THERE ARE MANY people whose assistance I wish to acknowledge: Professor Randolph Braham, who read and commented on the last draft of this manuscript; Professor Adam Heller, who gave me his detailed notes; Professor Michael Marrus, who read two successive drafts without complaint and gave me the benefit of his wisdom on both of them; Yitzhak Katsir, who provided Kasztner family notes and photographs and drew my attention to the minutiae of Israeli law; Geraldine Sherman, who was the first to insist on a plethora of footnotes; Yehuda Lahav, who generously provided his notes and his book about a “wounded life”; George Jonas, who kept encouraging me to go on with the research even when it became obvious that many documents, books, and memories were contradictory; John Pearce, who is much more than an agent—he is a painstaking editor; Rosemary Shipton, my imaginative editor; Wendy Fitzgibbons, the most exacting copy editor anyone could wish for; Wendy Wright, who helped with the translation of Karla Müller-Tupath; Professor Yechiam Weitz, who allowed me to read the unpublished translation of his brilliant book, “The Man Who Was Murdered Twice”; Gabriel Barshaked, whose taped interviews in the Yad Vashem Archives proved to be a most valuable source for mining Hansi's memories; Yitzhak Livnat, without whose assistance in Israel I would certainly have been lost in the archives, as well as in the city streets; and last, but not least, my intrepid publisher, Scott McIntyre, who stuck with this massive project till the end.
I want especially to thank all the people I interviewed for this book, because without their help I could not have written it. Some I have described in detail in the text; others are presented here in alphabetical order by surname.
SHLOMO ARONSON, a historian with a vibrant sense of humor, was able to describe many of the people I wrote about.
YEHUDA BAUER is an academic adviser to the Yad Vashem Archives. I found his book Jews for Sale? invaluable.
EVA BERG lent me her treasured copy of Robert St. John's book The Man Who Played God, but I appreciated more the hours we spent with her memories of Rezső and Bogyó Kasztner in the Váci Street pension, her stories about how she and her mother survived the Holocaust, their journey to Israel via Cyprus, and her continued relationship with Rezső.
GEORGE BISHOP was a teenage delivery boy for the Red Cross in the Kolozsvár ghetto. He thinks that perhaps his family was selected for Kasztner's train because his father had been a highly decorated officer in the previous war. In 1948 George joined the Israeli army; he emigrated to the United States in 1955 and became a successful businessman in New York and, later, in Los Angeles, as owner of Truflex-Pang.
RANDOLPH BRAHAM works in his sparse office at City University in New York, surrounded by books and manuscripts. He is the real dean of Hungarian Jewish history. His many books were of enormous help in marshaling the facts, and his two-volume work The Politics of Genocide proved to be my guide and checkpoint throughout.
DANI BRAND and his wife were kind enough to invite me into their home in Tel Aviv and share with me their own stories about Hansi and Joel.
EVA CARMELI talked to me in her home in Tel Aviv and told me how her friend Hansi continued working with children until she was eighty-eight years old.
DOV DINUR has written his own book in Hebrew about Kasztner. He was one of the young halutzim in Hungary in 1944, and he remembers Rafi Benshalom and all the others in this book. I talked with him in Haifa, and we visited Peretz Révész together in 2006.
MARGIT FENDRICH, Joel Brand's niece, greeted me in her elegant apartment in Tel Aviv. Her memories of the terrible times that followed her being left behind by the second Kasztner train to Switzerland, and her recollections of the Nuremberg Trials, have been of immense help in writing this book.
LEA FUERST, Ottó Komoly's daughter, lived in Tel Aviv in a home for the elderly before her death in 2006. She had perfect recall of those years in Budapest.
ADAM HELLER, a distinguished scholar, professor and research scientist at the University of Texas, thinks his family was selected in Kolozsvár for the Kasztner train because his father had survived labor service in the Ukraine.
ZSUZSI KASZTNER, Rezső and Bogyó's daughter, talked with me in Tel Aviv and sent more information after our meeting. She has three daughters: Mayrav, the TV and radio interviewer; Michal, a businesswoman, and Keren, who was completing her graduate work in international law and human rights.
AGNES LANTOS, then a dressmaker, survived in hiding in Buda, helped by many of her clients. When the Soviet army arrived in Budapest, she made clothes for the women soldiers who could afford a bit of luxury. Agnes's sister, MAGDA LÉTAI, and her sister-in-law were on the death march to Vienna in late October 1944 and ended up in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Both of them survived because of Magda's determination not to give up.
JOE LEBOVIC shared his experiences of hiding in Budapest during the Arrow Cross's rule.
YITZHAK LIVNAT told his harrowing story of the foot march from Auschwitz to Mauthausen in January 1945, of the German soldier who told him he was too young to die, of the hastily constructed Gunskirchen concentration camp in March 1945, of the thousands who died of typhus and starvation. He found love and life in Israel.
RON LUSTIG is director of the Memorial Museum of Hungarian-Speaking Jewry in Safed, Israel. The museum was founded by his parents, both Holocaust survivors, in early 1948. Situated in a place where no one would expect a museum—about one hundred miles from Tel Aviv and close to Lake Galilee—it is jammed full with memorabilia from centuries of Hungarian Jewish life. The museum's Web URL is www.hjm.org.il/.
TOM MARGITTAI, a young passenger on Kasztner's train, went on to become co-owner of the Four Seasons, one of the most famous restaurants in New York.
EGON MAYER’S Kasztner Memorial Web site is still available at www.kasztnermemorial.com/.
AGNES PAP, a journalist, has been studying and documenting the houses occupied by the SS and the Arrow Cross, as well as safe houses for Jews and other buildings of special interest to people studying the Hungarian Jewish catastrophe. She drove up Swabian Hill with me to the former Majestic Hotel, still an imposing building though with somewhat worn outer walls. The acacias and chestnut trees are still there, as is that wonderful view over the Danube. The footbridge that Rezső Kasztner, Hansi and Joel Brand used to cross for their meetings with Eichmann remains, as does the small enclosure that used to be the guardhouse. Little has changed inside the former hotel. Under the Communists, this building became a choice apartment complex for party members and their families. When we were there in 2005, the couple in Eichmann's former offices were renovating their new apartment. They had heard the stories about a bedroom where Göring had once spent a night as Eichmann's guest. Later, Agnes and I had a glass of wine in the Astoria Hotel bar, where not much has changed since the SS officers drank there in 1944. The interrogation and torture area of the basement has been transformed into a conference center.
ANNA PERCZEL, an architect and historian, is still trying to save buildings in the former Budapest ghetto from demolition.
BABA SCHWARTZ let me read her heartrending memoir about her last farewell to her father at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Baba lives with her husband, Andor, in Australia.
RABBI JÓZSEF SCHWEITZER went into hiding with his aunt when the Germans occupied the Budapest Rabbinical Seminary in March 1944. He was picked up by the Arrow Cross in November and assigned to a work detail digging antitank ditches east of the city. Again he escaped, and he hid in the Glass House until January 1945; in March that year, he returned to his studies at the Rabbinical Seminary. I met him there, in his modest office, in 2005.
SZABOLCS SZITA is the author of several books on the Holocaust, including one on Kasztner and the Budapest Rescue Committee. When I asked how he became a historian of the Holocaust in Hungary, he told me this story: “I was researching a historical book, digging in Sopron [in Hungary], when we came across some human bones. When I asked the locals, they said the bones must have belonged to the Jews who dug trenches during the war. There are no Jews in the area now—just the bones.” This is what propelled him to make sure those who had disappeared would not be forgotten.
JULIA VAJDA, a psychiatrist in Budapest, collects interviews with Hungarian Holocaust survivors.
GYÖRGY VÁMOS, former documentaries chief for Hungarian Radio, is head of the Carl Lutz Foundation in Budapest. György was only six years old when he and his mother were taken to the Danube by the Arrow Cross to be shot. They had been in the Glass House on Vadász Street. He does not know how they were rescued or why, but he does remember asking one of their captors, “Nyilas bacsi [How long do we have to stand here]?”
PAUL VARNAI, one of the Strasshof child deportees, is now a journalist in Budapest.
JUDY YOUNG’S father, George Balazs, did not make it onto the Kasztner train. He had taught Hebrew at the Rökk Szilárd Street seminary and owned a bookstore in újpest, just outside Budapest, in the second-to-last deportation zone. Dr. Balazs was considered to be a scholar of such high standing that he and his family were offered places on the Kasztner train. He declined at the last moment because, Judy thinks, he suspected that the train was just another German ruse. Judy's parents were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau between July 6 and 8, 1944; she was almost one year old when her mother handed her to a relative to be cared for until they returned. They never came home again.