If Eichmann could not be forced to back down here and now,
then the Va’ada had put its chips on the wrong number in this game for
human lives and was as much of a loser as so many others had
been in occupied Europe. The loser in this game could then be called a traitor.
REZSŐ KASZTNER, DER KASZTNER-BERICHT
ON JUNE 5, not having heard back from Kurt Becher, Rezső Kasztner went to see Otto Hunsche at the SS offices at the Majestic. Again, he lodged a complaint with as much formality as he could muster: hundreds of Jews were dying in the sealed boxcars, he stated, and thousands were being gassed shortly after they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It would be impossible for the Germans to make any kind of deal with the Allies if they knew what had been going on in Hungary.
Hunsche said he had looked into the matter and, at most, sixty persons had died in each transport. That was not a large number, considering the circumstances. As for Auschwitz, the talk was all rumors. He knew of no such place.
On that same day, Florian Manoliou, a Romanian businessman, arrived in Budapest with two hundred Salvadoran schutzpässe, or immigration papers, and an urgent inquiry about what had happened to the Jews of Transylvania. He had been sent by George Mandel-Mantello, a Romanian refugee from Transylvania, whose parents had remained behind in Bistrita when he left the country before the borders closed.1 Since then, Mandel-Mantello had acquired Salvadoran citizenship and a posting as consul in Switzerland. He now had access to citizenship papers and was eager to help his parents and their friends.
Manoliou's initial contact was Rezső Kasztner, the man who had always been in the know, especially about what went on in Transylvania. He found him at Columbus Street, in a hastily assembled barrack outside the Wechselmann Institute. Kasztner had nothing but dire news. All the transports from Bistrita had gone across the Slovak border on their way to Auschwitz. He told Manoliou what Auschwitz meant for most people. Mindful of Eichmann's warnings, Kasztner did not mention the list.
Manoliou's return journey to Bistrita confirmed Kasztner's bone-jarring information. The Jewish community was no longer in the city; many of the members had been deported—no one knew where—and the rest were in ghettos, completely sealed off from any communication.
Back in Budapest, Manoliou called on Carl Lutz at the former American embassy to give him the schutzpässe. Though too late for his friend's parents, they could at least save others.
Lutz realized that he now had the opportunity he had been seeking: Manoliou could take the Auschwitz Protocols out of Hungary.2 The horrific details would shock world leaders into immediate action. Auschwitz could be destroyed, the whole murder apparatus stopped. Lutz's idea was that Manoliou would act as courier for the Jewish Agency; they would disguise the document as a regular weekly communication. Lutz implored Moshe Krausz to write a note with the Vrba-Wetzler report. As the Jewish Agency's official representative in Hungary, Krausz was expected to send reports out of the country. The only risk he took was that this particular report would be carried by Manoliou. Lutz could not put his own signature to the covering letter; he would be recalled if the Germans found the Auschwitz Protocols.
Krausz, ever the stickler for formalities, resisted. He could not send anything to a Salvadoran Consulate, because he had not been authorized to deal with foreign governments. It was all very well for Lutz to be afraid of losing his job—well, he, Krausz, was not going to jeopardize his own job, either. When Lutz reminded him that he had personally benefited from Lutz himself breaking the rules and giving him and his family refuge, Krausz insisted that was a different matter. The consul had good reasons to house the Agency's representative.
In the end, Krausz agreed that his note would be addressed to Chaim Posner of the Jewish Agency's Palestine Office in Switzerland, absolving him of blame when Manoliou delivered the package to the Salvadoran Consul.
Within days, Mandel-Mantello sent copies to all the major newspapers in Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Now, finally, the world learned about Auschwitz.
Unfortunately, news of the annihilation of European Jewry had to share center stage with other war news. The BBC broadcast some sections of Alfréd Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba's report, but the commentators construed much of it as propaganda, intended to vilify the enemy. The Swiss and the Swedish papers reported on the gas chambers, then quickly returned to day-to-day coverage of the war in Europe. The Jewish press in Palestine treated the extermination of Hungarian Jews with silence, whether because of British censorship in the area or policies imposed by the Zionist leadership, Kasztner did not know. What he did know was that time was running out.
On June 9 Eichmann declared that, if he did not receive final word from Istanbul within three days, he would “let the mills work in Auschwitz.”3
JOEL BRAND was arrested by the British even before he stepped off the train in Aleppo on June 6. He was escorted to their well-appointed barracks, where they assured him the food would be to his liking. It was. They apologized for the quality of the lodgings, though it, too, was fine. For two days, resting only for cups of tea and the generous rations, he was questioned by an officer. He was unaware that the British had already reviewed Eichmann's proposition at a war cabinet meeting a week earlier. Moving a million Jews across Europe and into Spain would mean temporarily stopping the war. Such a prospect would be unpalatable to the British high command. The British high commissioner for Palestine, Sir Harold MacMichael, asked the obvious questions: Why would the Nazis propose a plan to save Jews? And why would they ask for trucks, knowing that trucks were war materials and that no goods could be shipped to the Germans in the middle of the war? However, the British had not yet discussed the matter with the Americans, and they needed them onside for any decision potentially affecting a million lives. No matter what the Nazi ploy, the American War Refugee Board was openly in favor of negotiations.4
Moshe Shertok arrived in Syria from Palestine with an entourage of four intelligence officers, including the head of the Mossad, by then a branch of the Haganah. He questioned Joel for ten hours in a large, marble-floored Arab villa with a magnificent swimming pool, in the presence of both his own men and four British agents.
Brand became increasingly distraught. He stressed that time was being wasted, that the failure of his mission would mean the annihilation of Hungarian Jews, including his wife and children, who were being held by the SS as surety against his return. “Do you know, Mr. Shertok,” he asked, “that while you and I have been locked in this room, at least twelve thousand of our people have been murdered?” He broke down and cried when Shertok told him the British might not let him return to Budapest for now.
Shertok, convinced that Brand was not a spy (though perhaps an unwitting pawn in a German plot) and that the slender thread of his strange deal might be the last chance to save what was left of Europe's Jews, recommended to the British that a neutral nation be used to enter into discussions with the SS. He urged that Brand be sent back to Hungary with some sort of promise that would never be met. Then he returned to Jerusalem to put the matter before the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency. He said that, of all institutions, the Jewish Agency must keep the door open to trading goods for lives, no matter how offensive the prospect. “If there is even one chance in a million,” he said, “we must take it.”5
On June 7 Chaim Weizmann met Britain's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and asked him not to reject the German proposal out of hand. In return, he promised that the Agency would do nothing on its own without informing the British government.6
Contrary to Shertok's recommendation, Brand was taken to Cairo by the British and confined to a large furnished room in a prison for finer gentlemen. He was allowed out for lunches, given wine and Arab sweets, provided with tea and biscuits, but he was not allowed to leave the country. During the numerous interrogations that followed, he was asked hundreds of questions about the SS in Hungary, about the various former Abwehr and SD agents and the Hungarian intelligence network, about troop movements and fortifications, but nothing about the essence of his mission. The goods-for-blood deal had been referred to higher authority. To his proposition that just the appearance of negotiations would keep the Jews alive, a British officer responded that His Majesty's government could not make promises it had no intention of keeping.
A British envoy told Brand that, even if the Germans were negotiating in good faith, “what in the world would we do with a million Jews?” They could not be allowed into Palestine in contravention of the agreement with the Arabs to limit immigration. There was no more room for refugees in Britain, which could barely feed its own people and its armed forces. America, while generally supportive, had not offered to lift its immigration bar. The British and the Americans had come up with the harebrained notion that they could, together, examine the possibility of accommodating these Jews on the Iberian Peninsula.7 The Swedes, the Swiss, and the South Americans had produced their own acceptable numbers, but nowhere could you settle a million impoverished souls.
After several days of meetings in London, the Foreign Office concluded that Joel Brand's whole mission was a crude Nazi ploy. When Anthony Eden saw Shertok and Weizmann about the proposals, he told them there was no effective action the British could take.
In Washington, however, John Pehle, director of the War Refugee Board,8 informed the secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., that the Brand proposals were of less importance than the chance to save lives by talking, and that talking with the SS was what the War Refugee Board should do.
WHEN IT SEEMED clear in Budapest that Joel's mission had been a failure, only Hansi managed to remain calm. Rezső wept like a child. She cradled his head in her arms and kept repeating that they must not give up—indeed, they could not give up. He must tell Adolf Eichmann again that Eichmann's own actions were making the trade impractical. They had to pretend that the Joint was still waiting for proof that the SS was serious; that the documents would not be delivered until World Jewry was satisfied.
One afternoon, in the bar of the Gellért Hotel, Dieter Wisliceny told Kasztner that Eichmann had been opposed to the deal all along. It hadn’t been his idea. It was Himmler’s. “Eichmann is frustrated that he can’t carry out his mission as he planned. He has been slowed down, unnecessarily. His idea is to carry on with the deportations till not a single Jew is left in Hungary. Or didn’t you know that?”
“But what about Brand's mission?”
“Oh, that,” Wisliceny laughed. “Eichmann's one regret is that this one Jew has escaped him. He doesn’t expect to see Brand again.”9
Kasztner decided not to tell Hansi what he had heard.
He sent increasingly furious cables to the Jewish Agency in Istanbul and the Joint in Switzerland.
IN KOLOZSVÁR, eighteen thousand people were crammed into the tight space of the brickworks ghetto. Conditions had deteriorated with the summer heat, the lack of washing facilities, the overflowing latrines, and the sense of hopelessness. The Hungarian gendarmerie's Lieutenant-Colonel László Ferenczy, dissatisfied with the thoroughness of body searches, had ordered the hiring of obstetricians and nurses to ensure that women could not hide jewelry or money. Gendarmes used pliers to wrench tight-fitting wedding rings from fingers.
József Fischer, still head of the Jewish Council in Kolozsvár, was gravely ill and barely aware of the terrible task he had been asked to perform: making changes to a preliminary list for the “Kasztner train,” as it had started to be called. As Dieter Wisliceny and Hermann Krumey had insisted, the list would have to feature the names of those who could, conceivably, have been part of a Jewish conspiracy. Although children would be allowed, they could not form the majority of the names. Kasztner was given leave to talk on the phone with his father-in-law, but the list had to originate in Budapest and purportedly be taken to Kolozsvár by the SS.
The first couple of hundred names (no one is sure how many) were selected by Sigmund Leb, a member of Kolozsvár's Orthodox congregation, who had happened to be in Budapest when the Germans marched in; he had not been able to return home. The list was changed several times to include Zionist leaders, intellectuals, former parliamentarians, doctors, Polish refugees, orphans, widows, and some members of Rezső's and Bogyó's families. Because Fischer was ill, the young scharführer delegated by Krumey to accompany Kasztner to Kolozsvár delivered the list to the Jewish Council in that city. There it was changed by local Jewish leaders, by several Hungarian city officials who favored a few among those to be deported, and by SS men who had been bribed. It ended up with 388 names, including those of Kasztner's mother and older brother as well as several members of the Fischer family.
Fischer was still in the Jewish Hospital, a building near the ghetto that the authorities had permitted to operate until the last transport was ready to leave. In the tight space of the brickworks, with part walls on the only buildings and no privacy, with an insatiable need for reassurance, the news of the list traveled swiftly. There were fierce arguments about whom to exclude and whom to include and why. Some of those chosen refused to go, suspicious that occupants of a special train would be the first to be massacred. Some did not want to live in Palestine—they planned to return home once the war was over. Others still believed in the myth of a safe place in western Hungary where everyone would work. A few doctors had volunteered to be on the first trains, choosing to believe they would be needed where the trains went.10
Many who were not on the list clamored to be included, and those who survived Auschwitz remembered the ghastly scenes of begging and vituperations, of threats and humiliations. They would never forgive.
Fischer had no power to help anyone now. The ghetto granted no recognition to his past achievements. He had lost all he had worked for. His local council tried to keep order, distributed food and clothing from the Aid and Rescue Committee, and attempted to delay the deportations. But by June 8, the only people left in the ghetto were those few who had been selected.
The train, an ordinary second-class passenger train, left Kolozsvár on June 10, carrying the 388 people.
They arrived at Columbus Street in Budapest starved, beaten, and ill, dressed in rags. The first priority was food and clothing, milk for the children, medicines for the sick. Because Jewish doctors had been denied their right to practice, there was no shortage of specialists. Over a four-day period, a group of Jewish builders had erected five wooden barracks and sanitation facilities in the large courtyard behind the Wechselmann Institute. A twenty-five-bed hospital had been set up in one of the barracks.11
There were bunk beds, simple tables, and makeshift shelving. Men and women were in separate buildings, but they shared the kitchen and dining room. The food, prepared by the inmates, was tasty and plentiful. The institute's basement gymnasium had also been transformed into sleeping quarters.
The buildings were protected by five SS guards, ordered to behave with courtesy toward their charges. Kasztner observed that they followed these orders with the same exacting attention they would have accorded orders to machine-gun everybody and bury the corpses in lime.
The Wechselmann Institute is still there today: a massive, red brick building with dormer windows, an elaborate facade, decorative fencing, a high-ceilinged foyer with a brass bas-relief commemorating the architect and philanthropist Dr. Ignaz Wechselmann's efforts to help the deaf, the dumb, and the blind. It is a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. The elevated rails of the old railway line can still be seen from the pavement in front. When Hansi Brand arrived with armloads of clothes and toys for the children, its halls were filled with noisy, anxious people trying to find a place for themselves. She and Kasztner designated a room in one of the barracks as an office, and Kasztner's secretary moved there from Sip Street, where the noise level was even greater.
Word had spread in Budapest about a train for Jews who could leave this hell and go to Palestine. At the Va’ada office in the Jewish Community Center on Sip Street, frantic people jostled one another for a chance to see Rezső Kasztner, Ernő Szilágyi, or Ottó Komoly. Some waited for hours, all day, even overnight, huddled in the corridors, collapsed along the stairs; mothers with children, women whose husbands had gone for labor service and disappeared. They all waited for a chance to explain to some-one—anyone—why they had to be on the train to carry them toward Palestine. They begged as Kasztner had begged Eichmann; they promised money and jewelry, as he had promised bribes to the SS. Initially, “one hundred spots on the transport had to be offered to those people who could supply the most valuables and money,” Kasztner recalled later. The trade-off to accommodate the German demands was the only way the Jewish planners could include those who had nothing left—the widows, the rabbis, community leaders, the young Poles and Slovaks who had been risking their lives at border crossings, and those who had worked for the Zionist cause without compensation. “Discussions with applicants for the ‘spots for sale’ were held under the leadership of Komoly,” Kasztner said. “Unfortunately most Hungarian Jews had obeyed the law and turned their wealth over to the government months ago. That's why we had to raise the number of the ‘paying’ to 150. In the truest sense of the word, a battle was waged over those places.”
One survivor remembers Kasztner asking her mother, wife of a former textile merchant from Kolozsvár, whether she could still lay her hands on a few valuables. A gentile friend then made the dangerous journey from Transylvania to Budapest, carrying a bag with jewelry and a set of silver cutlery. Had she been caught, she would have been imprisoned; had she confessed to transporting Jewish valuables, she would have been executed.
Bogyó, anxious about her father's health and suffering from the heat, the airlessness, the loneliness of this, her last Budapest summer, decided to join her family at the Wechselmann Institute. Since the German occupation, she had barely seen her husband. Even during the few hours when Jews were allowed out into the streets, she was too frightened to leave the Biss's apartment. Rezső rarely returned even at night now. She knew he was with Hansi and that their relationship had become a love affair, but now was not the time to deal with it. She had wanted children, but Rezső insisted that no child of his should be born in a place ruled by the Nazis. Unbeknownst to him, she had endured a barely medicated abortion in an illegal Jewish clinic.12 When the war was over and the world returned to sanity, Bogyó hoped to reclaim her husband. She would have children then and a real home, somewhere safe.
Hansi and Rezső worked together every day. They spent their evenings in the small apartment Hansi had rented with fake Christian papers. She visited her boys, but did not dare take them back there. It would not be safe. If Joel didn’t produce what Eichmann wanted, she was sure this monster would destroy them.
By now Kasztner was really chain-smoking, lighting one cigarette from the butt of another, slouching forward, blowing smoke at the Germans when he met with them, acting as though he had equal authority and could match Eichmann, “the Master,” in power. He had taken to pacing, like Eichmann, with a furious stride, shouting, gesticulating in frustration. During the night Rezső and Hansi curled up together, at first only for comfort, to feel alive. There is something about existing in the shadow of death that draws people together, some in anger or frustration, some in love.
Until now, as they lived on the knife's edge, each evening as surprising as the last when they found they had survived another day, Rezső had not fully realized how he felt about Hansi. He was not sure when he had fallen in love, but his need for her had become the sustaining force of his life. He was afraid to ask what she felt. Or perhaps he didn’t need to. He already knew.