where a number of Jewish functionaries had their offices. Their Great Synagogue on Dohány Street, behind the faded-red brick office building, was one of the architectural wonders of the city. Leaders of the congregation were lawyers, bankers, industrialists, and members of parliament. Most of them had taken the position, publicly, that they were opposed to illegal immigration, and they parroted allegations made in the anti-Semitic press that some “eastern Jews” could be spies. They were adamant in their declarations of loyalty to the Hungarian nation and their refusal to be classified with Jews from other countries. Hungary was, after all, a German ally. And Germany was at war.

  Samuel Stern, the head of the National Bureau of Hungarian Jews, had also been president of the Jewish Community of Pest for almost fifteen years now. His office was on the fifth floor. He was a hofrat, or court councillor (an honorary title awarded to those who had performed great deeds for the state), and a social friend of the Regent, Miklós Horthy. Stern's rank demanded that he be addressed as “Excellency.” He had been head of the country's national food transportation company, which had distinguished itself by supplying the armed forces through the First World War and was still doing so now. Though semiretired from office, he remained one of the country's most highly respected businessmen. Given his rank and important connections, he had been reluctant, at first, even to meet Kasztner. It was dangerous to associate with someone who might be helping enemy aliens enter Hungary illegally. Kasztner assumed he had been honored with an audience only as a result of a phone call by Ottó Komoly.

  Contrary to his elevated status in society, Hofrat Samuel Stern was a surprisingly small, elderly, birdlike man. However, he had the proud demeanor of one used to exercising power and had a strong, decisive handshake, one he proffered readily once Kasztner stood directly before his wide oak desk. After the introductions, Stern stayed safely behind his papers, gilt-framed family photographs, and large array of fountain pens, most of which he had received as gifts from grateful customers and political friends. It was difficult to imagine, in this high-ceilinged room giving onto the airy, sun-streaked courtyard, that anyone in this country was endangered or that Jews belonging to respected associations in other parts of Europe had already been murdered with their families. Yet that was what Kasztner knew, or suspected, from the stories he had been told by the refugees.

  Stern listened to Kasztner's report on the difficulties faced by the Jews who had managed to escape from Slovakia and Poland. Once he heard the appeal, he folded his pale, manicured hands and smiled. He said that he, too, had heard the stories. There were many such Jews in Budapest and in the provinces. But he was also sure that providing funds for “a few” might jeopardize the interests of the many. Hungary's Jews could not afford to be allied with the refugees, who were so different from them that they seemed to belong on another planet. Many of them still wore the distinctive fur-trimmed outfits of the backward, the uneducated, he said. They were leftovers from the fifteenth century. Hungarians had nothing in common with them.

  To Kasztner's alarm, Stern said he was in general agreement with the government's stance on the over-representation of Jews in certain professions. It was unreasonable to expect, with only 6 percent of the population, that Jews should make up 20 percent of the professions. They held too many prominent positions, and they were too proud of their accomplishments. “Vanity,” he said, “too much vanity.” He echoed the attacks the daily press had made recently about Jews having become overly conspicuous in the intellectual life of the country. The laws, as they had been imposed, were not “unreasonable,” given that such a large proportion of millionaires in Budapest were Jews. Certain exceptions to the new laws had already been granted, and more, he knew, were on the way. Besides, he declared, the laws were merely a sop to the Germans, a way for the government to pacify its more powerful, belligerent neighbor.

  Stern viewed the labor service imposed on able-bodied Jewish men as a necessary evil. If Jews were not to be part of the regular army, at least the labor brigades gave them a chance to help the “homeland.” It was honorable. Jews, who were only a segment of the service, could prove themselves both reliable and hardworking. Indeed, he noted, both he and his organization had helped collect money and clothing for the men there.

  When Kasztner mentioned the ghettos in Poland, Stern said he could not imagine that such things could happen in Hungary, where Jews were integrated into society at all levels, and they did not live in isolation as so many of Poland's Jews did. As Hungarians, Jews shared the goals of the majority for the well-being of the nation. It was only their religion that was different. He was impatient with the Zionist assertion that Jews should make their way to another “homeland.”

  Before long, Stern's forbearance with Kasztner began to wear thin. He stood up as soon as Kasztner began to talk about the unique problems faced by Jews in Transylvania. For him, the meeting was over.

  Kasztner walked down the staircase, past the notice board announcing that, in the evening, there would be a Mozart concert in the auditorium with a visiting opera singer. Bizet's Carmen was coming to the main stage of the Wesselényi Street Goldmark Hall, Verdi's Rigoletto and La Traviata would be the main attraction the following month, and there would be poetry recitals in the main hall on Sip Street.11 Obviously the Jewish Community of Budapest was not concerned about the fate of Jews elsewhere.

  Kasztner knew that the people at greatest risk in the city were the refugees. Without official papers, they could be returned to the German-occupied areas. Though their numbers were not recorded,12 there were thousands in refugee camps, and the authorities could return them to their home countries at any time. Others seeking asylum in the city were arriving every day: groups of orphans whose parents had been taken to concentration camps; families who had nowhere to hide and little hope of getting help from the official Jewish organizations. Kasztner was now gathering funds not only for the people back home but also for the refugees here, in Budapest.

  Kasztner found kindred spirits at the Bethlen Square Hungarian Jewish Assistance building. Its large storerooms supplied clothing, flour and margarine, dried fruit, and cans of vegetables to the refugees and the poor of the city. Its free kitchen served daily rations. This agency received funds from the American Joint Distribution Committee,13 or “the Joint” as it was affectionately called, and a great deal of help from the rich Jews of the city. Baroness Edith Weiss, eldest daughter of the banker-industrialist Manfred Weiss, volunteered there. As a member of one of the wealthiest families, she was used to privilege and comfort, to influence in government. Now she ran interference with the authorities and bargained with tailors and dressmakers to provide winter coats for the men in the labor battalions. Even in these difficult times she could open doors in ministers’ offices.14