Probably in all 5703 years,1 Jews have hardly had a time
as tragic and hopeless as the one which they are undergoing now.
One of the most tragic factors about the situation is that while singled out for
martyrdom and suffering by their enemies, they seem to have been
forgotten by the nations which claim to fight for the cause of humanity.
SENATOR WILLIAM LANGER,
ADDRESSING THE UNITED STATES SENATE, OCTOBER 6, 1943
IN THE EARLY spring of 1941, when Rezső Kasztner first went to Budapest, the city seemed deceptively friendly and rather grand. At this time of year the Danube is majestic; its swollen floods rush over the lower keys, and the sound of swirling waters overwhelms the chamber music coming from the musicians in the cafés along the Danube Corso, the main street along the Pest side of the river. Well-dressed couples strolled on the shaded boulevards, and Váci Street, which runs parallel with the Corso, was filled with shoppers. The women preened under their expensive parasols; the men pretended to read their newspapers. Flower vendors offered violets and carnations, the blossoms’ strong bouquet mingling with the river's fishy smells. The massive Parliament Building—the largest in the world when it opened in 1902—with its gothic spires and voluminous baroque base, was still imposing enough to make a young man's ambitions soar. On the Buda side of the great river, the hills were covered in the light greens and yellows of the acacias. At the top of the hill, the Royal Palace gleamed almost white after the heavy rains.
The economy was booming, the theaters were playing Shakespeare, the stage at the Comedy Theater was taking risks with veiled references to the Nazis, and people were not afraid to laugh at Hitler jokes in revues at the jam-packed nightclubs. The opera season was in full swing with performances of Gounod's Faust and Mozart's Così fan Tutte and The Marriage of Figaro. The cafés and casinos were packed. Ordinary restaurants offered more interesting fare than even the best eateries in Kolozsvár. Here, it was easy to ignore the looming shadow of war. With the arrival of warm weather, people went boating on the Danube, the young filled the dance halls every night, and musicians played new, sad Hungarian love songs. At night, Pest lit up like a Christmas tree.
Jews were still an accepted presence in the city. Anti-Semitism was there in the newspapers, in cartoons, and in quoted speeches from parliament, where there were regular discussions of “the Jewish problem,” but it was well known that the right-wing press was paid by the Germans for its virulent attacks. The Social Democratic Party's Népszava (People's Voice) and the Magyar Nemzet (Hungarian Nation) provided more balanced reporting. Some accommodation was made after the latest round of anti-Jewish laws was announced, and they were more in name than in fact. Legal loopholes allowed most of the business empires to continue. Silent gentile partners were found for the country's ten largest industrial enterprises. All of them had been owned by Jews or, as in the case of most of the Weiss and Mauthner families, baptized Jews. The Weiss-Chorin-Kornfeld-Mauthner dynasties still controlled the Commercial Bank. Together with the Credit Bank, they held over 50 percent of Hungary's industrial production. The Weiss-Chorin group also owned the Weiss-Manfred Works industrial complex and had controlling shares in machinery, food production, armaments manufacture, and textiles.2 Ferenc Chorin, the head of the intermarried family group, was the most influential businessman in the country. The Regent himself, Admiral Horthy, had been wary of replacing the smart Jewish entrepreneurs who had helped rebuild Hungary after the war “with incompetent, vulgar and boorish elements… Such a project requires at least one full generation,”3 he told his Council of Ministers. While some of the ministers may have disagreed with the Regent's crude generalization about the arriviste gentile entrepreneurs who had been hoping to feast on the pickings from Jewish businesses, most of them agreed that the country's wealth had been in competent hands.
Although Protestant bishop László Ravasz's resounding radio sermons were heard all over the country on Sunday mornings, Kasztner found that they seemed less threatening here than in Kolozsvár. When the good pastor reached the inevitable anti-Semitic accusations in his lengthy orations, the big city did not appear to listen. Ravasz's obsession with the Jews killing Christ seemed more symbolic here than real. Perhaps because Ravasz was from Transylvania, he was taken more seriously there.
Budapest was a cosmopolitan city. Kasztner was sure it would provide the assistance he sought for the refugees who were streaming over the borders. His letters home expressed guarded optimism about the possibility of employment and the new life that Bogyó would join him to share.
He rented a small, two-room flat in a pension on Váci Street near Vörösmarty Square and the legendary Gerbeaud Restaurant. The pension was in a lovely old building: the guest lounge had well-worn Turkish carpets, soft armchairs, and on the walls romantic paintings of prettified landscapes. In the large communal dining room, a gourmet cook served hearty Hungarian and German meals on white linen tablecloths that were changed every day. There was a cards room for gin rummy and bridge in the evenings, and the pension's owner, Elizabeth Zahler, played the piano and sang popular love songs on some evenings. She was a beautiful woman, an occasional actress, a recent divorcée. Her pretty teenage daughter, Eva, danced for the guests when she was in the mood. Rezső, who had an eye for attractive women, always listened to the singing with rapt attention.4
Eva Berg (née Zahler) remembers that her mother found Rezső fascinating. Here was a well-read, highly educated man who seemed delighted with Elizabeth's company and eager to tell her about politics and even to share his interest in Zionism, a subject about which she knew little. Elizabeth was impressed by his broad-ranging knowledge of Hitler's record and his predictions for the future of European Jewry. Budapest, he believed, would remain the safest place in eastern Europe, and he repeated what he had been saying in Kolozsvár: the spreading of this war to the Soviet Union was inevitable. A dictatorship of the right could not allow a dictatorship of the left to continue as an ally—indeed, to continue at all. For a few weeks while Bogyó was still in Kolozsvár, waiting for word from Rezső, he and Elizabeth met every day, talking, going for long walks along the Danube Corso. She showed him Buda, the Castle District, the grand old houses, the gardens around the Royal Palace, the lovely Coronation Church.
Elizabeth and her father, a highly respected surgeon, were already donors to charities supporting the refugees. From the time of his arrival in Budapest, Rezső was dogged in his pursuit of assistance for the thousands of people streaming into the city. He went to the offices of all the Jewish organizations—the Orthodox, the Conservative, the Zionists—and to the cultural societies and the charitable foundations.
Kasztner had a letter of introduction from József Fischer to Ottó Komoly, the president of the Budapest Zionist Association and author of two books about the future of the Jews. Kasztner had read neither of them but was ready to compliment the author, should the occasion arise. A heavyset man in his forties, Komoly was an engineer, a decorated war veteran, a reserve officer in the Hungarian army. He was socially well connected and a committed Hungarian patriot, despite his support for a Jewish homeland. “It is not a contradiction,” he insisted. “There must be a Jewish homeland, but I am not likely to live there myself.” In that, Komoly was prophetic. He had been introduced to Zionism by his father, a close friend of Theodor Herzl, but he had not applied for an entry visa to Palestine.
As the two men drank ersatz coffee in tiny, elegant Herendi cups, Komoly confided that he felt comfortable in Budapest, though he warned Kasztner that the time would come when no Jew would find comfort there. “Too many of us have been in the window of social life,” he mused. “We have attracted the attention of other, less-fortunate segments of the population. A person is inclined to believe in the permanence of favorable conditions and is reluctant to pay attention to warning signs.”5 And that group, he thought, included himself.
Here, as in Kolozsvár, the Zionist movement had divided along the same lines as in Palestine and, eventually, as it would in Israel. On the left were the Ihud (later the Mapai), the Israeli Labor Party that had been running the Jewish Agency, in effect the government in Palestine; the socialist Hashomer Hatzair, a youth organization with small clubs (called “nests”) throughout Europe; the Maccabee Hatzair, another socialist youth movement that had been organized at Jewish high schools in the late 1930s; and Dror (affiliated with the Ihud), which, with its leadership in Poland, had been active on Hungary's eastern borders, helping to bring across refugees from both Poland and Slovakia. On the right was Betar, the youth wing of the Revisionists, which, led by Vladimir (Zeev) Jabotinsky, a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Palestine, fought bitterly with the Mapai leadership. Jabotinsky fostered armed resistance to the British in Palestine and to the Germans in Europe (though he, too, became involved in deal-making to save lives). In addition the Klal, or general Zionists, tended to focus on emigration to Palestine, and the Mizrachi, the religious Zionists, who saw themselves as the only intellectually qualified leaders of the Zionist movement. Despite all the alarming outside threats, the Zionists remained deeply divided along religious and political lines, each passionately opposed to the others’ points of view.6
Komoly encouraged Kasztner to seek out Miklós (Moshe) Krausz, the Jewish Agency's man in Budapest. If Kasztner's refugees needed Palestine entry visas, Krausz was the one to see. He was the undisputed boss of the Palestine Office and a convinced Mizrachi. “It would be best,” Komoly warned, “not to tell him of your own Labor sympathies.”
The Palestine Office was on Erzsébet Boulevard, near the National Theater. When Kasztner arrived, he had to fight his way up the wide staircase through the scores of people who stood waiting, leaning against the wall, squeezed along the iron handrails, talking in Polish, Slovak, Croatian, or Yiddish. He met a group of young Zionist pioneers, or halutzim,7 from Slovakia, who wanted everyone to hear of the brutal deportations they had witnessed in their own country. When the roundups began, they said, the old and the families with young children were lined up, and they all did exactly what they were ordered to do. Only a few young people tried to escape: they had heard stories from the Polish refugees, and they suspected a fate that their parents refused to believe. They hid in closets, cellars, and lofts, or in bushes along the riverbanks. They found the Hungarian border during the night.
Kasztner talked to one young girl who was crying, her soiled handkerchief bunched into her mouth to quiet the sound. Her younger sister, ten years old, a dreamer, she said, had been caught just steps from the border and thrown into a waiting truck by Hlinka Guard militiamen—Slovak fascists. The older girl had promised their mother she would not let go of her sister's hand, but she had been so nervous that she needed to pee all the time, and she had to be alone when she did it, that's how shy she was. Suddenly there had been searchlights and dogs barking, men shouting, and her little sister's shrieks, “Run! Run!” Now the older sister wanted to know how such a little girl would find her way out of a Polish concentration camp. “Have you ever heard of Treblinka or Sobibór?” she asked. No one, so far, had come back from those places. And how would she explain to their mother that she had let go of her little sister's hand?
Upstairs, the large auditorium was jammed with noisy, desperate people, waiting, hoping to be on the lists of those who had been chosen for the few Palestine entry certificates that were still available. Would there be more certificates, Kasztner wondered, now that most of the Palestine offices in other countries had been closed? Was there still an office in Prague? The one in Warsaw, he knew, had been closed by the Germans. Surely the British would open the borders to Palestine now that Europe was in flames?
After two hours of waiting his turn in the line, Kasztner, ignoring protests by Krausz's busy secretaries, barged into the great man's office. He was greeted by a huge desk completely covered with piles of paper, letters spilling off the surface onto the floor, where hundreds of unopened envelopes lay in mountainous heaps. Boxes of papers lined the walls.8
Krausz, a thin, bespectacled, middle-aged man with an unusually large head balanced on a long neck, popped up from behind the desk. He looked like a distressed turtle forced out of its shell and outraged at the unusual interruption. When Kasztner explained why he was there, Krausz said he was much too busy to discuss the problems of the Kolozsvár refugees. He had his own people to cope with; as Kasztner must have seen, there were more than a hundred of them on the stairs and more in the waiting rooms.9 Surely he was aware of the difficulties, Krausz complained. “Once the British mandate certificates are in hand,” he continued, “we need exit visas and official transit visas from neutral countries. Turkey will grant only forty to fifty a week. Yugoslavia has become impossible now that the partisans have made a few successful strikes against the Wehrmacht [the German army]. Italy refused.”10
“Spain?” Kasztner inquired.
“None for now, but maybe they will once the new consul arrives.”
When Kasztner asked about illegal immigration, Krausz countered angrily that nothing should be done to jeopardize the Agency's good relations with Britain and that the refugees would be processed strictly according to his instructions. Kasztner argued that there had been some contact between the Germans and the Revisionists and that the Ihud had been successful with a few shiploads of refugees—it was just a matter of funding the ships and bribing everyone along the way. Once the Jewish families reached Haifa, he was sure that the British would allow them to land.
Krausz was adamant that his office would abide by the rules. He had taken an instant dislike to the forceful, loud, and insistent Kasztner. He was used to the begging and cajoling of supplicants, not the aggressive, commanding tones of the young lawyer from Kolozsvár who thought he knew how to deal with functionaries. The dislike was mutual. Kasztner despised Krausz as a little man overly taken with the importance of his own position, one who paid more attention to bureaucratic minutiae than to the real plight of his people.
Kasztner offered to help with processing applications and seeking exit visas from the Hungarian government, an offer Krausz considered ludicrous. He didn’t need a coworker, and if he ever did, Kasztner would not be on the shortlist. Later, when Kasztner urged him to include entire families in a single certificate, Krausz complained to his superiors. He was not going to bend the rules, he proclaimed righteously. He had held his position in the Palestine Office for several years, and in all that time he had kept the peace between the religious Mizrachi and the Hashomer Hatzair by fairly apportioning certificates between the two factions. He was not about to change how he handed out the documents. Until recently, he had been reasonably comfortable in rewarding those he agreed with and in denying those he disliked. Kasztner was going to be in the second category.
Having failed with Krausz, Kasztner spent hours in waiting rooms on the various levels of 12 Sip Street, the headquarters of the Neolog Jewish congregation in Budapest and of the National Bureau of Hungarian Jews, where a number of Jewish functionaries had their offices. Their Great Synagogue on Dohány Street, behind the faded-red brick office building, was one of the architectural wonders of the city. Leaders of the congregation were lawyers, bankers, industrialists, and members of parliament. Most of them had taken the position, publicly, that they were opposed to illegal immigration, and they parroted allegations made in the anti-Semitic press that some “eastern Jews” could be spies. They were adamant in their declarations of loyalty to the Hungarian nation and their refusal to be classified with Jews from other countries. Hungary was, after all, a German ally. And Germany was at war.
Samuel Stern, the head of the National Bureau of Hungarian Jews, had also been president of the Jewish Community of Pest for almost fifteen years now. His office was on the fifth floor. He was a hofrat, or court councillor (an honorary title awarded to those who had performed great deeds for the state), and a social friend of the Regent, Miklós Horthy. Stern's rank demanded that he be addressed as “Excellency.” He had been head of the country's national food transportation company, which had distinguished itself by supplying the armed forces through the First World War and was still doing so now. Though semiretired from office, he remained one of the country's most highly respected businessmen. Given his rank and important connections, he had been reluctant, at first, even to meet Kasztner. It was dangerous to associate with someone who might be helping enemy aliens enter Hungary illegally. Kasztner assumed he had been honored with an audience only as a result of a phone call by Ottó Komoly.
Contrary to his elevated status in society, Hofrat Samuel Stern was a surprisingly small, elderly, birdlike man. However, he had the proud demeanor of one used to exercising power and had a strong, decisive handshake, one he proffered readily once Kasztner stood directly before his wide oak desk. After the introductions, Stern stayed safely behind his papers, gilt-framed family photographs, and large array of fountain pens, most of which he had received as gifts from grateful customers and political friends. It was difficult to imagine, in this high-ceilinged room giving onto the airy, sun-streaked courtyard, that anyone in this country was endangered or that Jews belonging to respected associations in other parts of Europe had already been murdered with their families. Yet that was what Kasztner knew, or suspected, from the stories he had been told by the refugees.
Stern listened to Kasztner's report on the difficulties faced by the Jews who had managed to escape from Slovakia and Poland. Once he heard the appeal, he folded his pale, manicured hands and smiled. He said that he, too, had heard the stories. There were many such Jews in Budapest and in the provinces. But he was also sure that providing funds for “a few” might jeopardize the interests of the many. Hungary's Jews could not afford to be allied with the refugees, who were so different from them that they seemed to belong on another planet. Many of them still wore the distinctive fur-trimmed outfits of the backward, the uneducated, he said. They were leftovers from the fifteenth century. Hungarians had nothing in common with them.
To Kasztner's alarm, Stern said he was in general agreement with the government's stance on the over-representation of Jews in certain professions. It was unreasonable to expect, with only 6 percent of the population, that Jews should make up 20 percent of the professions. They held too many prominent positions, and they were too proud of their accomplishments. “Vanity,” he said, “too much vanity.” He echoed the attacks the daily press had made recently about Jews having become overly conspicuous in the intellectual life of the country. The laws, as they had been imposed, were not “unreasonable,” given that such a large proportion of millionaires in Budapest were Jews. Certain exceptions to the new laws had already been granted, and more, he knew, were on the way. Besides, he declared, the laws were merely a sop to the Germans, a way for the government to pacify its more powerful, belligerent neighbor.
Stern viewed the labor service imposed on able-bodied Jewish men as a necessary evil. If Jews were not to be part of the regular army, at least the labor brigades gave them a chance to help the “homeland.” It was honorable. Jews, who were only a segment of the service, could prove themselves both reliable and hardworking. Indeed, he noted, both he and his organization had helped collect money and clothing for the men there.
When Kasztner mentioned the ghettos in Poland, Stern said he could not imagine that such things could happen in Hungary, where Jews were integrated into society at all levels, and they did not live in isolation as so many of Poland's Jews did. As Hungarians, Jews shared the goals of the majority for the well-being of the nation. It was only their religion that was different. He was impatient with the Zionist assertion that Jews should make their way to another “homeland.”
Before long, Stern's forbearance with Kasztner began to wear thin. He stood up as soon as Kasztner began to talk about the unique problems faced by Jews in Transylvania. For him, the meeting was over.
Kasztner walked down the staircase, past the notice board announcing that, in the evening, there would be a Mozart concert in the auditorium with a visiting opera singer. Bizet's Carmen was coming to the main stage of the Wesselényi Street Goldmark Hall, Verdi's Rigoletto and La Traviata would be the main attraction the following month, and there would be poetry recitals in the main hall on Sip Street.11 Obviously the Jewish Community of Budapest was not concerned about the fate of Jews elsewhere.
Kasztner knew that the people at greatest risk in the city were the refugees. Without official papers, they could be returned to the German-occupied areas. Though their numbers were not recorded,12 there were thousands in refugee camps, and the authorities could return them to their home countries at any time. Others seeking asylum in the city were arriving every day: groups of orphans whose parents had been taken to concentration camps; families who had nowhere to hide and little hope of getting help from the official Jewish organizations. Kasztner was now gathering funds not only for the people back home but also for the refugees here, in Budapest.
Kasztner found kindred spirits at the Bethlen Square Hungarian Jewish Assistance building. Its large storerooms supplied clothing, flour and margarine, dried fruit, and cans of vegetables to the refugees and the poor of the city. Its free kitchen served daily rations. This agency received funds from the American Joint Distribution Committee,13 or “the Joint” as it was affectionately called, and a great deal of help from the rich Jews of the city. Baroness Edith Weiss, eldest daughter of the banker-industrialist Manfred Weiss, volunteered there. As a member of one of the wealthiest families, she was used to privilege and comfort, to influence in government. Now she ran interference with the authorities and bargained with tailors and dressmakers to provide winter coats for the men in the labor battalions. Even in these difficult times she could open doors in ministers’ offices.14
In the courtyard of the Orthodox Jewish headquarters, a short walk from Sip Street, Kasztner met Baron Fülöp von Freudiger, a soft-spoken, patrician man with a long-suffering smile, who was obviously used to being petitioned. A wealthy industrialist—the family owned several textile factories—Freudiger was known for his generosity and his support for charities. His group already ran a soup kitchen and food bank for the refugees. He had little time for his visitor, or any Zionist, but he encouraged Kasztner to come back over dinner when the refugee halutzim gathered there to eat and talk. Freudiger's first impression of Kasztner was of a young man too much in a hurry to listen to advice.
Ernő Szilágyi met Kasztner two or three months after the latter arrived in the capital in the spring of 1941. He thought that, already, Kasztner was on a personal mission to save people. The notion of becoming a leader, someone remembered later as a savior of Jews, had been on Kasztner's mind. Given what was happening to the Jewish communities of Europe, it was a laudable ambition. The two men met in a late-night café-cum-bar, a gathering place for both religious Zionists and the Hashomer Hatzair. Szilágyi, a scholar of Greek and Roman history, had taught at the university, where he garnered respect among his peers as a philosopher and as an expert on the Bible. Though he was a dreamer, he had been able to reach an agreement with Krausz to supply the youth wing of his Hashomer faction with a share of the much-sought-after Palestine certificates.
GERMANY LAUNCHED its attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Special killing squads, Einsatzgruppen, followed the German army and organized local collaborators to assist in the systematic mass murder of the Jewish populations in the territories they passed through—Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the Ukraine.
On June 26, after unmarked planes bombed the city of Kassa,15 Hungary followed suit and declared war on the Soviet Union. The news blared through all the radios in Budapest, celebratory bands marched along the Great Boulevard, and six-foot placards everywhere called on young men to sign up for the battles to come. The right-wing political parties launched ferocious new attacks in their newspapers on Jewish industrialists and black marketers, and, without realizing the contradiction, they also attacked Jews as Bolshevik sympathizers and agitators.
After declaring war on the Soviet Union, Romanian armies occupied the territories they had earlier reluctantly ceded to the USSR at Hitler's insistence. Jews from the villages and towns of Bessarabia were driven hundreds of miles to the east. The sick, the elderly, the very young children, and others who could not keep the pace were shot or beaten to death on the march. In the reconquered areas of Bessarabia and Bukovina, where the majority of Romania's 760,000 Jews lived, 100,000 of them were murdered. Under pressure, the Germans agreed to send another 190,000 Jews into the conquered Ukraine (Transnistria), where they set up prison camps in the area near the River Bug. Most of the inmates froze or starved to death.
On February 16, 1941, the New York Times ran an advertisement over Ben Hecht's byline: “for sale to Humanity, 70,000 Jews, guaranteed human beings at $50 a piece.” Hecht was alluding to a purported Romanian offer to let Jews go to Palestine. “Romania is tired of killing Jews,” he went on. “It has killed one hundred thousand in two years …”
Refugees from Romania and the Ukraine were now streaming across the Hungarian borders, recounting atrocities in the Ukraine that amounted to mass murder. The Einsatzgruppen forced women and children to dig ditches and undress, then shot them and threw them into those same mass graves. They covered the bodies—some of them still alive—with lime, repeating the process until whole villages were emptied of Jews.
BOGYÓ ARRIVED in Budapest in late July 1941. Rezső felt that it was safer there than in Kolozsvár, and Budapest was farther from the Soviet border. There had been little change in Budapest after war was declared. As more German officers crowded into the city to enjoy their leave, hotels and restaurants flourished and even the lesser-known bands had the opportunity to play the maudlin tunes that Germans liked. “Lili Marlene” and “Gloomy Sunday” were such favorites that no orchestra along the Danube Corso could avoid playing them every hour.
Rezső had urged his father-in-law to move from Kolozsvár with the whole extended family but failed to persuade him. Although József Fischer had lost his law practice, he was still confident that, ultimately, reason would prevail. Besides, as the president of the Jewish community in the city, he felt responsible for those who trusted him. There had been speculation that the Romanian government would be willing to sell a portion of the Jews it had deported to Transnistria for some kind of gain. And Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization, had petitioned the British to allocate all the remaining certificates from the quota set for emigration to Palestine for use by the persecuted Romanian Jews.16
Bogyó settled into the Váci Street pension with a trunk full of her treasured belongings: her Limoges china, a heavy silver service and coffee set, hem-stitched linen tablecloths, a couple of her favorite paintings in gold-leaf frames, a small bronze statue of a dancing girl, a fine porcelain sculpture of a pensive peasant in traditional Transylvanian garb, and silk-weave rugs. She tried to re-create some of the coziness she had known, though she did not feel that this busy city could ever be home.17 With Rezső out the door at dawn and away until dark every day, she stayed in bed until noon, wrote long letters to her parents, read voraciously, and tried not to feel lonely.
OTTÓ KOMOLY introduced Rezső Kasztner to another key figure in the effort to help the refugees. Sam Springmann was a diminutive, balding, talkative man in his midthirties and, like Kasztner, had been involved with the Zionist movement since his teens. Amiable and slightly disheveled in appearance, he was a diamond dealer, watchmaker, and jeweler. He and his parents had arrived from Poland after the First World War. His father was a war veteran, and Sam had been supporting the family since he was a boy. He made unique, diamond-studded brooches for wealthy clients, including the Mauthner girls and other members of the Chorin, Kornfeld, and Weiss families.18 All the money he made went to his relatives and friends in Poland. He told heartrending tales about the Lodz ghetto, where his relatives were incarcerated—or had been, when he had last heard from them. But that was six months earlier, and his most recent letter had come back unopened. The courier he had paid (a member of the German Abwehr, or military intelligence service) could not find Springmann's relatives.19
Springmann's method was to bribe a variety of people—but mostly German officers—to carry messages and food packages to Lodz and other ghettos in Poland. Since April, the ghetto had been sealed. No Jew could get out without German authorization, he explained, and no one was authorized to leave unless he had work in one of the German-run factories. This winter would be terrible in Lodz. There was never enough food or clothing, and the children were dying.
When Springmann received a postcard from Istanbul in August 1941 with the words “regards from your cousin in Palestine” written on the back, he immediately understood that the Jewish Agency was seeking a contact in Budapest.20 He began to send regular messages to Istanbul, he told Kasztner, and the Yishuv responded with some funds—though never sufficient. A few of the young halutzim had volunteered to cross the border into Poland with false passports, to carry supplies to the ghetto. But no one could ever be sure whether they would make it back.
Though he still had a rough Polish accent, Springmann traveled on a Hungarian passport. He had been able to find a pleasant flat in the city through the Polish government-in-exile, which was still favored by the Hungarians. The Poles in that group found his courier and news services more reliable than their own, and their officials supplied him with funds for their colleagues who were still in Poland. Curiously, some of the Abwehr agents were willing to deliver packages to resistance members in Poland, and they were able to get into some concentration camps where former Polish officers were held.
Sam Springmann introduced Kasztner to Joel Brand in the Pilvax Café, a few doors from the Váci Street pension. As left-leaning Zionists and members of the Ihud, he joked, they were likely to end up in Palestine, so they might as well start organizing a political party here. On a more serious note, he explained that Brand, too, was involved in helping fugitives. He even had a name for their enterprise: tiyul, or excursion. The ultimate tiyul was, of course, the one that would take the refugees to Palestine or another country willing to accept them. For now, however, they needed accommodation in Budapest.
Brand, who had been born in Transylvania but educated in Erfurt, Germany, spoke passable Hungarian with a heavy German accent. He was broad-beamed, slope-shouldered, with a ruddy complexion and an easy smile, his reddish-brown, curly hair flopping over his forehead. He was about the same age as Kasztner but looked older. He had certainly lived a more adventurous life. In his late teens, he had joined the Communist Party, and for a while he had been a sailor in the Americas, traveling to the Bahamas and all over Southeast Asia. He had also been to the United States, Japan, and the South Sea islands. He gave the impression that he had been an agent for the Communists. Certainly he had served time in a German jail for his political affiliations, and he had been expelled from Germany after a battle between the Communists and Hitler's “Brown-shirts,” the Nazi Party militia. Briefly, Brand found work in Romania, but he had to leave after bragging about his Communist activities to a bar filled with Romanian security agents.21 Fortunately, Transylvania had been Hungarian when Joel Brand was born, and that allowed him to keep his Hungarian citizenship and find work in Budapest. He had decided he wanted to leave Europe again and, in his efforts to obtain a highly prized Palestinian immigration certificate, he had taken crash courses in Zionism and agriculture.
Brand jumped to his feet when Springmann made the introductions, grabbed Kasztner's hand, and looked him in the eye. “Excellent to meet you,” he announced. “Sam told me about you. Says we have a great deal in common.” He grinned, took Kasztner by the shoulder, pushed him onto a chair, his other hand waving to the waiter for another glass. His bottle of wine was already half empty.
He told Kasztner that he now worked for his wife's gloves-manufacturing business as a sales representative, calling on shops throughout Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. It was not a real job, just something to tide him over these rough times. His father had founded the Budapest telephone company and, when Joel first arrived in the city, he had been able to work there. Now that sort of job had become impossible. Being a salesman provided him with an income and a chance to spend time in the coffee-houses, better restaurants, and old clubs where he had become a favored client. The people he met in these places brought him useful contacts. Joel loved to play cards, had a knack for poker, and often won in a single night more than his salary for the week. Besides, he said, much to his wife's surprise he had turned out to be exceptionally good at sales. Hell, their business thrived because of him.
A man with a friendly disposition, Joel Brand had a reputation for being able to procure things that had become difficult to buy. He could still find silk stockings and extra-fine flour for cakes; he could connect you to the right supplier for filter-tipped cigarettes, Parisian scented soap, and delicate lipstick colors. He was a generous tipper. More important in these times, he could get things done.
Kasztner's conversation, unlike Brand’s, was about politics. He had been fascinated by the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939. Assuming rightly that Brand hadn’t read Mein Kampf Kasztner was pleased to give his summary of its five hundred pages. He had not only read the original edition but could now make comparisons between it and the newly expanded German best-seller. He assumed that Stalin, like Brand, hadn’t bothered to read the book and was therefore equally ignorant of Hitler's ideas. Had Stalin read it, perhaps he would not have signed the pact. Kasztner talked about the price Hungary would pay in armed assistance to the Germans for the regained territories in Upper Province, the Bácska, and Transylvania.
Despite his initial irritation with Kasztner's intellectual swagger, Brand invited him to dine at the Mátyáspince, an expensive, old-world restaurant where the headwaiter knew which table Brand liked and which waitress he favored. While they waited for the menus, Brand ordered another bottle of German red wine and salted pretzels.
Kasztner, who tended to be private about his personal life and careful about what he said when he met people for the first time, was amazed at Brand's fast-talking, open ways. As he listened to Brand's patter, he realized that his companion knew people on the fringes of society—some of whom could be very useful for saving lives. Brand, like Sam Springmann, used extensive connections among agents in the intelligence services—several Hungarian agents in addition to the Germans—to smuggle Jews out of Poland and Slovakia. Ottó Komoly had asked him to help send documents across the borders. “The only Zionist organization left in eastern Europe is the one in Budapest,” Brand told Kasztner. “Believe me, despite everything, Ottó is still an influential man.”
By late September 194, most young Jewish men were in labor service. Young non-Jewish men were in the army. When Brand asked Kasztner how he had avoided the service, the answer was less than honest. Kasztner said he had done his time and was on leave. Brand was proud of having successfully evaded labor service. In 1941 it was still possible to buy the necessary medical certificate, he said. He confessed with a laugh that he had been diagnosed as diabetic.
Joel Brand remembered Rezső Kasztner from that first meeting as an intense, rather overbearing man who liked to dominate the conversation. Kasztner was restless, impatient, barely listening to what someone else had to say. But Brand, too, was intensely interested in helping other people, and those were times when it was hard to find men like that.
A few days later, Brand took Kasztner home to meet his wife. “You’ll want to meet the boss,” he said, joking, but he was only half joking. Other than his doing a reasonable job of sales, she made no demands on him, he told Kasztner. He was free to enjoy life as he chose—no questions asked, no need to go home for supper. It had been an arranged marriage, a marriage of mutual convenience. Hansi Hartmann had wanted to go to Palestine, and he had been sure he could get a visa both for himself and for his wife. Brand, in turn, had wanted a job while they waited.
Hansi Brand, as she was now called, had learned how to make knitted and leather gloves from her aunt, an enterprising woman with no children of her own. The aunt had babysat the Hartmann girls, and, while they were there, she taught them how to use knitting and sewing machines. Hansi's parents had provided the money to start the small business. Now, ten or twelve women worked for her at any one time, taking home leather bits and patterns, then returning with sewn gloves. The fashion for mixed leather-and-knit gloves had helped expand her business. Recently she had added men's socks and women's stockings. No one went hungry while in her employ, and the business was thriving. The Palestine entry certificate had not arrived, but the Brands could afford to put the journey off for a year or two.
Their apartment was pleasantly furnished: parquet floor with colorful rugs, lamps with hand-painted shades, a long wooden table with a few framed photos, deep armchairs—a place designed for comfort. When the two men arrived, she was sorting clothes from a shipping crate onto the floor of the dining room. Hansi, Joel explained, was setting aside garments for new arrivals. They were expecting a group of refugees from Poland.
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back to the entrance, her head tilted to one side as she examined each item and put it into one of the piles she had created. She was pretty in a dark, mid-European way, perhaps a little too fleshy, but well-proportioned, round-hipped, big-breasted, long-legged. Her face, when she looked over her shoulder, barely acknowledging the two men in the room, was a pale oval, her hair tied back in a knot at her neck. She stood up slowly, brushing loose strands of hair from her face, her movements agile, like a cat’s. She wore a loose-fitting, light-blue summer dress with a row of pearl buttons decorously closed all the way to her neck.
Rezső had a strange feeling that they had met before, as though he had known her but half forgotten. He followed her with his eyes as she stood and stretched, then she disappeared into the kitchen for coffee and cakes.
Joel had told her about him, she said when she returned and curled into the armchair by the standing lamp—about his hopes for finding ways through Joel's connections to rescue people. She had dark, expressive eyes and a warm smile, lively, welcoming, not the busy business-woman he had expected.
She had paid a man named József Krem, a Hungarian army intelligence officer and part-time smuggler, to bring a family of Slovaks safely across the border. Krem had been one of Joel's coffeehouse finds, an inveterate gambler, always in debt, a man few would have trusted to deliver on promises. But she had trusted him, and her faith had really paid off when her sister and brother-in-law were arrested in July 1941. On orders from the government, Jews who could not prove they were Hungarian citizens were driven across the border into occupied Polish Galicia and turned over to the Germans. Many of them were refugees from Poland and the Ukraine, but some, like Hansi's sister, were Hungarians who had not bothered to get citizenship papers because they had lived in the same area for centuries and had had no reason to prove to their neighbors that they were who they said they were. These people were now driven into Poland at the rate of about a thousand every day and handed over to the Germans. Hansi had paid Krem what he demanded to rescue her sister and husband, not once but three times, and he kept returning empty-handed. Kamenetz-Podolsk in the Ukraine, where they were, was difficult to reach, and there German Einsatzgruppen were everywhere, trigger-happy, indoctrinated young men who seemed to enjoy shooting people.
When Krem finally arrived in the village, he found mass confusion; it seemed impossible to locate these two people when he was armed with nothing but a name and a couple of tiny black-and-white photographs. But on his last return trip, just a day before a massacre fated to occur there, Krem had found Hansi's sister and her husband. It had been worth the money, Hansi said. Few of the eighteen thousand people who ended up near Kamenetz-Podolsk survived. On August 27 and 28, Krem told the Brands, they were machine-gunned in rows, one hundred at a time, and stacked into shallow graves.
Joel, then, offered Krem's services to other families who wanted to send letters and packages into the Polish ghettos, find relatives in Austria, or buy information about people in concentration camps. And through Krem, the Brands met other individuals with similar skills.
Joel's smuggling even extended to bringing home men from the labor service. There were thousands on the Soviet front, and they all needed news from home, medicines, and extra food rations. “It was often necessary for me to go into the enemy camp to rescue men who were in danger,” Brand wrote later, “and I then had to join in drinking bouts with the enemy's agents. Sometimes this made me sick, but when my nerves failed, Komoly reassured me.”22
On his second visit to the Brands’ apartment, Rezső was surprised to find Hansi with a baby on her lap and a toddler playing on the floor nearby. The toddler was chubby, with tiny tufts of red hair like Joel’s.
“I thought you said this was a business arrangement,” Rezső said when he and Joel were alone again.
“This one,” Joel acknowledged with a laugh, “has an upside.”