The ideals which characterized the great era
of the individual, such as humanism, justice, freedom and rationalism,
will give way to other slogans… and Judaism, which
has been attached to these ideals, will move on its road of agony.
REZSŐ KASZTNER, ÚJ KELET, JUNE 28, 1940
REZSŐ KASZTNER was born in 1906, in Kolozsvár, Hungary—soon to be Cluj, Romania, as the aftermath of the First World War divided and redivided the borderlands of the once powerful and widespread Austro-Hungarian Empire. This part of Transylvania had belonged, variously, to Romans, Saxons, Magyars (as Hungarians call themselves), and Romanians. Mindful of the surrounding history and their own Jewish ancestors, Rezső's parents blessed him with three names right from the start: Rudolf, with a nod to the German Saxons; Rezső, for the Magyars, and Israel, the name the biblical Jacob received when he fought the Dark Angel and won. It was a prophetic name for Rezső Kasztner, though he would have little time to savor his victory.
Kolozsvár, the largest city in Transylvania, has always had grand cultural and historical pretensions. In the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains that form Hungary's ancient protective border, Kolozsvár was cosmopolitan, its wealthy merchants reaching out east and west to fill the shops with Oriental silks and carpets, French and English antiques and formal wear, Belgian lace, Indian spices, and handcrafted musical instruments from Russia. Its grand avenues, shaded by plane trees, featured the yellow stone houses of the rich. Its main square boasted the largest church in Transylvania. Built in the fourteenth century, the church's massive walls were used to display the flags of the local Catholic nobility who had paid for its construction. Outside, there was an imposing statue of Hungary's last Magyar king, Mátyás, his bronze horse trampling on Turkish flags, celebrating his fifteenth-century victory over the invading Turks. Mátyás and his Black Knights were the embodiment of Magyar romantic pride, and the city of Kolozsvár was King Mátyás's birthplace.
Rezső grew up in a two-story brick house in the southern part of the city. His father, Yitzhak, a prosperous merchant, spent most of his days in the local synagogue, where he studied the Bible and debated various parts of the Talmud with other Jewish scholars. Rezső's more business-minded mother, Helen, ran the store. She was a born trader, an educated woman who aspired to a good life for her sons. Although she was religious, she decided to send all three of her boys to general high schools, where the curriculum was broad and included the study of languages. She recognized early that her youngest had the sharp mind, quick wit, and imagination to become more than a merchant. He was a slender boy with long, wavy, dark hair, the charming good looks of his mother, and his father's gift for intense concentration. By the time Rezső graduated from high school he spoke five languages—Hungarian, Romanian, French, German, and Latin.1
Helen Kasztner decided that Rezső would study to be a lawyer, but his passion was politics. He argued with his parents about the nature of Jewish privileges in Hungary, and he insisted that the Hungarian aristocracy, whose fancy carriages still pranced up and down Kolozsvár's streets, tolerated Jews only for their support against the other minorities in the country.2 In 1900, non-Magyar speakers, including the Romanians of Transylvania, were 46 percent of the population. Jews helped to balance the vote in favor of the Magyar ruling aristocracy. The Kasztner family, along with most of the other Jews in the country, ignored the mild, fastidious, often jocular anti-Semitism of the ruling classes as well as the grimmer resentments of the disenfranchised poor. When others talked of the ancient bond between the Magyars and the Jews of Hungary, Rezső scoffed. The bond would last only so long as it was useful, he said. The rancor would remain.
Like most of the fifteen thousand Jews of Kolozsvár, Helen Kasztner had been a supporter of the 1914–18 war effort, a proud Hungarian citizen. There had never been any doubt that the Jews would volunteer for the army. They fought with uncommon valor by the side of other Hungarians, allied with the Kaiser's Germany. Even the archdukes Joseph and Francis had expressed their appreciation to their Jewish subjects. There were Jewish majors and colonels and a Jewish general. The National Rabbinical Association had called on its members to offer up prayers for an early victory. Rabbis gave their blessings to all those who fought, and they reminded their congregations of their patriotic duty to support the war effort. Rezső's father, who had studied at the Bratislava yeshiva, or religious school, volunteered for the Hungarian army, where he served as a chaplain.
Many Hungarian intellectuals argued that the war had been the Hapsburgs’ own personal conflict, that the archdukes had dragged Hungary along, and that it was all about territory. Archduke Ferdinand's untimely death at the hands of a Hapsburg-hating Serb in 1914, while unfortunate, hardly seemed a clear cause for war.
Austria-Hungary lost the war, and the House of Hapsburg had to give up its centuries-old empire. Charles, the last Hapsburg emperor-king, abdicated, and both Austria and Hungary declared themselves republics. Adding to Hungary's woes, returning troops in 1919 were faced with a Communist republic that brought in the government of Béla Kun—a mob of vitriolic Communist reformers who confiscated property, abolished entitlements, nationalized industry, and hanged or shot real and imagined opponents. Kun imposed a range of reforms that echoed those of the Soviet commissars. After just four months (from March 21 to July 30, 1919), the Kun era ended with the arrival—on horseback—of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the former commander in chief of the unimpressive Austro-Hungarian fleet. The Hungarian army of stragglers that accompanied him was supported by a contingent of Romanians.
For Hungary, the war ended with the June 1920 Treaty of Trianon, a sideshow to the grand Treaty of Versailles of 1919. Hungary was carved up by the victorious Allies, who donated two-thirds of its historic territory and three-fifths of its population to the surrounding countries. The package of punishments included the granting of Transylvania to the Romanians, who had been ably represented at the bargaining table by a brilliant, beautiful, and promiscuous queen, King Ferdinand's wife, Marie.3 When all was done, Romania alone had gained more territory than was left of Hungary.
By the stroke of a pen, Transylvania became part of Romania, and Kolozsvár was now Cluj. To the Hungarians, the diminution of the country—the loss of Felvidék, or Upper Province, to the new republic of Czechoslovakia, of the Bácska area in the south to Yugoslavia, and of northern Transylvania to the Romanians—was unthinkable and unbearable. No other country had forfeited in such a spectacular way. The sheer magnitude of the loss haunted Hungarians for the rest of the twentieth century. The additional 180 million crowns in war reparations barely registered in the minds of the thousands who demonstrated in rage and disbelief throughout Hungary. Their government appealed in vain to the newly minted League of Nations, to the winning nations of Britain, France, and the United States, and to the neutral powers; it gained no sympathy. Horthy declared himself Regent and promised to return Hungary to its former size. In response, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Romania signed mutual defense treaties in case the Regent was serious about his intentions.
The postwar years were a desperate time for the poor: the peasants suffered extreme hardships, factory workers were forced to put in long hours, the homeless knew nothing but misery, and they all lacked food. In these terrible conditions, Horthy's new government was relieved to hit upon the perfect scapegoat for the country's ills—the Jews. With the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany and throughout eastern Europe, the Jews were a natural target. In Lithuania, Poland, and the Ukraine, there were murderous rampages against Jews. In Germany, Julius Streicher launched the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer (The Stormer) in 1923 with the headline, “The Jews Are Our Misfortune.”4 The First Anti-Jewish Law, the Numerus Clausus Act, was introduced in Hungary as early as 1920, the first anti-Semitic legislation in twentieth-century Europe, and the fourteen-year-old Rezső saw it as an indication of the times. It limited the number of Jews at universities to the same small proportion, 6 percent, that they represented in the population at large. The “closed number” law proved to be only a mild rebuff to the success of Jewish students and was allowed to lapse eight years later, but many saw it as a harbinger of tougher laws to come.
Rezső declared himself a Zionist at age fifteen. For him, it was a romantic rather than a political notion. “Zion” was the biblical name of ancient Jerusalem, where King David had built the fortified temple that was later destroyed by the Romans. The fifteenth-century poet Yehuda Halevi was the first to apply the term to the people of the Diaspora. The idea that the Jews would, one day, return to their ancient lands in Palestine attracted Rezső even before he discovered the writings of Theodor Herzl. The Hungarian-born Herzl wrote of the ingrained, centuries-old anti-Semitism among Europeans and declared that he understood the reasons for it. Although Jews had endeavored to blend themselves into their surrounding communities while preserving the faith of their forefathers, they had not, he said, been permitted to do so. They had continued to be viewed as “aliens,” as strangers. “Old prejudices against us lie deep… He who would have proof needs only to listen to the people where they speak with frankness… My happier co-religionists will not believe me till Jew-baiting teaches them the truth.” Herzl in 1896 foretold the disasters of National Socialism under Adolf Hitler and warned his fellow Jews to found their own homeland before it was too late.5
In 1919, Britain was mandated by the League of Nations to administer and thus control Palestine. In 1920, following another resolution of the League, the British government agreed to the creation of a “national home for the Jewish people” in the mandate territory, as spelled out in the Balfour Declaration. The Yishuv, as the Jews already living in Palestine called themselves, would now be represented to both the British authorities and the rest of the world by a new organization, the Jewish Agency, which was composed of the various Zionist factions in the pre-1930s World Zionist Organization.
Rezső's older brother Gyula, whose enthusiasm for the land of Zion had inspired young Rezső, emigrated to Palestine in 1924 to work on a kibbutz in the Valley of Jezre’el. Eighteen-year-old Rezső would have accompanied him, but he had not yet finished high school. Instead, he joined a youth group, Barissia, whose Zionist student members were training to become citizens of Eretz Israel, the new Jewish homeland that would rise from the old in Palestine. Within a year, he emerged as the group's leader. For the evening sessions around the campfire, he prepared wildly impassioned speeches about the new promised land. The training was not much different from that familiar to Boy Scouts everywhere; they learned to be comfortable in the uncomfortable outdoors and, in addition, picked up a few Hebrew songs along with some scattered knowledge of Jewish history and basic agricultural techniques. In the new land there wouldn’t be room for merchants or, for that matter, lawyers. Rezső was already a fine writer and a great debater. Even before he entered law school, he wrote articles for the Hungarian-language, Kolozsvár-based Jewish newspaper Új Kelet (New East), reporting on the development of British policies in Palestine.
Rezső was twenty-two when his father died. It was a perfect death for a religious man: Yitzhak died as he read the Torah in the synagogue on the seventh day of Passover.6 But for Rezső it meant he had to put off any ideas about emigrating. His mother needed him at home.
UNFORTUNATELY FOR the Jews of Hungary, the only country willing to listen to the Hungarians’ grief over their territorial losses was the other big loser under the Treaty of Versailles: Germany. Throughout the 1930s, as Hungary began to develop closer ties with Germany, discriminatory legislation against certain groups within Germany grew apace. In January 1933 Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist Party, or Nazi Party, was named chancellor by the addle-brained president of Germany, Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) Paul von Hindenburg. In April, Hitler's National Socialists took over the Prussian Secret Police to establish the Secret State Police (the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo) and assumed the powers to arrest, interrogate, and imprison all those they considered enemies, without the benefit of legal process. Violent attacks on Jews, Communists, and rival right-wing party members were becoming the norm in German cities.
Rezső Kasztner had read Hitler's Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in its first German edition, long before it was published in Romanian. German newspapers, most of which were regularly available in Kolozsvár, hailed it as the brilliant work of a young genius who had a clear-eyed view of how best to solve Germany's postwar problems. Kasztner found it to be the incoherent ranting of a poorly educated man, full of hate and ambition. Hitler's one consistent thought was his identification of “the Jew” as the chief enemy of his herrenvolk, the Aryan master race. Like David BenGurion,7 the chairman of the Jewish Agency Executive in Palestine, Kasztner realized that if Hitler came to power, war was inevitable, and that the Jewish people would bear the burden of much of Hitler's war.
To anticipate where the Hungarians would stand, all he had to do was listen to the Magyars in Kolozsvár's coffeehouses along the renamed streets, read their imported newspapers, and tune in to their radio. The rallying cry of Nem, nem, soha, “No, no, never,” had become the mantra of Hungarian politicians, who vowed never to accept the postwar settlement. Maps of historical Hungary, with its superimposed, dramatically reduced post-Trianon borders, decorated the walls in Hungarian schools. Even the youngest children were taught patriotic poems and songs about the return of the old territories. If Hitler went to war, Kasztner predicted in Új Kelet, Hungary would become Germany's ally, and Transylvania's Romanian adventure would prove short-lived.
After he graduated from law school, Kasztner joined the staff of Új Kelet. He was happy to start as a sports reporter, so long as he could write political commentary as well. He wrote about the Kun era's likely effects on Hungarian politics. Kun was from Kolozsvár, and some of his relatives still lived in the city. Unfortunately for all the Jews of Hungary, Béla Kun and many of his associates had been Jews. Traditional anti-Semites saw the whole Kun interregnum as a failed Jewish plot. The fact that many of Kun's victims had been wealthy Jews made no difference to those seeking someone to blame for the Communists’ few months in power.
Kasztner was hired as an assistant to Dr. József Fischer,8 a member of parliament, lawyer, and president of the Jewish Community of Kolozsvár. Fischer was one of the wealthiest citizens of the city. He was among the first to own a car; his family lived in a spacious villa with a range of housekeeping staff; he supported numerous charitable and cultural institutions, and, as a leading member of the National Jewish Party, he represented Romania's 700,000 Jews in Bucharest. A tall, patrician man with pale-blue eyes and a high forehead, he wore suits made to measure in Berlin or Budapest, hand-stitched shirts, and monogrammed gold cuff links. Fischer was respected in both Romanian and Hungarian society. He had noticed young Rezső Kasztner's articles in Új Kelet and encouraged him to continue his writing, even if his opinions drew few friends. Not only was Kasztner smarter and better read than others, but he also let everyone know that he was superior in wit and knowledge.
Fischer may have been the only other person whose intelligence the young man respected. Kasztner often dismissed people as stupid, incompetent, or intellectually cowardly. He was intolerant of his critics. “He had no sense of other people's sensitivities, or he didn’t care whether he alienated his friends,” said Dezsö Hermann, who went to law school with Rezső and, despite their ongoing battles, remained a lifelong friend.9 Rezső's sarcastic retorts to those who disagreed with his views about Hungarian feudalism and the old ways were famous even at the University of Prague,10 where his mother sent him to finish his studies. “He was a tough man to argue with,” Hermann said. “Back then, in Kolozsvár, Jews kept their heads down. Not Rezső.” Yet he was one of the few who could deal with the authorities as an equal.11
In local government, Kasztner was remembered as a “fixer,” a man others trusted to solve their problems, but he was too smart to be much loved even by those he had helped. Still, he was sought out. The Jews of Kolozsvár needed someone like Kasztner to help them survive the difficult years after Transylvania was ceded to the Romanians. They and their ancestors had supported the Hungarians through several centuries. Now they were a minority within the Magyar-speaking minority. They endured not only the wild, enthusiastic nationalism of the newly jubilant Romanians but also the occasional virulent bouts of anti-Semitism by the Iron Guard, a fringe group of fascists whose main objective was to acquire Jewish property and destroy the Jewish presence in Romania.
Kasztner managed to keep in touch with bureaucrats and gentile functionaries of all political stripes. He knew whom to bribe and how much to offer, whom to flatter and how. He succeeded in securing interviews with leading politicians. Much to the consternation of his readers in Kolozsvár, he interviewed members of the Iron Guard, including dedicated anti-Semites who were keen to share their ideas. Even then, he thought it was wise to know the enemy.12 In addition to his other languages, he spoke the form of courtly Romanian developed under Hapsburg rule that endowed all men in authority with grandiose titles and employed an antiquated form of address that ordinary folk had never learned.
People consulted Kasztner about small problems, such as not being paid for goods delivered, and large problems, such as the time in 1938 when he persuaded a magistrate to release an elderly Jew charged with attacking two policemen. The beefy gendarmes couldn’t refrain from laughing as they told their tale. The Jew, they said, had lunged at them with his cane. They failed to mention that they had pushed his wife off the sidewalk. Kasztner asked to have his client admitted to the courtroom. When the magistrate saw the frail old man, he knew the score. Yet, this being Romania in the thirties, everyone went on pretending. Kasztner knew how to play this game: he paid off the gendarmes, the charges were dropped, and the old man and his wife went home.13
Kasztner was outspoken, brash, unafraid. He could be seen striding toward government offices and into police headquarters, a pale, muscular, slender man, his dark hair swept back, his well-tailored black suit stark even during the summer heat, his tie loosened over his white shirt, the collar perfectly starched. He was confident, in a hurry, his briefcase casually swinging from one hand, the other ready to wave to all his acquaintances.
Given his quick rise in society, it was surprising that Kasztner did not leave behind his Zionism. For a Kolozsvár (Cluj) Jewish intellectual in the 1920s and ’30s, it was unfashionable to be a Zionist. The idea of emigrating to Palestine, to live on communal farms and work in hardscrabble fields barely retrieved from the desert, did not appeal to people who had been part of Europe for centuries. Jews enjoyed public life, commerce, banking, the arts and sciences; some of them were noted writers, humorists, historians. They were simply not cut out for farming. Nor was Zionism popular among the religious Jews, who often sought Kasztner's assistance when dealing with the authorities. Most of them, like Rezső's father, did not believe Jews should return to their homeland until the Messiah came.
When the opportunity arose to join one of the Palestinian Jewish political parties planning to form a government once a new Jewish state was established, Kasztner chose the Ihud14 (later known as the Mapai, or Labor Party). Its leaders, David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, were renowned statesmen who had traveled in Europe and spoken at large gatherings of Zionists. József Fischer had met Ben-Gurion and sent financial support for the agricultural efforts near Haifa. He had also written to Weizmann,15 who headed the World Zionist Organization office in London, reporting on the situation of the Jews in Romania. Fischer encouraged Kasztner to be active in the politics of the Yishuv without losing interest in the politics of Romania and Hungary.
Kasztner's fortunes gained a brighter patina when he married Fischer's daughter, Elizabeth. Fischer had allowed his spacious living room to serve as a meeting place for Kasztner and his group of young Zionists. Elizabeth—her nickname was Bogyó, or “Flower Bud”—used to hide behind the banister of the receiving rooms, waiting to see Rezső, who was ten years older. He would arrive in his overly formal suits late in the evening, long past her bedtime. In her lacy white nightgown, she had looked every bit the angel in her father's gold-framed Titian adorning the wall. Rezső felt a generation away from the fragile eighteen-year-old girl who became his bride in 1934. A pretty brunette, with milky skin and dark, curly hair that she wore stylishly long, Bogyó was quiet and shy in public. The fact that he had known her since she was a child would influence their relationship in the coming years. He was intensely protective of her, and she admired him unconditionally.
Bogyó had their new apartment decorated with skill and taste, then settled into the social life of Kolozsvár. She had studied ancient history, and she left political science to Rezső. Yet she said once that not even after he had read Mein Kampf could Rezső imagine how the next few years would affect their lives—and Rezső was better informed than most people in Kolozsvár. When Hitler became chancellor, Mein Kampf sold over a million copies, but the worst that Kasztner predicted was that Hitler would demand that all Jews leave the German territories.
Before the end of 1933, Jews in Germany were excluded from the universities and from most professions. On May 10, in the square next to the State Opera House in Berlin,16 a massive bonfire, accompanied by a long, hysterical speech by the future propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, incinerated thousands of books by Jewish authors deemed unfit for the new German ideology.
The September 1935 Nuremberg Laws, designed to protect “German blood and German honor,” defined Jews as a race, not as adherents to a religion. Henceforth, a Jew was a person who had two or more Jewish grandparents. Jews were no longer German citizens, and marriages between Jews and Germans were expressly forbidden. The British and American press found the new laws barbaric, even though polite anti-Semitism was accepted in both countries.17 The international community raised no voice of protest. Nor did any outside government interfere when, in defiance of the rules set out in the Versailles Treaty, German law forbade Jews from participating in trade and industry. As Kasztner saw it, the plans set out in Mein Kampf were inexorably being implemented.
By 1936 Hitler's anti-Jewish policies ensured that Jews in Germany had lost all their economic power. They were selling their businesses and real estate to non-Jews at ludicrously low prices. The World Jewish Congress reported that Germany wanted all its Jews to disappear. Almost a quarter of a million of them were already fleeing, exchanging their possessions for slips of paper that allowed them out of Germany and gave them permission to enter Palestine. In Palestine, the Hebrew-language newspapers talked of deals between Nazi officials and Jewish leaders that allowed German Jews to transfer at least a portion of their wealth if they left for Palestine. The notion that Germans would systematically murder innocent people seemed far-fetched. József Fischer maintained that a civilized nation like Germany, the home of Beethoven, Schiller, Goethe, and Thomas Mann, would not, could not tolerate acts of murder. Germans had been one of the most cultured peoples of the world, he said, quite unlike those peasants to the east who habitually committed atrocities against their Jewish neighbors.
Alarmingly, 1936 also marked the beginning of widespread riots in Palestine by Arabs protesting against the influx of Jews. By the 1930s, about 400,000 Jews were living in Palestine, and their number rose as the German persecutions escalated. In the face of Arab opposition, the British began to vacillate between appeasing the Arabs and increased Jewish immigration. When Rezső's brother Gyula went to Kolozsvár to visit his family in late 1936, the picture he painted of his new homeland was anything but the bucolic scene his mother had imagined.18 He had joined the Yishuv's underground army, the Haganah, as a small-arms instructor, to take part in the defense against Arab attacks on Jewish civilians. He anticipated that Britain would hesitate to live up to the promises of the Balfour Declaration.
In 1937 the Iron Guard bombed a Jewish theater during a performance in the Romanian city of Temesvár (Timisoara), a few hours’ journey from Kolozsvár. There were anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev and Bucharest, where indulgent policemen looked on and chose not to interfere. The persecution of Jews continued in Poland and the Ukraine. By 1937, almost 400,000 Polish Jews had emigrated. Winston Churchill, in the British House of Commons, spoke of Europe “drifting steadily… towards some hideous catastrophe.”19
On March 12, 1938, Germany occupied Austria in what Kolozsvár radio reported as a friendly, brotherly way, with cheering crowds welcoming the invading army. It was now the Austrian Jews’ turn to prepare for the Nazis’ expropriation policies. Over five hundred Jews committed suicide during the first few weeks of the Anschluss, the term by which the annexation of Austria became known. Új Kelet picked up the story from British newspapers about a family of six Jews in Vienna who, unable to face the fate of German Jews, chose instead to shoot themselves. Within a year, over 100,000 Austrian Jews had been “emigrated” by the well-oiled German state machinery. Some went to camps, some to Palestine, and others to the United States, Hungary, and other countries. Austrian villagers whose families had lived side by side with their Jewish neighbors for hundreds of years now proudly raised white flags declaring themselves Judenfrei—free of Jews.
In Nuremberg, a new exhibition opened under the title The Eternal Jew. It denounced Jews as a disease, a virus that infected Aryan races, and equated Judaism with Bolshevism. A film of the same title, featuring Jews as plague-carrying rats, went into production.
IN 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt bowed to public pressure in the United States and called for an international conference to facilitate the emigration of refugees from Nazi-controlled Germany and Austria. As a result, in July that year, representatives from thirty-two countries met for nine days at the luxurious Royal Hotel at Évian-les-Bains on Lake Geneva. Most of the delegates availed themselves of the excellent sporting facilities offered by the hotel as they hiked, fished, golfed, swam, and played tennis.
Two weeks before the conference, sixteen thousand German Jews had been arrested and sent to concentration camps. The prison camps for Jews and those in opposition to the government were full: Dachau near Munich, Oranienburg near Berlin, Buchenwald near Weimar. In the Buchenwald camp a recorded voice announced over the loudspeaker every night: “Any Jew who wishes to hang himself is asked first to put a piece of paper in his mouth with his number on it, so that we may know who he is.” Yet, as all the finely dressed gentlemen grandly assembled at the Évian Conference in France made sympathetic speeches to each other about the Jewish problem, immigration quotas at home stayed in place, and not one country offered asylum to the Jews of Europe. Later, those nations claimed they had had no idea how terrible the situation had become.
Canada had been reluctant even to attend the Évian Conference and, once there, committed to take only “certain classes of agriculturists.” In practice, that meant no Jews. Brazil would accept only those who could show certificates of baptism. Australia agreed to accept up to fifteen thousand Jewish immigrants over the following three years, but its delegate explained: “As we have no real racial problems, we are not desirous of importing one.” The British representative had similar concerns. Britain had already taken eight thousand, most of them children.
Only three small countries—Holland, Denmark, and the Dominican Republic—offered limited temporary asylum. The conference participants examined a proposal for a “large-scale settlement” in British Guiana that could accommodate up to 5,000 carefully selected “young people” at a cost of £600,000. Rhodesia could make room for up to 500 families over a “period of years.” Ambassador Myron Taylor of the United States announced that his country's full quota of 27,730 German and Austrian immigrants would be admitted. It was a ridiculously low number from the nation that had called the conference, but U.S. State Department officials later made sure that the rules were applied so rigorously that even this quota would not be met; fewer than 15,000 managed to gain entry. At that time, there were about 625,000 Jews under Nazi rule in Germany and Austria. When Germany invaded Poland, there would be another 3.5 million souls. There were more than 800,000 in Romania and hundreds of thousands in neighboring countries.
Having accomplished nothing, the delegates at the Évian Conference passed a unanimous resolution that they were “not willing to undertake any obligations toward financing involuntary immigration.” For Kasztner, the conference confirmed his suspicions that, other than Palestine, there would be few safe havens for Europe's Jews. And even there, the doors were closing.
AT THE END of September 1938, Hitler won another major victory without bloodshed. He convinced the British, French, and Italian leaders of Germany's right to the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia. The latter had mobilized its army after Hitler asserted this right, but a Munich gathering of “the great powers” accepted the reversion of Germany's agreements with the Czechs and its immediate occupation of the Sudetenland. The Czech government was not consulted and had little choice but to abide by the so-called Munich Agreement. On his return home, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain made his infamous announcement that he had achieved “peace with honour.”
On November 9, a new wave of violence swept over Germany. During the night, 191 synagogues were burned down or destroyed with axes and hammers. Tombstones were uprooted, homes were smashed, shops were looted, and Jews found in the streets were beaten. The Nazis called it Kristallnacht—Crystal Night, or Night of Broken Glass. In response to this brutality, the British government organized a series of children's transports out of Germany. Almost ten thousand children were taken into temporary homes in Great Britain. Most of them would never see their parents again. Within three months, in one of his characteristically shrill speeches, Hitler declared that war would lead to the “annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”20
On March 15, 1939, the German army occupied Bohemia and Moravia, the two western provinces of Czechoslovakia. In Hitler's view, this territory (including Czechoslovakia's capital, Prague) was part of the historical German Reich. Slovakia, which had been part of Hungary, thereupon seceded from Czechoslovakia and formed an independent nation under the protection of the Reich. It would now be governed by the fascist “People's Party,” split between the clerical, fascist, ultranationalist faction of Josef Tiso, a Catholic priest, and the pro-Nazi group of Vojtech Tuka, who became the first prime minister. Both factions were enthusiastically and bitterly anti-Semitic.
The partition of Czechoslovakia was celebrated by the Romanian and the Hungarian press as a way to end Germany's search for lebensraum, or “living space,” as outlined in Mein Kampf, providing new land and raw materials. Kasztner wrote in Új Kelet that he had foreseen it all: the acquisition of the Sudetenland was clearly outlined in Mein Kampf as a prerequisite to Hitler's vision of a vast, unified territory of German-speaking peoples. Hitler would be reaching out next to the more than 100,000 German speakers in Hungary. Meanwhile, like tossing a bone to a dog, he gave Hungary a chunk of Magyar-speaking Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia. Perhaps in gratitude for the gift, the Hungarian government enacted a stronger version of its lapsed First Anti-Jewish Law.
The Italians, encouraged by Hitler's success, invaded Albania. Benito Mussolini, the dictator of Italy whose ridiculous demeanor was fashioned after the rulers of ancient Rome, signed the pretentiously named Pact of Steel with Hitler in late May 1939.
PALESTINE HAD been the one sure destination for Jews fleeing from Europe, but, as German enthusiasm for Jewish emigration grew in the early years of the Reich, so did Arab resistance to Jewish immigration. The sporadic riots that began in Palestine in 1936 soon culminated in a full-scale Arab rebellion. About 600 Jews and some British soldiers were killed, and thousands more were wounded. The British government, determined to protect its access to the Suez Canal, “the jugular vein of the Empire,”21 and to appease the Muslims in its colonies to the south, commissioned a White Paper on a new policy for Palestine. Its effect was to limit Jewish immigration to 12,000 people a year. Peace with the Arabs was of greater strategic importance to Britain than peace with the small number of Jews in Palestine or the powerless Jewish population of Europe. The British authorities soon amended the number to a maximum of 100,000 immigrants over five years, including refugees who arrived without appropriate entry certificates, but after 1941 the Arabs would have a veto over any further Jewish immigration.22
It was a pitifully small number seen from where Kasztner kept watch over the rising tides of anti-Semitism in Europe. “Perfidious Albion,” he thundered in Új Kelet.23 In exchange for political expediency, Britain had closed the door to the only land still open to the Jews. On May 19, Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons and accused his own country of setting aside “solemn engagements” for “the sake of a quiet life.” Britain, he charged, had capitulated to threats from an Arab population that had been increasing at a rate faster than that of Jewish immigration. “We are now asked to submit to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and fascist propaganda.”
Refugees from Poland, Slovakia, Austria, and other countries, with little more than the clothes on their backs, poured over the borders of both Hungary and Romania. There were no particular rules affecting the fleeing Jews, though some pedantic border guards insisted on hearing a recitation of the Lord's Prayer to test whether a person was a genuine refugee or just a Jew.
Despite specific government orders forbidding any aid for refugees, Kasztner set up an information center in Kolozsvár. He solicited help from local charitable organizations, seeking temporary accommodation and collecting clothing and food, but his main concern was to provide Jewish refugees with a safe destination. As a Zionist leader, he sent telegrams to the Jewish Agency's Labor Zionist leadership in Tel Aviv, asking for help and funds to buy passages on ships and to pay bribes to local officials. The Jewish Agency's staff were much more sympathetic to refugees than their British-authorized administrative functions allowed, but they could not issue more Palestinian entry visas than the imposed limits, and these were never enough. The solution, they agreed, was to encourage illegal immigration. The Agency's Executive had already set up an office in Geneva to monitor the situation in Europe, and Chaim Barlas,24 head of its Immigration Department, moved to Switzerland to help with both legal and illegal immigrants. After the British White Paper, all Yishuv leaders supported illegal immigration, or aliya bet, as it became known.
To get people out of danger in Europe, the Jewish Agency paid the going rate for passage on forty-five ships between 1937 and 1939.25 In 1939 alone, thirty ships, legal and illegal, sailed from Romanian Black Sea ports through the Bosphorus and on to Palestine.26
Ever the brilliant fixer, Kasztner obtained exit visas from the Romanian government even as Britain stepped up its efforts to persuade officials not to allow the departure of the overcrowded boats. Kasztner was certain that the British would allow the refugees to land once they arrived in Haifa's harbor. Of course officials and shipowners would have to be bribed, and ships in the Romanian port of Constanta were still willing to sell passage to Istanbul and thence to Palestine.
Refugees continued to set out down the Danube and from ports on the Black Sea, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. As it happened, several thousand German Jews ended up in Shanghai, where no one had thought of setting immigration limits.
THE GERMAN-SOVIET Pact of August 1939 between Hitler and Russian leader Joseph Stalin turned out to be the prelude to the organized massacre of the Poles. Hitler cut off their escape route. It was a tricky situation for Hungary, now leaning on German might for its territorial and industrial ambitions but historically allied with Poland. After much hand-wringing, the Hungarian government decided not to join in the attack on Poland and hoped that Hitler would be forgiving.
On September 1, 1939, German armies attacked Poland. The Luftwaffe, the German air force, dumped bombs on both military and civilian targets. The grotesque carnage left behind on the battlefield proved to the rest of Europe that old-fashioned warfare had no chance against German steel. Thousands of Poles joined the armies of refugees flooding over the borders into Romania and Hungary.
In defiance of the Treaty of Trianon, Hungary launched a massive re-armament program. The Romanians, expecting an attack, began to build new fortifications and increased their already significant armed presence on their western borders, including in the city of Kolozsvár. Their open hostility to the Hungarians in the region added fuel to the saber rattling on both sides. Hungary began to talk about liberating its fellow Magyars.
Britain and France, obliged through their nonaggression treaties with Poland, declared war on Germany on Sunday, September 3. That day, close to midnight, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service reported that a German submarine, without warning or provocation, had torpedoed and sunk the British liner Athenia, which had been en route from Liverpool to Montreal. There were 1,400 passengers on board, and more than 100 perished. British parliamentarians were outraged, though the German naval commander later insisted it had been an innocent mistake. In fact, Germany was determined to disrupt British shipping lanes and had been building a range of submarines for that very purpose.
On September 21, Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Security Office, called all senior SS men in his special police force to a conference to tell them the process that had been decided on for eliminating the Polish Jews. Given the very large number of about 3.5 million, the German officers were to implement a staged plan, first to concentrate the Jews in designated areas in large cities, close to the railway lines; then to appoint Jewish councils made up of respected elders to ensure that German orders were followed, and finally to confiscate all Jewish belongings and show no mercy when inflicting pain.
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.