Though times had changed considerably since
I had been aide-de-camp to His Majesty Emperor Francis Joseph,
my concepts of honour, law and justice… had not altered…
It was not my task to stand in judgement of the man who had shown
nothing but goodwill towards Hungary.
MIKLÓS HOR THY, WRITING ABOUT A DOLF HITLER IN MEMOIRS1
We stumbled into world history…
JOEL BRAND2
HUNGARY's THIRD Anti-Jewish Law, of August 1941, prohibited marriage between Jews and non-Jews. Its punitive provisions were explained by declaring that mixed marriages were harmful to the “national soul.” It went on to say: “They brought into a position of influence that Jewish spirit whose harmful effect we have seen. There is no doubt about the failure of the experiment in assimilation. We now want to exchange this for disassimilation.”3
The new law allowed for just a few exceptions. A person was not considered to be Jewish, for example, if both his parents were Christians at the time of his birth and if he was, therefore, “born” a Christian or was converted before the age of seven. This loophole allowed many members of the country's establishment the chance to have themselves classified as bona fide Christians, thus saving them the embarrassment of having to declare their marriages to non-Jews invalid.
IN OCTOBER 1941 Rezső Kasztner was present at a meeting of Jewish leaders, a dinner at the elegant Corso-Pension Restaurant in Pest. It was attended by a few members and former members of the Hungarian and Romanian parliaments, including former members of the Hungarian upper house. “My aim,” Kasztner recalled, “was to save Jewish lives, help the refugees, and prepare for the self-defense of the Hungarian Jews.”4 Yet no one he met that night was willing to contemplate that Hungarian Jews might need to be defended. Even without that message, however, Kasztner would not have been a popular presence at such a gathering. He was too brash, too persistent, too “country” by Budapest standards. He was also unknown. He lacked refinement, patience, respect for opposing opinions, never mind respect for his social superiors. Kasztner was not the sort of man who recognized anyone as his superior.
As Kasztner had already learned from Samuel Stern, the educated, politically astute, influential members of the Jewish community thought they belonged to this land and its causes as much as any of their Christian neighbors did. Hadn’t they fought alongside them in the last war? they reasoned. Wasn’t everyone in this room proud of his war dead and his decorated war heroes? And despite the rumors, many of them continued to take the position that they were opposed to illegal immigration and refused to be classified with Jews from the east. Hungary was, after all, at war with some of those countries.
Over dinner, Kasztner told the assembled leaders of the dispossession of German and Austrian Jews, of the mass executions in the Ukraine and the Baltic States, of the gassing trucks, of the massacre near Kamenetz-Podolsk. They did not believe him.
He talked about the Iron Guard in Romania attacking Jewish homes and burning farms; of the grotesque display of the dead in butcher-shop windows in Bucharest; of the rapid spread of violent anti-Semitism, the stench of dead bodies in side-tracked wagons in the countryside; of public hangings and shootings in the streets. The diners who had heard of the murders shook their heads in disgust. Most of those killed, they thought, had been from the east, too easily identified by their long black coats and traditional black hats. They would not accept that the Hungarian government had sanctioned the murders at Kamenetz-Podolsk. Such things would never happen to Hungarians—not in this civilized society. Romania was different. What can you expect of the Vlachs? And the Ukrainians? Savages.
When Kasztner recalled the skepticism of the assembled Jewish bankers and industrialists, their reluctance to consider the possibility that Jews were being murdered in Europe for no reason other than that they were Jews, he realized that they would remain passive if they found themselves faced with Adolf Eichmann and his death squads. The Hungarian Arrow Cross Party held daily parades in Budapest, demanding that the government take more decisive action against the Jews, yet most Jews remained unprepared for a future that would rob them of their dignity.
Still, the Budapest Va’ada Ezra w’ Hazalah (Aid and Rescue Committee) was born, at least in theory, at the Corso-Pension Restaurant that night. It took several more months and Ottó Komoly's personal involvement for it to become official. In his own way, Komoly had been working to help refugees for over a year now. He used his connections with the public service, Jewish members of parliament (in those days there were still a few), and a handful of other sympathetic parliamentarians, including Endre Bajcsy-Zsilinszky. In the 1920s, Bajcsy-Zsilinszky had been a founding member of a party whose chief platform was the defense of the “Hungarian race,” but he had aged well. A decade later he had started his own anti-Nazi newspaper, Szabadság (Liberty). He had joined with the Social Democrats to fight fascists and defend the rights of all citizens, irrespective of race. He was the man to whom Joel Brand had gone when he first learned of the mass killings in Kamenetz-Podolsk, and he had raised the matter in parliament and demanded an explanation from the perpetrators.
It may have been Ottó Komoly's influence and Rezső Kasztner's continued petitions that helped to finally mobilize antifascist members of parliament to hold a mass rally on March 15, 1942, at the historic Petfi őMonument in Budapest, overlooking the Danube. Sándor Petőfi, a much-loved poet of romantic and patriotic verse, had died a martyr's death during the Hungarian uprising of 1848 against the Hapsburg Empire. His statue was symbolic of the free spirit of the country and its independence from Germany. Bajcsy-Zsilinszky was one of the speakers at the rally.
Komoly also knew the editors of all the liberal newspapers, and he frequently lunched with the editor of the Social Democrats’ Népszava. Komoly had remained friendly with Samuel Stern and his group of influential Jewish leaders; Stern and his friends still enjoyed the Regent's company. Without Komoly, as Brand recalled, the Va’ada would have lacked the authority to act in the name of the Jewish community. Komoly's presence lent the Aid and Rescue Committee an air of respectability.
GREAT BRITAIN declared war on Hungary on December 7, 1941, the same day that the Japanese attacked the United States Navy fleet in Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war in the Pacific. Then Hitler, tied to Japan through the Tri-Power Pact, declared war on the United States on December 11. The next day, the American ambassador departed from Budapest, as the United States no longer considered Hungary an independent nation, though it did not formally declare war on Hungary until the following June.
By Christmas that year the German attack on the Soviet Union had ground to a halt near Moscow. The mighty panzer divisions were now fighting defensive battles against the Soviet armies, as the infamous Russian winter overtook Hitler's generals. The formerly invincible German military might was stretched on two fronts, and a powerful new player, the United States, had been forced into the war. Once again, Hungary had allied itself with Germany—and its fate was tied to that of the Third Reich.
In Budapest, where such details of the war news were not readily available, people tuned in to the BBC and continued to hope that the war would soon be over.
IN JANUARY 1942, Hungarian military units executed more than 3,000 civilians in the recently occupied part of Yugoslavia, including 140 children who, according to one of the commanding officers, “could grow up to be enemies.” Joel Brand found out from one of his contacts that close to a third of those murdered had been Jews. The thin pretext that they were likely to have joined the Serb partisans was no more than a nod to the government authorities who had demanded an explanation. After a military tribunal apportioned blame, all the commanders of the infamous campaign found refuge in Germany.
The flood of refugees into Hungary now included Jews from the Délvidék, or “southern lands,” as Hungarians referred to those parts of Hungary that had been awarded to Yugoslavia by the Treaty of Trianon. The new arrivals had terrible tales of mass executions: people had been shoved into the icy waters of the Danube. The men in charge of this so-called military expedition continued the killings even after they received orders to stop.
The Brands’ apartment remained the first address known to the refugees. Soon it was filled with stunned escapees who wanted someone to hear what they had endured. For a few days, Hansi and the children went to the Majestic Hotel on Swabian Hill, in Buda, allowing them a place to rest while Joel looked for more permanent accommodation for the displaced. To escape the crowded apartment, Hansi often booked rooms in the Majestic. Her younger son, Dani, suffered from asthma, and the fresh air in Buda made it easier for him to breathe.5
Hansi frequently handed over her own clothes and money to families arriving from the bloody streets of Poland, Slovakia, and, now, Yugoslavia. Hundreds of refugees remembered her from those days. She let the women pick what they liked from her own clothes closet, fed them, and occasionally looked after their children while they hunted for work. She was generous and warmhearted. She treated them like family. Joel, meanwhile, worked with a group of young halutzim, preparing fake documents.
By late 1942 the Va’ada was launched and Kasztner was appointed as chief executive. Joel insisted, somewhat petulantly, that the idea for the Aid and Rescue Committee had really been Hansi’s, though she wasn’t interested in a formal role. She had been helping refugees long before Rezső arrived in the city.
Kasztner's appointment meant that he could now present himself at the offices of influential people as head of an organization, rather than merely as a human being committed to helping other human beings. Joel Brand recalled that Kasztner visited the Italian minister of foreign affairs, Count Ciano, at his plush mansion in the Buda Hills to ask him to intervene with the Germans on behalf of the Croatian Jews. Brand thought that Kasztner's spirited presentation of the “terrible plight of the Jews” probably motivated the Italians to send forty children to Budapest in Italian army cars.6
In the wake of the atrocities in Yugoslavia, Moshe Schweiger, a businessman in his midthirties, arrived in Budapest. He immediately joined the Aid and Rescue Committee to help teach Polish and Slovak refugees rudimentary Hungarian, enough to answer simple questions if they were stopped by the police and questioned about their papers. Schweiger, a longtime member of the Hashomer Hatzair (“the Marxists,” as Hansi called them), brought news of large-scale deportations from the Croatian countryside, where women and children had been shoved into cattle cars. His contacts in Italy had news of the ghettos in the north. The Italians, he said, had not been as cooperative as the Croats in rounding up Jews, so the Nazis tried to whisk Italian Jews out of the country during the night. Some of the trains from Italy would have to cut through Hungary. Schweiger asked his new friends to help prepare food and water for them.
Despite the growing list of horrors, the rivalries continued among the different Jewish groups in Budapest and were reflected in the Aid and Rescue Committee. Ernő Szilágyi joined the committee to gain an advantage for his own left-wing Zionist group, intellectual young lads who lionized him and gathered around him in the evenings to hear about Maimonides and Ovid, Aeschylus and King David. Other young men from the various Zionist youth factions also joined. When they got into arguments late at night, Kasztner and Brand told them it was now more important to work together for the cause than to try to uncover which of them held the keys to the future of Eretz, the new Jewish homeland. Many of these young men went on to become smugglers and couriers, hiding their identities with Christian papers and uniforms.
The Jewish Agency's first recognition of the systematic extermination of Europe's Jews was published in November 1942. Even then, the facts of the indiscriminate murder of a whole population seemed incredible. After the Agency Executive set up its own Relief and Rescue Committee in Istanbul, it sent a cable to contacts in Budapest, asking that a similar committee be established there—only to find one was already in place under Kasztner's direction. His was a full-time job, supported from funds that the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency sent to Budapest. The Istanbul group then began to send additional financial assistance to fund the bribes needed for a host of officials, border guards, policemen, and German agents.
A PRACTICAL WOMAN with a head for business, Hansi became the heart of the fledgling Rescue Committee. From the start, she had offered to do the paperwork, to keep track of donations, to organize. She had also expanded her own shop to create more work for refugees, supplying sewing machines to the women she employed, deducting their costs from the piecework. The continuing popularity of the new style of leather-and-knit gloves allowed her to rent a small factory building on the outskirts of Pest where she could employ even more women.
Rezső often drove Hansi to the Majestic Hotel when she was living there. Sometimes he stayed on for long walks in the garden or a cool beer in the shade of the lush chestnut trees. It gave them a chance to talk. She confided to Rezső that she had met Joel through a friend in the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist organization in Budapest. She had not belonged to the leftist movement but found their social events attractive, and she did want to emigrate to Palestine. In 1935 she had wanted a valid certificate, and Joel had needed a job. He was sure he would have his entry permit in a few months and, like all permits in those days, it would allow him to take his wife. Friends had initially picked another man for her, but she thought him repugnant. Joel, if nothing else, was great company.7
An arranged marriage, Joel had told Rezső, a business arrangement. But now there were the boys, and Joel doted on them.
Hansi, too, described her marriage as a practical arrangement. She was sure Joel did not love her, nor did she expect him to. Gossips were glad to tell of his latest flirtations and occasional entanglements. He loved the cafés, the restaurants and bars, the nightlife of the casinos, the plush private clubs. He was a gambler—and so were the Germans stationed in Budapest. Joel always made sure that he lost just the right amount. He spent some of his nights with women who also consorted with German spies. You never knew, he had told her, what you might discover from a night with the right woman.
Rezső found it all incomprehensible. He would watch Hansi as she walked around the apartment, her every movement graceful. He was drawn to her, and he knew that she was attracted to him.
Bogyó saw too little of Rezső during the two years before the German occupation of Hungary in 1944. He left early and returned home late, if at all. Often he called the pension just to reassure her that he was still at work and she should not wait up for him. She had wanted a child, but Rezső insisted Jewish children should not be born into a world like this.8 Yet he was attracted to a woman with two children.
ALREADY, REZSő had seen something in Hansi that he needed. Like him, she was a strong soul; she could hide her fear and live in the moment. Together they visited the wealthy Jews in the city, collecting funds and clothing.
Kasztner tried, in vain, to get financial help from the left-leaning Christians, Socialists, Communists, and newspapermen with known sympathies for the underdog. He dictated long letters to the Jewish Agency, asking for more Palestine visas. He included information that Brand's and Sam Springmann's couriers had brought back from other countries. Some had heard of a killing camp in Chelmno, about fifty miles from Lodz in Poland, and of the mobile gassing trucks in the Ukraine; others knew of the killings at Majdanek, Treblinka, and Belzec in Poland. On March 2, 1942, some five thousand Jews were machine-gunned into a pit near the town of Minsk in Russia. Babies were thrown into the hole alive and left to suffocate, covered by the bodies of their parents. Two boys who had survived the Kamenetz-Podolsk massacre were picked up by Ottó Komoly from the stairwell of the Palestine Office. The older one, aged fourteen, had been in the fields with the men when the transports of Hungarian and Polish Jews arrived. The boys had seen their family slaughtered. The little one could only nod his head when his brother told their story; he could not speak.
Joel Brand was the main contact with the halutzim arriving from Slovakia, where deportations had begun on March 26, 1942, with a transport of girls sixteen and older. None of them survived the war.9 Joel took the young men home for evening meals and set them up with Christian birth certificates and military service release papers. That was how they first met Peretz Révész, a skinny young Slovak Jew with almost orange hair, a sideways smile, and bruises all over his body. He had been beaten by the police after he was arrested lurking near the Palestine Office with no identity papers. They had been convinced he was a spy. Peretz had escaped from the police sergeant on their way to the internment camp—he thought the sergeant had let him run.10
Peretz became one of the regular members of the Rescue Committee in Budapest. He was brilliant at discovering new paths across borders, one time bringing the full complement of children from a Jewish orphanage over from Slovakia without losing a single child along the way in the dark.11
Joel bought a small printing press to produce fake identity papers. Fortunately, most of the documents did not require photographs, so he and his halutzim helpers changed names, inserted new dates, and restamped the papers with a handmade stamp whose imprint resembled the smudged marks of the government. When demand became so great that one small press could not keep up, Hansi took a chance and hired gentile printers. Costs, of course, escalated with the number of refugees. Peretz and Kasztner raided cemeteries for likely Hungarian-sounding names to use on the new identity papers. By now, the effort to send all these illegal emigrants to Palestine had become known as the Tiyul Department—the Excursion Department—and it was run by Joel.
The Aid and Rescue Committee sent regular shipments of food to Vienna for Jews who had gone into hiding after the Anschluss. Ironically, their courier for these trips was the driver of a delivery van belonging to the Nazi Party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter (People's Observer). In Vienna, the food was distributed by a non-Jewish woman whom Joel Brand gratefully acknowledged in his memoirs.
Sam Springmann was responsible for the committee's financial affairs and for developing useful contacts with Abwehr men and Hungarian spies who could be bribed and trusted. As couriers, they often carried significant sums of cash. One of his first was an Abwehr major, Jozsi (Josko) Winninger, a rotund, amiable man popular with women who was also a devoted gambler. He traveled the Turkey-Slovakia-Hungary route. Frequently, only a portion of the money he carried arrived at its destination, but both Ehud Avriel, one of the Agency's men in Istanbul, and Springmann were afraid to ask him to return the missing funds. Fritz Laufer, Erich Popescu, and Bandi Grosz all played significant roles as double and even triple agents and have been written about by most historians of the period in Hungary.
Fritz Laufer, a.k.a. Karl Heinz, a heavyset man with sandy-red hair, sallow complexion, and glasses, had the uncanny ability to blend into a crowd. This characteristic had been useful for his early life as a petty criminal, but now he worked for the Germans in Yugoslavia and Prague while pretending to work for Czech Intelligence. He also took assignments from the British, who hoped to recruit him as a full-time operative in the east. At times he ran errands for Springmann, bringing dollars from “the Joint” in Istanbul or delivering packages to concentration camps in Slovakia and Poland. Occasionally he would bring someone out of jail, but he was expensive and unpredictable. Jozsi Winninger warned Joel that Laufer was dangerous.
Laufer had, apparently, done some jobs for Freddy Schwartz, a.k.a. “Dogwood,” the highly intelligent, multilingual head of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), otherwise known as American Intelligence. Educated in both philosophy and psychology, a perfect combination for a spymaster in troubled times, Schwartz had handpicked his men from among the ready coterie of other nations’ spies and named each one after a flower. Laufer's code name was “Iris.” Some of Laufer's former OSS and Abwehr colleagues had been betrayed and executed by the Sicherheitsdienst (the Reich Security Office, or SD). Winninger reasoned that if he knew that much about Laufer, so did the SS.
According to Joel Brand, Springmann had met Erich Popescu at the French Embassy—both of them were used by the French for information gathering. Popescu, a.k.a. Erich Wehner, Werner, or Wenda, was an Abwehr spy who also worked for the Romanians and the Hungarians. He proved his reliability to Springmann by delivering, intact, a small package of diamonds to one of his Polish contacts. Popescu met the Jewish Agency's Teddy Kollek (later, mayor of Jerusalem) through Dogwood shortly after Kollek arrived in Istanbul. Dogwood had been keen to establish closer relations with Kollek because he found the information from the beleaguered Jews of Europe more reliable than his own agents’ work. In early 1943 Kollek set up an office in Istanbul to organize a network of spies who could bring news to and deliver financial help from the Yishuv.
Gyorgy or Andy Grosz, a.k.a. Andor or Andre Gyorgy, André Giorgi, Bandi, and Antal, was short and ugly, with protruding teeth, bandy legs, and a thatch of red, curly hair. His nickname was “Little One,” the reverse of his name “Grosz,” which means “big” in both Yiddish and German. He was, as Brand and Springmann knew, a triple, perhaps quadruple agent with several jail sentences, in a range of countries, hanging over his head. Here, he worked for both the Hungarians and the Germans. He had frequently been used by the Hungarian government to reach Dogwood with the message that the Hungarians were ready to negotiate a separate peace. Because all sides assumed he was their man, Grosz, half Jewish, traveled more or less freely across borders. Dogwood, optimistic that Grosz, too, would become an OSS agent, had code-named him “Trillium.” Like Laufer, Grosz had a reputation for being dangerous to cross. When he decided that a particular agent was becoming too greedy or slicing off too much of the well-paid work, he alerted whomever he was working for at the time that the agent was a courier for the Jews. That kind of information could have the man demoted, moved, jailed, or executed.
Both Sam Springmann and Rezső Kasztner thought it vital to inform the Jewish Agency's people in Istanbul of the full impact of Germany's war on the Jews of Europe. It was heartrending to realize how little of the truth was known. Through 1939 and 1940, for example, the Mapai's Central Committee did not once put the subject on its meeting agenda.12
Kasztner continued to focus on his political contacts, working to gain sympathy for renewed emigration to Palestine even as Britain kept the borders closed. Jewish emigration had not been expressly forbidden by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler until late October 1941. Now, a year later, there was still hope that refugees could slip through the German dragnet in exchange for bribes, and, if the Hungarians allowed free passage for ships down the Danube, there was a chance of finding a boat in one of the Black Sea ports.
The Jewish Agency in Palestine issued its own statement condemning Britain's “breach of faith” with the Jewish people: “It is in the darkest hour of Jewish history that the British government proposes to deprive Jews of their last hope and close the road back to their Homeland.” Britain did not budge—in fact, because some Zionist leaders continued to support illegal immigration, it tightened the conditions for emigration to Palestine and declared that, thenceforth, all illegal immigrants would be carefully deducted from the overall “legal” totals. At the same time, Britain demanded that neutral nations, such as Portugal and Turkey, deny Jews transit to Palestine and that ships stop delivering them to any port close to Palestine. The Foreign Office began to seek other settlement opportunities for refugees in Australasia, Africa, and South America, without success.
“There is strong evidence to suggest,” Ottó Komoly told Rezső Kasztner, “that the British would rather see us all perish than grant one more visa for that benighted land. It's a protectorate only because they want to protect it from us.”
Not until the case of the SS Struma, however, did British policy toward Jewish refugees receive worldwide attention. The Struma, an old, marginally refurbished, British-built yacht, had set out from Constanta in Romania in December 1941 with 769 Jewish refugees on board. The Greek shipowner had sold tickets for the voyage at exorbitant prices, aware that few ships would risk the voyage and that, for most of the passengers, the Struma offered the last chance to survive. The vessel arrived at Istanbul with a broken engine, the passengers crowded together with barely enough room to sit and no fresh water, food, sanitation, or medicine for the ailing children or the people suffering from dysentery.
The ship remained in Istanbul for two months. No one was allowed to leave or to board, though the Jewish Agency did succeed in distributing small amounts of food and water. The British government had prevailed on the Turks to block the Struma's entry and to prevent its leaving for Palestine. There was some discussion of lifting the women and children off the ship, followed by more discussion and exchange of cables among the Foreign Office, the Turks, the Jewish Agency, the United States government, the Romanian government, and the Reich. Eventually, the ship was towed out of the harbor, whereupon an explosion ripped open the hull, and the ship sank. One person survived.
To this day, no one knows for sure whom to blame for the disaster, but whether the destruction of the Struma was accomplished by a bomb on board or a Soviet torpedo, all those familiar with the story at the time laid the blame squarely on Britain's intransigence. On walls all over the Jewish areas of Palestine, posters appeared bearing the photograph of Sir Harold MacMichael and the words: “Known as High Commissioner for Palestine, WANTED FOR THE MURDER of 800 refugees.”
IN THE EARLY summer of 1942, Baron Fülöp von Freudiger of the Budapest Orthodox Jewish congregation received a letter from a little-known Orthodox rabbi named Michael Dov Weissmandel, in Bratislava, Slovakia. It was a cry for help, mostly financial, but also for advice on how to deal with the Joint and the Jewish Agency on the survival of the remaining Jews of Slovakia. The Germans had already taken 52,000 Slovak Jews. Rabbi Weissmandel and a woman called Gizi Fleischmann had founded the Bratislava Working Group, an offshoot of the local Jewish Council.
It was an unusual alliance. Gizi Fleischmann was the founder of the local branch of the Women's Zionist Organization, and both her daughters had already left for Palestine. She was a Slovak representative for the Joint and had been entrusted by the Jewish Agency with the task of creating a Slovak Aid and Rescue Committee. Rabbi Weissmandel, in contrast, was the son-in-law of the spiritual leader of the ultra-Orthodox, anti-Zionist rabbi of the Slovakian town of Nitra, Shmuel David Ungar. Freudiger had been surprised that Weissmandel would accept the leadership of a woman, but the situation in Slovakia was so dire that a practical, even-tempered person such as Gizi was welcome. The sole purpose of the Working Group was to save the remaining Jews.
Rabbi Weissmandel claimed that he had come up with the idea of bribing the Germans. For each Jew transported out of the country, the Slovak government had paid the Germans five hundred reichsmarks.13 Perhaps the Nazis would accept a larger sum to leave the Jews in their own country. Weissmandel said that he and his group had met with the Germans, not all of whom were equally committed to what the Nazis called the “dejewification” of Europe. Some, perhaps even one at the top, could be bribed, and the process had been started with a down payment of $25,000 (they had received the total sum from a local Jewish businessman) and an indication that they were not acting on their own but were part of a larger “World Jewry.” Weissmandel had used notepaper with a Swiss hotel's letterhead to write himself a formal letter in the name of his invented “rabbis of the world” and had authorized himself to act on their behalf. The Nazi officer had fallen for the fake letter immediately. It fitted his worldview.
Weissmandel believed that a deal, perhaps a series of deals, could be made if sufficient funds were found. With one down payment and promises of more to come, he thought they had succeeded in halting the deportations—a temporary measure, for sure, and another $25,000 was urgently required.
In subsequent meetings with this Nazi officer, a man called Wisliceny, the Working Group had realized that its experience could be extended to other countries in Europe. Weissmandel called it “the Europa Plan.” He and Gizi Fleischmann believed that all further deportations of Jews in Europe could be stopped.
In answer to Freudiger's question about what sums would be involved, Fleischmann wrote that the whole Europa Plan would cost only us$3 million, and then most remaining Jewish lives would be spared.14 The plan, unfortunately, would not apply to Polish and German Jews.
When Freudiger showed the letters—written in archaic Hebrew—to Kasztner and Brand, they were unconvinced: Hitler would not tolerate any Jews in Europe, they said. But Kasztner agreed that perhaps fewer barriers would be put in the way of Jewish emigration, provided it was paid for and fast. The rabbi's Europa Plan, after all, sounded very much like the Europa Plan devised by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, which had earlier allowed large-scale emigration from Germany until it encountered stiff opposition from the Arabs and the harsh quotas of the British. A grand gesture—and us$3 million was certainly grand—would reinforce German belief in the power of worldwide Jewry, its financial clout, its solidarity. With German armies stalled in the east by Stalin's Bolsheviks, it would be very useful if the Nazis thought of Jews as instruments of capitalism rather than Communism.
Gizi Fleischmann had written to Saly Mayer, the Swiss representative of the Joint, and to Nathan Schwalb, the European representative of the Hechalutz, the international Zionist youth movement that prepared its members for life in the settlements in Palestine; she begged them to put the case to their respective bosses in the United States and Palestine. If the money could not be ready in a few weeks, she warned, the plan would die. She believed that the German officer they were dealing with was a strict adherent to timelines. He had told them that he was taking the proposal to Himmler and would talk with the Working Group again in a few weeks. He had also told them that permission from the Slovak government would be needed to allow the Jews to remain in the country. That, Weissmandel and Fleischmann believed, would require additional bribes for government officials.
Fleischmann and Weissmandel used Springmann's “reliable” courier service to send their messages to the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee in Istanbul. The man who brought them money and letters of encouragement from the Yishuv was Jozsi Winninger, who doubled as the Abwehr's agent and, when it served his purpose, passed copies of useful information to his German handlers.
To raise this large a sum of money, Weissmandel and Fleischmann warned, all Jewish groups in Palestine and the United States and Britain would need to be involved. The Bratislava Working Group hoped that the Hungarians would contribute.
IN DECEMBER 1942, Sam Springmann received a card from the Jewish Agency office in Istanbul telling him that a former Austrian dentist turned German officer named Rudolf Sedlaczek would be visiting Budapest and suggesting he be made welcome.15 The card, one of the Agency's coded messages, made it clear that Sedlaczek was a “friend.” Springmann had already met Sedlaczek, and he knew that he was, indeed, a “friend,” a man who traveled regularly between Vienna, Kraków, and Budapest and was willing to carry in his false-bottomed suitcases large sums of money that would be used in local bribes. In addition to his sporadic dental activities, Sedlaczek, like Jozsi Winninger and Fritz Laufer, worked for the Abwehr. He was also a courier for the Zionists, and he had been sent to gather hard information on what had been happening to the Jews of Europe. Dr. Sedlaczek had visited Kraków recently and had heard news about the systematic extermination of Jews in Poland. This information was so startling that he had decided to let the Jewish Agency's people, the Rescue Committee in Budapest, hear it firsthand from his own source.
Sedlaczek told Springmann that the committee should prepare to receive a German visitor by the name of Oskar Schindler who would tell them, directly, about those regions of eastern Europe occupied by the Wehrmacht. An industrialist, Schindler had been allotted a large number of Jews for slave labor in his Kraków factory, one he had acquired through “Aryanization.” He had shown himself to be a decent employer and had been helpful in delivering letters and parcels to Polish Jews in concentration camps. He had fed and clothed his workers, using the thousands of reichsmarks that had been delivered to him by couriers of the Jewish Agency and the Joint. But he needed more cash for this enterprise. Taking money across the borders had become too dangerous for Dr. Sedlaczek.
Schindler endured two days of uncomfortable travel in a freight car otherwise filled with Nazi Party newspapers to reach Budapest, and he was not in a good humor when Springmann and Kasztner met him at the Hotel Pannonia in Pest.16 Kasztner would remember Oskar Schindler as a huge man, almost threatening with his massive bulk, pacing from the window and back, drinking occasionally from his flask of brandy, and talking about conditions for Jews in the General Government—the German term for the part of Poland not absorbed into the Reich. He talked of the atrocities in Kraków and the remaining ghetto, the terrible hunger in Lodz, and the freight trains leaving Warsaw full of Jews whose final destination was not labor camps as they had assumed, but vernichtungslager— extermination camps. In the midst of this stupid war, he said, the Nazis were using the railway system, expensive engineering, and an untold number of guards and bureaucrats whose sole purpose was to apply hitherto untried scientific methods in murdering large numbers of people. These new camps had a single purpose: mass murder. They were run by the SS Economic Office at Oranienburg. People would be reduced to usable by-products—clothes, jewelry, toys, hair. Once inmates were in these camps, there was no chance of reaching them, no hope of rescue.
Kasztner and Springmann had heard of such camps, but Schindler's account was the first confirmation they had of their existence. They had known of atrocities, but their general assumption had been that the people in the camps were used for slave labor.
“Is it still possible,” Kasztner asked Schindler, “to get some small comfort, letters, and food to people in these camps?”
Schindler said his experience proved that most of the guards were corruptible, but the committee would be wasting its resources sending food to the extermination camps. There were still several work camps—some for women only—where food would be useful. He asked about their couriers and what the going rates were. When Springmann told him about Bandi Grosz and Jozsi Winninger, Schindler seemed amused. He had seen both men deliver packages to his own workforce of Jews in his factory in Plaszów, on the outskirts of Kraków. He paid the SS just five zloty a day for his “slaves.” Given the terrible conditions in the Kraków ghetto, he thought he was helping by increasing his workforce to the maximum. But he was concerned that even his own workers would be transported to one of these extermination camps while he was away in Budapest. The SS seemed to be bent on eliminating the ghetto.
The priority, Schindler told them, had to be finding escape routes, not sending packages of food. Hans Frank, who was the German governor general of the General Government in occupied Poland, he said, had been open about his mission: “As far as the Jews are concerned, I want to tell you quite frankly that they must be done away with one way or another… I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews.” Otherwise, Schindler said, Frank was a perfectly reasonable fellow with a law degree, a love of literature and music, the father of five bouncing children, a connoisseur of fine wine, and a sportsman. “You would enjoy his company if you met him in other circumstances,” he told the horrified men in his hotel room. Two days before, he and Frank had dined in the governor general's residence, the old Royal Castle on Wawel Hill in Kraków, and had talked about economics and the arts. Frank's wife was in Warsaw with the children, and Frank was concerned that one of them had the mumps and was running a high fever.
The three men discussed access roads from Poland into Slovakia and Hungary. Schindler would later recall that Kasztner was extraordinarily well informed about ways to extract people from the ghettos. He knew council members’ names and also their likelihood to cooperate with the German authorities. Indeed, his information about where the weak guards were posted seemed impeccable.
After some persuasion, Schindler agreed to travel to Istanbul to personally deliver his information to the Zionist leaders there. It was vital that all Jewish organizations be aware of the facts. That should give them the ammunition to effect changes in Western immigration laws, loosen British resolve on Palestine, influence Western leaders to interfere in Hungary, and help the ever-increasing number of refugees. Kasztner did not really believe that adverse publicity would deter the Germans from further atrocities, but public opinion might delay some of their plans, and any delay was good. With luck, the war could end before the annihilation of the Jews was realized.
Kasztner had not felt comfortable in the big German's presence. Even if the man had sympathies for the Jews, he was still enriching himself by their slave labor. His hands were far from clean. Could they believe what he had said? And would anyone else believe that such things could happen in a civilized world? Even in war?
All three men repaired to the Gellért Hotel's famous restaurant overlooking the Danube. Schindler ordered a Transylvanian platter of assorted meats and a full-bodied Hungarian red wine, and he soon set about eating everything on his plate. He seemed very comfortable surrounded by attentive service and men and women in formal attire. Unlike Springmann and Kasztner, he was unconcerned that many of the men wore German uniforms and that several others in black-tie attire were Abwehr agents out for the night with their mistresses. He talked about conditions in the General Government, the difficulties in obtaining good food and quality wines, and the deprivations faced by those German entrepreneurs who were willing to work hard. He was pink-faced, animated, loud, except when he mentioned that he had been able to buy black-market bread and shoes for his workers with the money “your people” had sent him.
Back in Kasztner's pension, he and Springmann deliberated over how to remove Moshe Krausz from his position of control over the number of Palestine visas that were handed out and to whom. If they were in control, they knew they could combine several families on one permit, to expand the numbers allowed under the British rules, and they could add orphans to families with few children. By some means, they would have to try to send out more “illegals.” If the ghettos were being emptied now, they would meet immediately with the halutz boys to run more rescue missions from Poland. They could try to contact the Yugoslav partisans to help spirit children across the border.
In December 1942, unbeknownst to Kasztner, Springmann, and the others in Budapest, most of the politicians in Europe already knew of the disaster befalling the Jews. During each of October and November, more than 300,000 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz, including 106,000 from Holland and 77,000 from France.17 Newspapers in the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as in Tel Aviv, carried reports, some firsthand, from traveling diplomats, businessmen, and refugees that the Germans were systematically murdering the European Jews. But anyone who followed these news stories assumed that the Germans’ resolve to annihilate the Jews was likely to be slowed down by defeats on the battlefields.
As recently as November 24, Budapest-born Stephen Wise, one of the United States’ most prominent Jewish leaders, and president of the American Jewish Congress, announced to a packed room of reporters that State Department sources had confirmed that over two million Jews had already been killed in Europe and that it was Nazi policy to exterminate them all. He informed reporters that Jews were being moved from all countries in Europe to mass-killing centers in Poland.18
In hindsight, it is surprising that the extermination camps were not anticipated. As early as July 1941, Göring had issued a directive “for the implementation of the Final Solution.” Reinhard Heydrich, security chief of the SS and Hitler's volatile confidant, also known as “Hangman Heydrich” to his victims in the east, had boasted openly at the Wannsee Conference for senior SS and SD men in January 1942 that “in the Final Solution to the Jewish problem, there are about eleven million Jews involved.” All eleven million would be selected for hard labor, and most would die “through natural diminution.” The rest would be killed. He had singled out the 3.5 million Jews of Poland as the “greatest danger.”
The deportations from France to Auschwitz began in the summer of 1942.