During two thousand years of persecution,
it often happened that Jewish lives were bought for gold and valuables.
This was neither the fault of the Jews nor of the money.
REZSŐ KASZTNER, “A NAGY EMBERVÁSÁR”
JOEL BRAND had not been able to extend his visa, and he was again arrested by the Turkish police. He was amazed to find that none of the Jewish Agency's functionaries there was able to get him released. It was beginning to dawn on him that the Va’ada had greatly overestimated the Agency's influence. Briefly, Bandi Grosz joined him in the makeshift prison where the Turks had confined him—they had seemed unwilling to put Joel into one of their regular jails—then Grosz bribed their way back to the hotel. There Grosz made a series of intense phone calls, had numerous visitors, and sent several cables while Brand waited for one of the Agency's people to arrive to help him prepare some sort of answering document that they could send to Eichmann. Unbeknownst to Brand, Grosz had already been to the offices of Western Electric Company, fronting for the Office of Strategic Services, the United States’ intelligence service. He had reported in to “Dogwood.”
Once again it had been Grosz who bribed and cajoled Brand's way out of prison. Brand was beginning to panic. What if Grosz let the SS know he had been detained? Brand assumed that Grosz's assignment was to keep an eye on him and report back to Eichmann. How could he pose as an important emissary for World Jewry if his contacts couldn’t even keep him out of jail? His anxiety increased when Chaim Barlas told him the Agency's people were unhappy that Grosz had procured his freedom—illegally. “You have no right to check into a hotel when you are under arrest,” one of them said. “The whole delegation could be in jeopardy. We could be expelled.”
Brand was outraged. What did he care if they were all expelled? The worst that could befall them was a speedy return to sunny Palestine. If he were expelled, he’d be killed. Worse, he was convinced that his mission was the last chance for European Jews. “If I am sent back for lack of a lousy visa, a million Jews will end up in Auschwitz!” he pleaded.1 Eichmann must be led to believe that he was meeting with the most important people in the Agency. If news of Grosz's engineering Brand's exit from jail got back to Budapest, it would not look right.
But Bandi Grosz, the German-Hungarian-American-Turkish quadruple agent, had an agenda that neither Eichmann nor Brand knew about. The ugly, red-headed petty criminal had been chosen by Himmler to carry a message to the Allies. Himmler knew all about Grosz—and the fact that as agent “Trillium” he was used by the OSS was, in Himmler's view, an asset.
Grosz's mission was to let the Allies know that, under certain circumstances, Himmler would be interested in suing for peace.
EICHMANN WAS becoming comfortable with Kasztner's visits. He even complained to Kasztner about Kurt Becher, saying that his promotions had come too easily. He, Eichmann, had had to struggle for each speck of recognition, while Becher had used “connections” to rise to the top. He had not been informed of Becher's mission in advance, and he considered all interference in dealing with “his” Jews as cutting across his turf. He referred to the Chorin deal as schweinerei, pig swill, and also as bad business because it annoyed local associates who had had every reason to think they would assume full control of the Weiss-Manfred Works and the broader Chorin interests. Besides, how was he to safeguard his personal friendships with Hungarian state secretaries László Endre and László Baky, given Becher's behind-the-scenes maneuvers? And how could he justify letting all these rich Jews out of the country at German expense?
Kasztner became even more anxious to meet this fabled, mysterious young cavalry officer.
CHAIM BARLAS assured Brand that he had alerted the American ambassador in Ankara, Laurence Steinhardt, to Brand's presence and that he would be able to meet the Americans. Barlas said he understood Brand's misgivings about talking with the British, though it could not be avoided: the British already knew of his mission. Brand was afraid that if the British rejected the German deal officially, it would mean the end of his quest. Barlas assured him that the Agency would continue to make every effort to extend his Turkish visa.
Meanwhile, they drafted a “memorandum of agreement” authorizing Brand to act on behalf of the Jewish Agency in negotiating a deal with the SS. Preconditions of the proposal set out that the deportations would cease and that emigration to Palestine and to neutral countries would be permitted. In exchange, the SS would be paid $400,000 for every one thousand persons allowed to leave for Palestine; $1 million would be paid for each transport of ten thousand persons allowed to leave for other countries.2 The Agency would supply food, clothes, and medication for those held in concentration camps. The memorandum stated that delegates of the Jewish Agency were on their way to Istanbul and would be ready to meet “authorized representatives of the opposite side.”3 As for the trucks, there seemed to be a few problems that would have to be ironed out.
Brand cabled Kasztner that a formal agreement had been prepared. Proudly, he quoted some of the terms. Once Kasztner received the cable, he took a taxi up to the Majestic to show it personally to Eichmann, though he was sure that Eichmann, given that all communications were censored, would know about it already.
On that day, or the next, Kasztner saw Kurt Becher for the first time, lounging against the wall of Eichmann's office, his arms crossed, his face turned toward the windows. He did not look at Kasztner or give any hint of his interest in Brand's cable.
Otto Hunsche, Dieter Wisliceny, Hermann Krumey, and Franz Novak stood behind their leader, at ease, settled in for what they assumed would be a long wait. They knew Eichmann was drunk. These past few days he had been drinking more than usual. And he had been angrier than usual. His normally tidy uniform was creased, the stiff collar unbuttoned. The dark stubble under his chin attested to a hurried shave that morning. There had been a raucous party at László Endre's the night before, with a local band, a deep-voiced chanteuse from the Corso singing sad, romantic German ballads, everybody dancing, and, later, vomiting in the lush rosebushes that lined the path from what had once been another wealthy Jew's house. The singer had been seen getting into Eichmann's car just before 4 AM.
Kasztner begged Eichmann for patience. “Please give Brand a chance to deliver on your deal. You must stop the deportations—you see our friends are doing their utmost to meet your terms.” Eichmann shouted that he would step up deportations rather than halt them. “I will show you and your swine you can’t play games with me,” he swore. He had waited too long already for such minimal promises. Now there was no mention of the merchandise he had asked for. He had already made it clear that the Reich did not need money. Where were the trucks?
Kasztner was now smoking as feverishly as Eichmann, and he had become so used to the other man's ravings that he knew how to wait them out and present his case again. And again. Over and over, he threatened that there would be no deal with World Jewry unless the deportations stopped.
Eichmann took a mimeographed letter from his pocket. It had been scrunched up, so he had to flatten it on the table, smoothing the edges with the palm of his hand. “This is what your people are spreading. This shit. This…” It was an appeal written by some members of the Jewish community, addressed to Hungarian Christians, reminding them of their thousand-year-long common bond with the Jews of Hungary and telling them of the terrible suffering of the provincial Jews in the ghettos, the lack of shelter and water in the brickyards and deserted mills, the horror of being driven into freight cars by men pointing bayonets, the suffering of the children. How, the appeal concluded, could the extermination of helpless old people, infants, and veterans, unarmed and defenseless people, be reconciled with the always chivalrous Hungarian nation?4
“More horror stories, Kasztner, more of the filth—and you know the penalty for that!” Eichmann's voice had risen so high that he was practically screaming. His arms braced, he leaned over his desk and spat his words into Kasztner's face. “The penalty is death! Hanging! And you want me to stop deporting this rabble? Germany has a war to win, and your filthy lot is trying to rouse these… savages… against us.” Eichmann often referred to the Hungarians as savages. He strode up and down the room again, his heels slamming into the old parquet floor.
The tall officer was still looking out the window.
Kasztner took a long, deep breath and waited. It was a hot, early summer day; the wisteria had grown over the walls, and its flowers were wilting in the heat. The heavy branches of the big oak tree to the left of the window were drooping, the leaves a soft bluish-green, melting into the yellower greens of the acacias. He was measuring his own silence, waiting for the right pause in the Austrian's invective, the opening in the wall of words.
When the moment came, Kasztner repeated quietly that if the deportations continued, there would be no lives to trade. He said, firmly: “Herr Obersturmbannführer, I must insist on the terms of our agreement.” He had decided there was nothing left to lose. He was going to bargain for at least some lives. He asked for a hundred thousand Jews selected from across the country.
Hunsche, Krumey, Wisliceny, and Novak stared at Eichmann, waiting for the next explosion. He had jumped from his chair and stood leaning back on his widely planted feet, his back straight, his head wobbling from side to side. Then, with only the slightest change in his tone of voice, he sat down behind his desk and announced that he would let two hundred Jews from Kolozsvár evade deportation to the “work camp.” After that, well, maybe that total of six hundred that had been talked about, half from Kolozsvár—“It's where your family is, right, Kasztner?”—if the Hungarians agreed to let them go. “I will not,” and he slammed the table with his fist, “go against the Hungarians. You know we need their help here? They, and they alone, insisted on no special treatments.”
Kasztner was quiet, waiting again for the storm to pass. He knew, as did they all, that six hundred Palestine certificates had been received before the German occupation. Each one could include a whole family. For this group, there would be no problem with entry into Palestine.
Then Krumey said, diffidently: “Obersturmbannführer, I think we can solve that problem. We tell [Hungarian Intelligence head Peter] Hain and [Hungarian gendarmerie colonel László] Ferenczy that we have uncovered a Jewish plot. Something far-reaching, affecting the Reich, and that we need to bring these people to Budapest for interrogation.”
Wisliceny, who had had his back to Kasztner until then, said: “I believe, Adolf, that you’ll have no trouble with the Hungarians. I’ve already told Ferenczy that we are tracking a dangerous Zionist conspiracy. I told him these conspirators have to be isolated from the rest of Jews. They could cause a disturbance if they are left with the others.”5
“They’ll fall for that?” Eichmann asked, obviously amused by the ruse. He was usually amused by jokes at the expense of the Hungarians. He considered them untermenschen, somewhat above the Jews and the Poles, but still unworthy of their partnership with Germany.
“Kasztner will have the list,” Krumey continued. “And the Hungarians will be pleased to oblige.”
Eichmann nodded. An advance group, a gesture, to be matched by Istanbul, he said. It's what he had said he would do when Brand left. Some token. Six hundred was not a large enough number to attract attention here, yet the Jews—the Joint—would think it was a sign. When Eichmann spoke of the Joint, one could tell he was thinking of something almost mythical, a huge, powerful presence. “I told Brand to make sure he meets with Steinhardt. He is connected with the Joint. Like all Americans.”
Kasztner asked if the selection of the people from Kolozsvár could be left to the Jewish Council there. They would know best which names to include.
Eichmann began to shout. “You take the Hungarians for fools, Kasztner? How in hell can we convince them of a conspiracy if we can’t even give them a list of the conspirators? No. The list will be done here and by you and your people.”
At the end of the afternoon, Kasztner was given permission for just the six hundred Jews, and Hunsche added that the cost would be $800 a head.6
Eichmann had mused that if the Americans could charge new immigrants $1,000 a head to let them in, then he, too, would charge $1,000 a head to let them out. “It would be only fair, don’t you think?” he asked. He turned to the other SS officers and gave one of his quick, mirthless laughs. “A fair offer?” The group could go via Spain or Portugal, but not down the Danube to Constanta, where the ship was ready to take them to Palestine.
Kasztner gave his larger plan one more try: ten thousand people from the provinces, including Kolozsvár. “If it's going to be a conspiracy, it may as well be a big one,” he said.7
“You can’t bring them back, Kasztner, once they are gone,” Krumey said, referring to those already deported. “No power on earth can bring them back. But we could see about that lot in Kolozsvár. If they are still available,” he added, ominously.
“And maybe some additional conspirators in other provinces where the transports have not yet left,” Wisliceny murmured.
“About two hundred from Kolozsvár, Kasztner, and that's my last word!” Eichmann pronounced. And, as an afterthought: “The head price will be determined later. You know they’ll pay whatever you want, Kasztner; those Jews will find their hidden money as soon as they know it’ll buy them their lives.”
Kasztner was about to argue for the numbers agreed on earlier, but Krumey gestured to him to be silent. “We’ll send this man to Kolozsvár with your list,” he said, indicating a young SS sergeant near the doorway into the connecting rooms.
“Where will you keep them?” Eichmann asked. “They can’t be allowed into the general population! Like letting poison back into the system. Vermin!”
Krumey suggested they could be gathered in tents, in a field outside Kistarcsa.
Kasztner would not agree to any site near Kistarcsa. He said the courtyard of the Wechselmann Institute for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind on Columbus Street in Budapest would serve the purpose. It had been emptied by the Gestapo. The place could be expanded. It had a garden and spacious grounds for tents or barracks.8 He had seen it on his way from Biss's apartment building and had thought of it as a possible hiding place for Jews. One of the young halutzim, perhaps Peretz Révész, had been inside and checked out the basement. There was room for a large bunker—a hiding place for refugees, he had thought.
“It's a Reich secret, Kasztner,” Eichmann pronounced as Kasztner was leaving. “A word of this to anyone and the deal is dead. Dead!” he shouted. “Dead, you understand?” His laughter followed Kasztner down the corridor and the few steps to the guardroom.
The sergeant who had been ordered to go to Kolozsvár with the list stopped Kasztner as he was about to cross the footbridge onto the street. “About two hundred, Dr. Kasztner,” he whispered, “can be more than two hundred. Perhaps a lot more than two hundred?” He had brought his sweaty young face close to Kasztner’s, his head tilted to one side, emphasizing that he was, indeed, asking a question.
“If you think so, Scharführer,” Kasztner said, carefully. “We would be most grateful.” The code word was “grateful.” The pimply young man whose uniform needed some tailoring—he probably didn’t have the money to have it fitted—would have understood.
KASZTNER DECIDED he would have the list delivered to József Fischer. He would know what to do. Meanwhile, every day, Kasztner took the cob railway to the top of Swabian Hill and walked on to the Majestic. He always returned on foot, giving himself a chance to think. If he could not slow Eichmann's plans for the deportations, he would have to work at expanding the list.
The draft agreement from Istanbul had not yet arrived, there was no further word from Joel Brand, and Kasztner had not yet been able to meet with Becher, though William Billitz had promised to see what he could do. Now that Billitz worked for Becher, representing the new owners of the Csepel works, he had occasion to speak with him every day when the young SS officer was in the city.
In a desperate gamble, Kasztner showed Eichmann the German translation of the Auschwitz Protocols. “How long,” he asked, “will it take for the Jewish Agency, for American Jewry, for the world, to find out about this?” And how would they respond to a deal—any idea of a deal—with a man who was sending tens of thousands of people to their deaths?
Eichmann leafed through the document casually, smiling his half smile of derision, as if he and Kasztner were sharing a joke at someone else's expense. Suddenly he stopped reading and threw the pages across his desk. “Herr Doktor, do you really believe this nonsense?”9
Kasztner said nothing.
“I had thought better of you, Kasztner. Surely you recognize this as another greuelmärchen [horror story]. I warned you people to stay clear of horror stories. This is the kind of bullshit that will get your slandering body in front of a military judge. It's treason to spread this kind of nonsense, Kasztner—the kind of treason that would see you and your stupid little bunch hanged!”
But at the end of the tirade he said he now had permission from Berlin for the sample group to leave Hungary. One train, he stipulated, straight from Budapest, across Germany, perhaps to Lisbon.
While the negotiations continued, the gendarmerie continued to gather up the Jews from the countryside. Very few tried to escape. Families stayed together. They still imagined they were being resettled in another, perhaps less civilized part of the country. Life would not be easy, but they would survive. Those who had understood that deportation to Germany was inevitable would explain that the Reich was desperately short of workers, that factories were idle, that farmers couldn’t gather the wheat come harvest time. It was obvious that the Germans needed workers. And when this madness was over, everyone would come home.
When a couple of young Zionists tried to tell a group of Orthodox Jews in southern Hungary about Auschwitz, they were chased out of town by the angry rabbi. God would never allow such a thing as Auschwitz.10
As Allied bombing raids continued, whole streets in Budapest became uninhabitable. Budapest City Council made plans to move all Jews out of their apartments and into designated buildings so that non-Jews could occupy the space. The Jewish Council's Housing Department was charged with ensuring that Jews left their homes in working order.
Copies of the Auschwitz Protocols had begun to circulate. Samuel Stern thought that Regent Horthy's son had given his copy to his father. Ottó Komoly had slipped a copy to the Hungarian foreign minister, who was already raising questions in parliament about foreign reaction to a film the Germans had made about gendarmes shoving people into boxcars. It was bad enough that the Germans were directing the operation; now they were going to blame the Hungarians. A member of the council had given a copy of the document to a local priest, who then gave it to Justinian Cardinal Serédi, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary. Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio, wrote to the government accusing it of being complicit in the murder of its Jewish subjects. “When old men of over seventy or even eighty are carried off, elderly women, children, the sick, one must ask: What kind of labor can these human beings perform? To the answer that this is an opportunity for Jews to take their families along, I ask: if this is so, such departures would be of one's free will.” When the government responded with the formerly effective lies that the deportees were being sent to work in Germany, the old nuncio spoke of his “terrible fear” that innocent blood was being shed against the will of God and, therefore, “His blessing cannot remain on this country.”
The message did finally reach Horthy, Stern reported to Komoly and Kasztner. Disregarding all the information he had received, the Regent had remained adamant that the Jews were sent to work camps and that they would not be harmed if they continued to cooperate. Surely, now, he would not ignore the pope's emissary in Hungary. Something, Komoly was sure, would be done.
It wasn’t.
AS A LAST RESORT, Kasztner tried to contact Kurt Becher through Otto Klages. The Budapest SD chief had been party to Brand's meetings with Eichmann; Kasztner hoped Klages could be made to understand that tangible evidence of SS goodwill was needed to close the deal in Istanbul. A few hundred people gathered into the Columbus Street buildings would not be enough. Thousands were needed, but, as the days passed, fewer Jews remained in their home countries, and perhaps fewer still were alive in the camps.
Eventually, it was Becher who made the first contact.11 His adjutant went to the Information Office at Sip Street and requested that Kasztner present himself at the Chorin mansions on Andrássy Avenue. These two four-story white stucco buildings were connected by a covered passageway. Each one had its own pillared portico, with wide marble steps leading to the carved oak doors. Despite the early summer heat, it was cool inside. The front hall was decorated with brass wall lamps, paintings in gilded frames, a long Turkish carpet, and, in the center above the wide balustrade, a vast crystal chandelier. The living room, or receiving room, was high-ceilinged, with dormer windows and a long oak bookcase along the wall facing the windows.
Becher stood when Kasztner entered. A broad-shouldered, pale man with a square jaw and light-blue eyes, he seemed to Kasztner every inch the German archetype Hitler had selected to rule the world.
Kasztner tipped his head at the German: “Herr Obersturmbannführer,” he said. He had learned not to stretch out his hand when he met Germans. Even Becher's return nod was a novelty these days. He asked Kasztner to sit and motioned to the narrow, gold-edged Louis Quatorze chair in front of a small, antique side table and offered coffee from the monogrammed silver set in delicate Herendi china cups.
“Herr Obersturmbannführer,” Kasztner repeated, still standing.
“For God's sake, Kasztner, will you sit down?” said Becher. “There.”
Kasztner sat rather carefully—the chair did not look as though it would support his weight.
Becher smiled. “It's stronger than you think,” he said. “Those spindly legs have supported bigger asses than yours in centuries past—and will again when this one is over. I expect you know who I am.”
Kasztner said yes, he knew.
“Your train,” Becher said before long. “There are a few people I will ask you to accommodate. Not many. Maybe fifty.”
“My train?” Kasztner stammered. “We are still not sure how many will go… or whether it will ever go… All he said was that I could make a list of two hundred for Kolozsvár.”
“It will go—and there will be about fifteen hundred Jews on board,” Becher stated. “I want fifty, well, maybe a hundred seats. I will let you know.”
“And Eichmann?” Kasztner asked.
“Don’t worry about Eichmann,” Becher said, with another easy smile. “Your train will be safe.”
As if Kasztner could ever stop worrying about Eichmann.
THE DRAFT memorandum that the Jewish Agency in Istanbul issued on May 27 asserted, without the slightest factual foundation, that the basic agreement was ready. Only a few legal and procedural issues had still to be ironed out. The document stated that the Jews accepted Eichmann's offer and the ransom would be paid, provided deportations ceased immediately.
Brand asked for additional money for bribes in Hungary and wondered, afterward, whether Menachem Bader, another Agency representative in Istanbul, had agreed too quickly to his request,12 knowing that he had no chance of assuring success for this mission. The good news was that Brand's expulsion order had been postponed for a few days, but so had his meeting with Laurence Steinhardt. The American ambassador in Turkey had alerted his State Department to the facts of the blood-for-goods deal and had been told that a special emissary would arrive in a few days to meet Brand.
On the same day, the Hungarian security police arrested Kasztner and Hansi Brand.13 They were picked up at André Biss's apartment and bundled into police cars, their bodies bent over to hide their faces. They were driven across the river to an interrogation center, an unassuming, white stone building with small rooms and a deep basement where Peter Hain's Hungarian Intelligence men kept prisoners they found particularly interesting. The basement was so far underground that no sound would be heard outside, no matter how loudly the prisoners screamed. For five days, they were kept in their respective cells, each questioned separately. There were, of course, no official charges, but Kasztner guessed from the questions that Hain wanted to know why Joel Brand had gone to Istanbul, on whose orders, and the nature of Kasztner's dealings with the Germans.
The pretext was the discovery of a large number of fake Christian identity papers that a group of Slovak and Polish Jews had been carrying when they were captured at the Romanian border. Early on the first day, Hansi was confronted with the limp body of a printer the Va’ada had paid to produce the papers. The man was barely alive, his fingers crushed and his teeth missing. Two men held him by the shoulders, some distance from their own suits; he had been lying in his own vomit and excrement.
Only with the lamp directed at his ravaged face did Hansi recognize him.
Quickly she took responsibility for his actions. She admitted to having paid the man to forge documents, but she denied all knowledge of her husband's whereabouts. She had no idea why the Germans had sent her husband abroad. She knew that if she revealed what Eichmann had referred to as “the state secret,” she and her children would be killed.
The interrogations lasted several days. Hansi was badly beaten. The soles of her feet were so raw and swollen that she could neither walk nor stand.
Kasztner, ever the fast talker, suffered only a few minor bruises. In his later retelling of events, he characteristically boasted that he had been freed by a direct phone call from the German plenipotentiary, Edmund Veesenmayer, to Prime Minister Döme Sztójay. What he did not talk about was how he had doubled over in pain when he saw Hansi's bleeding feet and how he had held them in the back of the car that the Germans had demanded they get for the journey home. Nor that, still weeping over what Hansi had endured, he could not speak when Eichmann's man called, demanding a meeting that evening.
When Eichmann heard of her suffering, he paid her the highest compliment he knew: “Mrs. Brand has the courage of a true Aryan.”
BY THE END of May 217,000 people had been deported from Hungary, a daily average of 12,056, or 3,145 per train. Body searches, in the name of the “preservation of national wealth,” continued up to the moment the victims were packed into the rail wagons. Gendarmes in the city of Nagyvárad warned that they would shoot ten Jews for every one who had hidden money or jewelry. A woman who had gone into labor was thrown in with more than eighty people standing, packed tightly, in the sweltering heat. Near the Hungarian border, the gendarmes provided a last chance for Jews to leave their belongings on Hungarian soil: they offered buckets of water in return for jewelry. “The guards told us,” one woman remembered, “we would not need anything where we were going, so why not leave it for the people in our homeland rather than let the Germans take it in Auschwitz.”14 Most of the boxcars were opened at the Slovak border. The corpses were removed, and those who had gone mad were shot.
The trains rolled through the countryside toward Auschwitz. Sometimes a piece of paper thrown out of a train, bearing a name, a town, a district, betrayed where the people had come from. Some begged that relatives be told of their fate.
All this was kept out of the newspapers. Neither of the large-circulation dailies reported on the deportations; nor did the Sonderkommando-censored Jewish newspaper. There were more dire warnings about “illegal propaganda activities”—the horrors in the countryside were forbidden from being reported to the foreign press still in Budapest.
Family and friends had started receiving postcards from Waldsee, where the deported claimed they were well and healthy, though working hard. But all the cards used almost exactly the same wording, and soon everyone realized that the text had been dictated. Most of the senders, Komoly said, would have been murdered before the cards were posted from the so-called labor camp.
When Kasztner implored Otto Hunsche to ease the suffering of the people on the trains, Hunsche warned him to stop spreading rumors again. However, he agreed to look into the matter.
On June 1, at a short meeting with Kasztner and Hansi Brand, Eichmann announced that if he did not hear from Joel within three days, “the deal he had offered would be off.”
JOEL BRAND was interviewed in Istanbul by a couple of minor American functionaries who recommended that the negotiations with the Nazis be kept going.15 They were concerned, however, that the undertaking for the trucks to be used only on the Eastern Front meant that the Germans were testing British/American interest in betraying the Soviets. The fact that Brand had been accompanied by Bandi Grosz cast further suspicion on the motives behind his journey.
Meanwhile, Grosz continued to have long, secret meetings, and Brand began to suspect he had a secondary agenda. Grosz urged Brand to travel with him to Aleppo, in British-controlled Syria. “We will get in direct touch with the Allies there,” he told him. Grosz saw no point in further talks with the Jewish Agency's local people.16 Moreover, he thought, the British were rightly suspicious that Jewish interests might not coincide with their own, and that the Jews would do anything, even betray an ally, to save their own people. While welcoming a Polish force, and the Free French forces, Czechs, and Romanians, the British had not been enthusiastic about creating a Jewish battalion. Such a battalion, they reasoned, could be used in Palestine as well as in Europe.
While at the hotel, Grosz was visited alternately by his wife and his mistress. His wife, Brand discovered, had not found it difficult to obtain an exit visa for Turkey, nor did she have problems with the Turkish officials. What he found puzzling was how a man as ugly as Grosz could maintain both a wife and a mistress and how he paid for two lodgings. And while Brand waited, Grosz attended his important meetings, he claimed, and he returned shuffling stacks of papers. He held long discussions with various Turkish businessmen, who all assured him that his interests were being safeguarded. He had already obtained a travel permit from the British. He told Brand that he had excellent relations with both the English and the American attachés, and that he had been advised to travel to Syria. Kasztner had warned Brand about the British, and Eichmann had told him to stay with Grosz. Brand was hoping that Moshe Shertok, the political leader of the Jewish Agency, would arrive soon from Palestine and decide what he should do.
Brand feared that, in spite of his best efforts, Jewish representatives in Istanbul remained unimpressed with the importance of his mission. Delegates of the various political factions were fighting over the best way to assist illegal immigrants, how far they could go to defy the “Mandatory Power” (the British presence in Palestine), and how to foment Jewish military resistance in Hungary. They didn’t seem to be paying much attention to his pleas that illegal immigration could save only a few, whereas he was here in the interests of a million Jews, or to his caution that developing a strategy for military resistance in Hungary would take longer than whatever time they had left. “Five hundred Jews are sent into the gas chambers every hour!” he kept repeating. He was hysterical, crying in his hotel room. Teddy Kollek, a member of the Jewish Agency's Political Department, recalled, “It was impossible to explain to Brand how helpless we were.”17 Brand did not understand the international context, Kollek said, no matter how hard everyone tried to tell him about the various preoccupations of the British and the Americans, their fear that the Soviets might withdraw from the war, and how low the Jews ranked on the Allies’ own agendas. Venia Pomerantz wrote to Shertok that he feared Brand had become suicidal. “He did not understand that our very presence in Turkey was tenuous… that our ability to deliver was weak.”18
The American emissary's visit was postponed, and then there seemed to be problems with Shertok's visa application.
Ten days after their arrival in Istanbul, Grosz decided to level with Brand and tell him what his own mission had been. The Nazis, he said, knew they had lost the war. Himmler's men wanted to start conversations with the Allies. Did Brand seriously think that Eichmann would let a million Jews go? “The whole Jewish business is just a blind.”19
Brand did not believe him.
On June 1, Grosz left for Syria. That afternoon, Brand was informed that Shertok had not been able to obtain a visa from the Turks. Brand would have to travel to Syria, where Shertok would have no problems with a visa. Worse, Chaim Barlas told Brand that British delegates would be present at his meeting with Shertok.
Brand tried to reason with Barlas: if he did not return to Budapest with a concrete agreement now, his mission would be lost. Eichmann's machinery would continue its murderous rampage. All he needed was the draft agreement, and he was sure he could hold off further deportations.
BY JUNE 3, the number of Jews deported from Hungary reached 253,389.20 The Jewish Council in Budapest rushed to whatever meetings they could arrange with members of parliament and their underlings. They were relieved to listen to the usual lies about Jews being Communist sympathizers and their removal being temporary. When news of deportations from Zone III reached the council, with a unanimous vote they decided not to tell the membership in Budapest. They feared that the news would create panic, and that panic could result in a massacre. They had to play for time and pray that the Allies would reach Hungary soon.
Minutes of Hungarian cabinet meetings for the months of the German occupation repeat the phrase “the Germans demand… the cabinet agrees,” as if each German demand was viewed as an order. Prime Minister Sztójay would not allow discussion of arrests by the Gestapo, even when those arrested were members of parliament. Meanwhile, specialists in the government's Jewish Affairs Office had started to draft new explanations for coming “operations,” such as the discovery of explosives in Jewish clubs or synagogues.21
Edmund Veesenmayer, the Reich plenipotentiary, responded that he did not deem it necessary to invent new reasons for the actions against the Jews.
JOEL BRAND boarded a train to Syria with Ehud Avriel of the Jewish Agency, who, he discovered in conversation, had been a Viennese youth leader before landing in Palestine and joining the Mossad Le’Aliya Bet—the Department of “B” Immigration, or illegal immigration to Palestine, established in 1938.22 Avriel had himself been in touch with Eichmann to arrange for ships during the years when Jews could still escape from Europe.23 He was therefore not surprised to learn of Brand's ransom arrangement. He had negotiated such deals in the past, except that the price was lower then and the proposed outcome more credible.24
Two men stopped Brand at the Ankara station as he was walking out of the men's washroom. They told him they were Jewish Revisionists25 and were convinced that Moshe Shertok and his party, the Mapai, would only betray him. They warned Brand that he would be arrested by the British once he reached Aleppo. They were zealots, Brand thought, crazed revolutionaries. He had met their chief, Vladimir Jabotinsky, in Istanbul. The man had been dismissive of all but his own efforts to save Jews. The British had to be forced to leave Palestine, he said. It was the only hope that Jews could be offered—a safe haven. His visceral hatred of the British was supported by long explanations, as were his fears of the Mapai-controlled Jewish Agency's complicity with the British. Brand could no longer indulge in such suspicions: the British were, after all, fighting the Germans. However misguided their policies in Palestine, they were, at least, on the right side in this war.
The Revisionists’ prediction, as it turned out, was accurate.
ROME FELL to the Allies on June 5. The very next day, Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy. The final phase of the Western Front had finally opened.