Rezső Kasztner

Kasztner was born in 1906 in Kolozsvár (Yiddish: קלויזנבורג‎, Kloiznborg; German: Klausenburg), Austria-Hungary (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania), into a local community of 15,000 Jews. The governance of the city was unstable, moving back and forth between Hungary and Romania. It became Cluj, Romania in 1920, was returned to Hungary in 1940, then was restored to Romania by the Treaty of Paris in 1947, after the Soviet and Romanian armies defeated German and Hungarian forces in the winter of 1944–45.

Kasztner was raised with his two brothers in a two-story brick house in the southern part of the city by his father, Yitzhak, a merchant and a deeply religious man who spent most of his day in the synagogue, and his mother, Helen, who ran the family store.[8]

Helen decided that her sons should attend a regular high school, rather than a religious one, because the curriculum was broader and included languages. By the time Kasztner graduated, he spoke eight languages: Hungarian, Romanian, French, German, and Latin, along with Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic.[8]

Anna Porter writes that he became known for his good looks, sharp mind, quick wit, and his intense concentration, as a result of which his mother decided he should study law, though his heart was in politics.[8]

Jewish entry to universities had been limited by the 1920 Numerus Clausus (closed number) Act, which was the first antisemitic legislation in 20th century Europe. The law limited Jewish university places to six percent, reflecting their representation within the population, and although the legislation was allowed to lapse eight years later, it affected Kasztner's teenage political orientation, and he decided at the age of 15 to become a Zionist.[9]

He joined a Zionist youth group, Barissa, which trained its members to become citizens of the Land of Israel, becoming its leader within a year. His older brother, Gyula, had already emigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1924 to work on a kibbutz, but Kasztner was still at high school and so unable to go with him. He played his part in the Zionist movement by writing articles on British policies in Palestine for the local Jewish newspaper Új Kelet.[10]

When Kasztner was 22, his father died reading the Torah in the synagogue on the seventh day of Passover. He had to put off any ideas about emigrating, because his mother now needed him at home. He went to law school, as she wished, then worked full-time for Új Kelet after graduating, at first working as a sports reporter, though he continued to write about politics. He also became an assistant to Dr. József Fischer, a lawyer, member of Parliament, president of the Jewish Community of Kolozsvár, and leading member of the National Jewish Party. Fischer admired Kasztner's writing, and encouraged him to continue working for Új Kelet too.[11]

Porter writes that Fischer may have been the only person whose intelligence Kasztner respected. He was known for being unable to suffer fools gladly, dismissing people as stupid or intellectual cowards. "He had no sense of other people's sensitivities, or he didn't care whether he alienated his friends," Dezsö Hermann, one of Kasztner's friends at law school, told Porter. "Back then, in Kolozsvár, Jews kept their heads down. Not Rezső."[12]

Ladislaus Löb quotes Kasztner's associate Joel Brand as saying that Kasztner was the "prototype of the snobbish intellectual" but showed "marvellous courage at critical moments"; the Orthodox leader Fülöp Freudiger called him "dictatorial" but "selfless and always willing to take personal risks". Kasztner's daughter, Zsuzsi, described him as "very arrogant, and rightly so, because he was extremely smart and intelligent and handsome and charismatic".[13]

He became known as a political fixer, knowing whom to bribe, how much to pay, whom to flatter. He interviewed leading politicians for Új Kelet, and even antisemitic members of the Iron Guard. He worked hard as a lawyer for his clients, reportedly knowing when to pay off the police so that charges would be dropped.[14] He married József Fischer's daughter, Elizabeth, in 1934, which further cemented his position locally.[15]

As the German army moved across Europe, Kasztner set up an information center in Kolozsvár/Cluj to help refugees arriving from Austria, Poland, and Slovakia. He arranged temporary accommodation for them and collected clothes and food from local charities. His main concern was to provide Jewish refugees with safe passage, using his ability to bribe and charm to obtain exit visas from the Romanian government. He asked for help from the Jewish Agency's leadership in Tel Aviv, though there was a limit to what they could do because the British had imposed strict quotas on the number of Jewish refugees allowed into Palestine, causing Kasztner to attack "Perfidious Albion" in Új Kelet.[16]

On August 30, 1940, The Second Vienna Award returned Kolozsvár to Hungary's control. The city's Jews were happy at first, reasoning that Hungary's Jews had not been subjected to the same random killings experienced by Jews in Romania. Hungarian Jews were patriots, seeing themselves as Hungarians first, Jews second, and Hungary as their homeland, not Eretz Israel. Their jubilation was short-lived. As Germany's influence over Hungarian policies increased, Jews found themselves subjected to antisemitic legislation and violence. In 1941, the Hungarian government closed all Jewish newspapers, including Új Kelet. Kasztner, then 36 years old, decided to move to Budapest to look for a job, leaving his wife behind in Kolozsvár.[17]

Kasztner rented a small, two-room apartment in a pension in Váci Street. He wanted to continue his work helping Jewish refugees in Kolozsvár, and with that in mind, had obtained a letter of introduction from József Fischer to Ottó Komoly, an engineer and president of the Budapest Zionist Association. Komoly directed Kasztner to Miklós (Moshe) Krausz, the Jewish Agency's representative in Budapest, who controlled the Palestine entry visas.

Porter writes that Kasztner had to wait in line for two hours in the Agency's office on Erzsébet Boulevard, among scores of Jewish refugees desperate to find a way to escape to Palestine. He eventually barged past Krausz's secretaries and into his office. Krausz explained that he was determined not to alienate the British, which meant that every entry visa had to be legitimate and properly processed, which was consuming all his time.[18] Kasztner offered to help, but Krausz wasn't interested. Porter writes that Krausz took an instant dislike to the "forceful, loud, and insistent Kasztner."[19]

Kasztner's wife joined him in Budapest in July 1941. He tried to persuade Dr. Fischer, who had lost his law practice, to join them but he refused, feeling responsible for the Jewish community in Kolozsvár. Komoly continued to introduce Kasztner to key figures in the Budapest Zionist movement. One of them was Sam Springmann, who was bribing officials—in part with money from the Jewish Agency—to carry messages and food parcels into Łódź and other ghettos in Poland. It was Springmann who introduced Kasztner to Joel Brand, a meeting that was to change both their lives.

Part of a series of articles on the Holocaust
Blood for goods
Key figures Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee Hansi Brand Joel Brand Rezső Kasztner Ottó Komoly SS Kurt Becher Adolf Eichmann Heinrich Himmler
Issues Auschwitz concentration camp Auschwitz Protocols Vrba–Wetzler report History of the Jews in Hungary The Holocaust Kastner train Kastner trial
Writers Malchiel Gruenwald (Michtavim el haveray be'Mizrahi, weekly pamphlet, 1952) Ben Hecht (Perfidy, 1961) Raul Hilberg (The Destruction of the European Jews, 1961) Rudolf Vrba (I Cannot Forgive, 1963) Randolph L. Braham (The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1981) Motti Lerner (Kastner, 1985; The Kastner Trial, 1994) Jim Allen (Perdition, 1987) Yehuda Bauer (Jews for Sale?: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933–1945, 1994) Tuvia Friling (Arrows in the Dark, 1998) Ladislaus Löb (Rezső Kasztner, 2008) Anna Porter (Kasztner's Train, 2008) Gaylen Ross (Killing Kasztner, 2008) Jeremy Davidson (Tickling Leo, 2009) Paul Bogdanor (Kasztner’s Crime, 2016)
Kastner train passengers Kastner train Avraham Deutsch Dezső Ernster Esther Jungreis Ladislaus Löb Egon Mayer Peter Munk Reuven Schmeltzer Yonasan Steif Léopold Szondi Joel Teitelbaum Béla Zsolt
Related Bratislava Working Group Gisi Fleischmann Michael Dov Weissmandl Europa Plan History of the Jews in Slovakia Jewish Agency Joint Distribution Committee Saly Mayer Dieter Wisliceny

During the summer of 1944, Kasztner repeatedly met with Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of deporting Hungary's 800,000-strong Jewish community to Auschwitz in occupied Poland.

They reached an agreement that some 1,685 Jews would be spared for a ransom of $1,000 per head. Most of the passengers could not raise the funds themselves, so Kasztner auctioned off 150 seats to wealthy Jews in order to pay for the others. In addition, SS officer Kurt Becher, Heinrich Himmler's envoy, insisted that 50 seats be reserved for the families of individuals who had personally paid him for favors, at an amount of approximately $25,000 per person. Becher wanted to get the price per head increased to $2,000 but Himmler set the price at $1,000.[20] The total value of the ransom was estimated by the Jewish community to be 8,600,000 Swiss francs, though Becher himself valued it at only 3,000,000 Swiss francs.[21]

Breaking his agreement, Eichmann had the passengers on the train sent to Belsen concentration camp. But in the end the passengers were saved by being transported to neutral Switzerland in two contingents, in August and December 1944 respectively. They included the Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the writer Béla Zsolt, the psychiatrist Leopold Szondi, the opera singer Dezső Ernster, the artist István Irsai, and other intellectuals, scientists, religious leaders and political activists, but also people who were neither rich nor prominent, not least a group of Polish orphans.[22] The passengers were ultimately released after a large ransom payment arranged by Orthodox Swiss Jew Yitzchak Sternbuch, Recha Sternbuch's husband.

Alfréd Wetzler (aka Jozef Lánik) and Rudolf Vrba (born as Walter Rosenberg) escaped from Auschwitz after learning that construction and preparations were being made for the mass arrival of "Hungarian Salami" as those Jews were jokingly called by the camp guards,[23] and wrote the Vrba-Wetzler report, also known as the Auschwitz Protocol, with help from the Bratislava Working Group. It was distributed to many Jewish and other organizations, including the Jewish Agency, in order to warn the Hungarian Jews. The recipients did not publicize the report.

Vrba claimed that Kasztner deliberately buried the report, because it would ruin his Blood for Goods plan. Kasztner's detractors allege that Kasztner and other members of the Aid and Rescue Committee helped the SS encourage Hungarian Jewry to board the trains bound for Auschwitz voluntarily, telling them that they would be brought to Kenyérmező and given jobs in factories and fields; and that as a result of this misinformation from their leaders, Hungarian Jewry was brought to Auschwitz. Professor Eli Reichenthal wrote that Kasztner at that stage was actually being blackmailed by the Germans, since his parents, friends and close family were all on the "Kastner train" stranded in the Bergen-Belsen death camp.[24]

Kasztner's defenders claim that as a result of his negotiations, an additional 15,000 Hungarian Jews were transferred to labor camps at Strasshof rather than being killed at Auschwitz. But Eichmann testified at his trial that this was an act of deceit on his part: "It is possible that I painted a bright picture for Kasztner."[25]

While negotiations about the first train were continuing, three Jewish Special Operations Executive members from Palestine, Hannah Szenes and two men, Yoel Palgi and Peretz Goldstein, were parachuted into Yugoslavia and attempted to penetrate the Hungarian border. They were caught by the Hungarian underground police. Szenes was taken to prison, interrogated in front of her imprisoned mother, and later killed, while the other two were brought to Kasztner, who convinced the two to go to the German Gestapo and inform them that they are Jewish fighters from Palestine who wish to confirm the 'Blood for Goods' deal, but ask that it reaches Switzerland instead of Palestine.

The two were jailed by the Germans, tortured and sent to Germany, but Palgi jumped the train on the way and escaped.

During the later Kastner trial, Hannah Szenes's mother told the court that Kasztner deceived her in a way that led to suspicions that he was the man that gave away her daughter's unit in the first place, and had her, the mother imprisoned. Palgi accused him of leading them into a trap.

Shmuel Tamir, Gruenwald's attorney, claimed that this was one of the main reasons he felt that Kasztner had been nothing more than a German collaborator, to save his family and perhaps for money. In Kasztner's defense, Eli Reichenthal says that at the point when the three paratroopers reached Budapest, what motivated Kasztner's decisions were the risk to the deal (which Kasztner believed was real and therefore could save many more Jews) and Eichmann's blackmail (having Kasztner's family together with the Hungarian Zionist leadership on the train). This was something Kasztner could not reveal at the trial; "I had reasons" was his answer to Szenes's mother.

In April 1944 Kasztner received in Bratislava, Slovakia the Vrba-Wetzler report and other evidence that Hungary's Jews would be sent to their deaths. The report was later released to the leaders of Jewish organizations in Budapest and elsewhere in the hope that Hungarian Jews would be warned that they were being deported to a death camp and were not being resettled, as they had been led to believe. However, the report was not made public by Kasztner, the Jewish Council (Judenrat) in Hungary or other Jewish organizations.[26]

It was Kasztner's Jewish Agency rival Moshe Krausz who eventually sent the report to Switzerland for publication.[27] George Mantello (George Mandel), an Orthodox Jew from Hungary and first secretary of the El Salvador mission to Switzerland, sent a diplomat from Romania, Florian Manoliu to find out what was happening to his family, who by then had been murdered. Manoliu stopped over in Budapest at risk to himself, obtained the abridged Auschwitz Protocols reports from Krausz on 19 June 1944 and immediately returned with the reports to Geneva.[28] Mantello publicized the details within a day of receiving them.[29] This led to grass roots demonstrations, over 400 headlines in the Swiss press deploring Europe's barbarism toward Jews (published in spite of Swiss censorship rules), sermons in Swiss churches and the publication of the book "Am I my Brother's Keeper?" by Paul Vogt, Switzerland's leading theologian. The resulting international outcry was one of the main reasons that the Hungarian government stopped the deportations. By then, 437,000 Hungarian Jews had been taken to Auschwitz, most being murdered on arrival.

Kasztner's critics also argue that he promised the SS not to warn Hungarian Jews to avoid jeopardizing negotiations to save the Jews who escaped on the Kastner train. In 1960, an interview with Eichmann, made by the Dutch Nazi journalist Willem Sassen in Argentina, was published in Life Magazine. Eichmann said that Kasztner "agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation—and even keep order in the collection camps—if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate to Palestine. It was a good bargain".[30] Rudolf Vrba wrote, "Kasztner paid for those 1,684 lives with his silence".[31]

Kasztner's supporters argue that the agreement over the train was part of a much larger rescue effort, involving negotiations to save all Hungarian Jews and that he could not have saved Jews by warning them anyway. Löb argues, "with no access to the media and limited opportunities to travel, under constant observation by German and Hungarian secret police, he could hardly have raised the alarm in an effective way" and even if he had, the Jews, "surrounded by enemies, stripped of their rights and possessions, having neither the arms nor the experience", were unable to organise either resistance or mass escapes.[32]

Kasztner's critics reply that he received SS permission to visit Kolozsvár/Cluj on May 3, 1944 but failed to warn the Jews there despite the fact that Cluj was only 3 miles (5 km) from the Romanian border and that the 20,000 Jews there were guarded by only 20 Hungarian gendarmes and an SS officer and could have escaped. They also say that he could have telephoned other Jewish communities but did not and that warnings might have enabled Jews to save their lives through "local uprisings, resistances, escapes, hiding, hiding children with Gentiles, forging documents, paying ransom, bribes" and other means.[33]

From 1943, the BBC Polish Service had been broadcasting about the exterminations but the BBC Hungarian Service had not mentioned Jews. After the German invasion in March 1944, the Hungarian Service did broadcast warnings but by then it was too late. According to David Cesarani and Götz Aly, although Jews who survived the deportations claimed that they had not been informed by their leaders, that no one had told them, there is plenty of evidence that Hungarian Jews could have known.[34][35]

The consequences of the meetings between Kasztner and Eichmann had long-lasting repercussions in the Israeli and Hungarian Jewish communities that are still felt. Part of these repercussions revolve around the fact that Kasztner helped to draw up the list of who was going to be among the Jews who were chosen to be saved and allowed to leave on a train. According to some sources, many of the Jews who were saved were Kasztner's relatives, rich Hungarian Jews who subsidized those on the train who couldn't pay, friends of Kasztner as well as "community and Zionist leaders". The passengers included orphans, students, workmen, teachers and nurses.[36]

In early 1945, Kasztner traveled to Germany with Becher, who had received the money and valuables paid to save the Jewish lives on the train. Himmler had ordered Becher to attempt to stop further exterminations at the concentration camps as the Allies gained further ground in the closing days of World War II. Even though Kasztner was a Hungarian Jew and Becher was head of the Economic Department of the SS, Kasztner and Becher worked well together. This 1945 action is credited by some for saving tens of thousands of Jewish lives [Ref. Anna Porter, "Kastner Train"]. Others consider Kasztner to have been a collaborator.

At the conclusion of the war, Becher was arrested and investigated at Nuremberg as a war criminal. Kasztner intervened on his behalf and sent an affidavit to his de-Nazification hearing, stating that "[Becher is] cut from a different wood than the professional mass murderers of the political SS". It is possible that he did so with the knowledge of the Jewish Agency (Zionist leadership in Palestine, the Yishuv) in the hope of obtaining help in recovering stolen Jewish assets and capturing Eichmann in return.[37] Kasztner later lied in court about having testified on Becher's behalf at Nuremberg trials, while he was asked about the affidavit.[38] This defense of an SS officer angered the Jewish public as much as the original negotiations with Eichmann.

Kasztner also intervened on behalf of SS officers Hermann Krumey and Dieter Wisliceny, who had negotiated with him before his meetings with Eichmann. In all, "there was a total of seven interventions by Kasztner on behalf of Nazi war criminals. Three testimonies were on behalf of Becher, two were on behalf of Krumey, one was on behalf of Hans Jüttner, and there was an appeal that had the potential to deliver Wisliceny from the threat of execution in Slovakia."[39] Wisliceny was hanged in 1948; Jüttner's 10-year prison sentence was changed to 4 years in 1949. He died in 1965; Krumey was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1969. He died in 1981; Becher died a wealthy man in 1995.