Reviving Kasztner

By Michael Orbach

Issue of October 30th/ 12 Cheshvan 5770

Rudolph Kasztner may be the greatest hero of the Holocaust. Oscar Schindler himself called Kasztner’s efforts to save Jews “unsurpassed,” but most people have never heard of the man. And many who have think of him as a Nazi collaborator, a man who, in the words of the presiding judge at his 1955 trial, “sold his soul to the devil.”

Fifty years dead, it wasn’t until Tuesday, Oct. 20, that

Rudolph Kasztner, beleaguered Jewish hero, truly received his due.

The occasion was the screening of Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt with Nazis, a new documentary by Gaylen Ross, at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Manhattan. Ross, whose earlier work includes Blood Money: Switzerland’s Nazi Gold, spent eight years making the film.

Killing Kasztner is a remarkable work examining Kasztner’s legacy. At the height of the genocide of Hungarian Jewry, when 12,000 Jews were being murdered each day, Kasztner, a Jewish journalist and lawyer, organized a train that carried 1,658 Jews to safety. He also managed to bluff Adolf Eichmann into keeping alive 20,000 Jews in a work camp.

Kasztner’s train of cattle cars rattled out of Budapest in 1944. It stopped at Bergen Belsen, then continued on to Switzerland, loaded with passengers whose lives had been bought for approximately $1,000 a head. The rich paid their own way, and the poor paid nothing, with Kasztner making up the difference with money he collected. The late Satmar Rav, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum zt”l, was a passenger. So were young non-religious Zionists. Kasztner’s daughter, Zsuzsi Michaeli, said Kasztner called the train his “Noah’s Ark.”

Rabbi Jacob Jungreis was eleven when he boarded the train with his family. His aunt, who ran an orphanage in Budapest next door to Kasztner’s office, was told by Kasztner to give him the names of orphans. The train, Rabbi Jungreis says, also had a disproportionate number of clergy.

“He [Kasztner] was a secular Zionist, but he felt after the war the Jewish nation needs to be rebuilt and we need the rabbis and sages,” said Rabbi Jungreis, now a Brooklyn rabbi and educator.

Kasztner was modest about his accomplishments.

“I was a product of the circumstance,” Kasztner told a nephew, “and under the circumstance I was a hero.”

After the war Kasztner emigrated to Israel with his wife and young daughter, and was at first lionized as a hero, responsible for the largest single act of salvation during the war. He was also a rising star of the Mapai Socialist party. Malchiel Gruenwald, an elderly self-styled journalist who lost family in the Holocaust, self-published accusations that Kasztner was a Nazi collaborator. The government sued for libel on Kasztner’s behalf. The first days of the trial were a success for Kasztner as his war efforts were retold, but then Gruenwald’s lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, called Kasztner to the stand and interrogated him mercilessly until Kasztner broke down and sobbed. It was revealed that Kasztner had written affidavits for high-ranking Nazis; he was accused of not saving enough Jews; he was accused of knowing about the Holocaust and not doing enough.

“Don’t forget,” Kasztner pleaded, according to Time magazine, “I saved lives that otherwise would have been snuffed out.”

Kasztner asked the Satmar Rav to testify on his behalf. According to Kasztner’s daughter, the Satmar Rav replied, “You didn’t save me. G-d saved me.”

“He didn’t know that G-d sent my father as his messenger,” Zsuzsi said, sadly.

The guilty verdict brought down the Mapai government in the 1955 elections. In 1957, at the age of 51, Kasztner was assassinated by Ze’ev Eckstein, a member of a radical right-wing group. In 1958

Israel’s Supreme Court exonerated Kasztner, but the damage was done.

Killing Kasztner begins with Ze’ev Eckstein, now living free in Jerusalem after serving seven years of a life sentence. Insomuch as the film is about Kasztner, the film’s real protagonist is Eckstein, an elderly Billy Bob Thorton-look alike. He meanders across the film looking for some sort of solace, while at the same time eschewing any guilt for it. He denies his culpability, saying he was just a pawn and then tosses up conspiracy theories about the event like a second shooter.  There is some weight to the theories, as the Shin Bet initially recruited Eckstein and three members of the right wing group were undercover agents, but the film is more concerned with Kasztner’s ostensible guilt, not Eckstein’s very real guilt.

The film by and large exonerates Kasztner by placing his trial in the context of a contemporary Israel. The Mapai government had just negotiated restitution from the Germans and had largely blocked out the right-wing political factions. Gruenwald’s lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, a Yerushalmi who served in the Irgun and later as Menachem Begin’s Justice Minister, wanted to bring down the left wing government; Kasztner was collateral damage. The most damning piece of evidence against Kasztner, the affidavits he wrote for the high ranking Nazis, were written at the behest of the Jewish Agency which needed funding for the fledgling Israeli army, a charge the Jewish Agency denied at the time of the trial.

The filmmaker, Ross, maintains that Kasztner’s exoneration wasn’t her main goal.

“I only propose that there was a context and emotions and passions and history that affected the legacy of this man. I say look at this like a great Shakespearian tragedy that happened in Israel,” explained Ross.

Kasztner was also caught in the nexus of a new Israeli reality, the film maintains. Israel wanted to remember the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto, and brave dead soldiers - not negotiators who managed to survive. In the words of a nameless student who appears in the film, you can educate a generation of soldiers on the legacy of Hannah Senesh, the Jewish woman who parachuted behind enemy lines and was killed, but you can’t educate a generation of soldiers on the legacy of Rudolph Kasztner.

Anna Porter, whose 2007 book, Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, largely agrees with the rehabilitated view of Kasztner. While the train is the best known of Kasztner’s efforts to save lives, was not the only one, she said. Kasztner was also responsible for saving between 14,000 and 20,000 Jews in the Strasshof labor camp.

“People ask why he didn’t do more,” Porter told the Jewish Star. “No one ever asked Schindler why he didn’t do more. The question asked of Schindler is why he did anything at all. There’s a big difference: that Kasztner was a Jew and Schindler’s wasn’t. Of Schindler nothing was expected, of Kasztner vastly more. “

The negative view emerges from a forced truth.

“The word selection keeps on cropping up,” she said referring to Kasztner, “and there a few words more loaded for an audience of Holocaust survivors than ‘selection’ and you know why.”

For the train survivors, who arrived early to the screening in Manhattan last week, many walking with the aid of canes and walkers, and surrounded by children and grand children, there is little doubt about the man. Harry Klein’s father, a rabbi in Hungary, was given scant minutes notice before the train left. He father wrapped all the food on the Shabbos table into the tablecloth and took his family to the train station.

“We didn’t know Kasztner from a hole in the wall,” Klein related, “To us Kasztner is a hero because he saved our lives and 1600 people.”

George Bishop, a manufacturer from Los Angeles, flew in for the premiere

“If Kasztner knew more he could have left in the middle of the night and driven across the border to Romania, but that’s not what he did. Even after his family was in Switzerland he went back again and again and exposed himself to going to concentration camp and pulling people out and saving their lives.”

Rabbi Jungreis has visited the cemetery in Israel where Kasztner is buried.

“I went to his grave and I expressed hakarat hatov, to thank him and say the Kale Malei. I’m very sorry that the tombstone has nothing written on it,” he said.  “We all called him a Tzaddik. Of course, when you can save a certain number of people, the other hundreds got upset and accused him of false accusations. It is utter nonsense. If you have a $100,00 to give tzedakah you can’t give a million.”

He said that they would have testified on Kasztner’s behalf had they been aware of it.

“I don’t know if I’d seen Kasztner as a friend,” explained Emmanuel Mandel, who was eight-years-old when he rode Kasztner’s train, “but it was the arrogance and the chutzpah that made it possible for him to negotiate with Eichmann; the kind of arrogance to go into the Majestic Hotel and face Eichmann in Budapest. That tells you something. The man had clear notions of wanting to help.”

Zsuzsi Michaeli, who was hugged by survivors at the screening, hopes the lesson of her father is understood. “You don’t die honorably. You just die. It’s against Judaism. Life is above Shabbos; life is above Yom Kippur. We were given life,” she explained. “You can be a hero without a gun.”

Gaylen Ross says Kasztner’s story raises a far more troubling point, one that is anathema to the Jewish community.

“It’s all about Jewish rescue. That’s at the heart of it. It’s taken so long for Jewish rescue to be honored and noted. It’s a different element when it’s a Jew rescuing other Jews. What does it say about the rest of the Jews? “

In an early scene, Ross attempts to visit the only memorial for Kasztner: a small patch of trees dedicated to him in a Tel Aviv forest. Ross and a bemused caretaker are unable to locate the trees and instead find a bald clearing. At the film’s close, Yad Vashem finally agrees to accept Kasztner’s archive, and there is a small memorial to him in the museum, narrated by Kasztner’s granddaughter Merav Michaeli, a popular Israeli television host.

The final scene of the documentary is of Eckstein, Kasztner’s killer, walking away with his back to the camera. A voice-over of Eckstein begins. He is speaking about a play by John Paul Sartre that he once read.

“People put in hell that start to tell each other stories and the hell is that they keep on retelling the [same] story. They cannot stop telling the story. They cannot escape and there is no liberation. This is hell.”

The Jewish community will once again have to tell Kasztner’s story; it is a story that must be told about what it means to be a hero and what it means to be a hero of circumstance. It is a story that must be told and told again until we finally accept what it means. Killing Kasztner is not the end of Rudolph Kasztner’s legacy, but this flawless documentary is a very wise place to begin.

Killing Kasztner’s will be shown, beginning November 6th, at the Kew Gardens Cinema.