If I pass through this difficult period,
I believe I will be able to say that my life was not in vain…
GIZI FLEISCHMANN, IN A LETTER TO HER DAUGHTER
IN PALESTINE, SUMMER 1944
IN THE LATE summer of 1944 a bloody insurrection erupted in Slovakia against the government of Josef Tiso, aka Father Tiso, a Catholic priest and one of the most feared, hysterically anti-Semitic leaders of the Nazi era. Since early June, there had been sporadic partisan attacks in the area around Banská Bystrica. Partisan forces had been strengthened by the addition of some Slovak army deserters and by French and Soviet escapees from concentration camps. A few parachutists from Britain and two Soviet airborne brigades also took part in the uprising, as did some Jewish partisans, including Rudolf Vrba, who finally got his chance to hear a German scream in pain. In his autobiography, Vrba writes of the extraordinary joy he experienced when he realized that Germans could be hurt, that they were not as invincible as they had seemed in Auschwitz.
Tiso requested Hitler's help to hold on to power. On August 29, SS Lieutenant-General Gottlob Berger arrived with an elite SS force to quell the rebellion, and Adolf Eichmann dispatched Hauptsturmführer Alois Brunner for immediate reprisals against the Jews.
Captain Brunner was one of Eichmann's most reliable acolytes. He had joined the National Socialist Party when he was only nineteen years old. His dream had been to become a member of the elite SS corps, but he was too short, too thin, and too ugly to be immediately accepted. He worked as Eichmann's secretary at the Zentralstelle für Judischer Auswanderung, the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, in Austria after the Anschluss and managed to have 47,000 Austrian Jews sent to the death camps. Then he went on to team up with Dieter Wisliceny in Salonica, where 44,000 Jews were packed into boxcars destined for Auschwitz. Wisliceny thought Brunner was too eager to prove himself because of his “black kinky hair and hooked nose.”1 Brunner commanded the roundup of Jews in France and their transport to Auschwitz. His hatred for Jews was legendary—Eichmann had chosen him carefully. He looked on his mission in Slovakia as an opportunity for further career advancement, as his chance to destroy those Jews whose lives had been spared against payments to Wisliceny. The deportations of all participants in the uprising in Slovakia and of all Jews were publicly announced. Of the 19,000 people who were driven to the Sered transit camp, about half were Jews.
Kasztner first heard of the Slovak uprising at Hermann Krumey's Castellangasse headquarters in Vienna. He had been working with Krumey's staff to allow the Red Cross to distribute shoes and clothing to the Strasshof deportees, who had been robbed of the last of their meager possessions by the Ukrainian guards on arrival at the transit camp. By now, all of them had worn out their summer clothes. Some had made wooden soles and tied them to their feet with rags; others wore rags with newspaper lining. Those prisoners used for fieldwork in the countryside had received pieces of clothing from villagers, but the Vienna groups had nothing to protect them from the cold. Kasztner had also brought in corn and potatoes from Győr in Hungary, but Krumey had insisted that the Austrians were as deprived of food as the prisoners and had confiscated the entire truckload.
As soon as Krumey told him the news from Bratislava, Kasztner cabled Saly Mayer in Switzerland, telling him what had happened in Slovakia and begging him to ask for another meeting. His previous cable had inquired whether Mayer was still alive. Only Mayer's demise, Kasztner thought, could explain the void into which he had been sending his desperate pleas. Next he called on Kurt Becher at the Grand Hotel in Vienna. He found the obersturmbannführer somewhat surly. Not enough was being accomplished at the meetings with Mayer, the German complained, and he did not want to be blamed for the lack of progress. As for asking Himmler to intercede on behalf of the Slovak Jews, well, now was not the time. Mayer's request for a list of goods was just another delaying tactic. Kasztner told him that the Sonderkommando had rounded up seven thousand or eight thousand Jews already in Slovakia, and, it seemed, Wisliceny could no longer help. Becher would not even discuss the Slovaks. He did not want to be perceived by his superiors as an advocate for Jews. That was not his job. However, he did grant Kasztner another travel permit for Bratislava.2He would be accompanied by Hauptsturmführer Max Grüson to make sure he made no contact with suspicious elements.
Becher did not tell Kasztner that he was concerned about Himmler's own position in the Reich. Although Himmler had enthusiastically organized the arrest and interrogation of the leaders implicated in a July 20 plot to kill Hitler, there had been rumors that he might have had contact with former colonel Claus Stauffenberg, the presumed mastermind behind the attempted assassination. The Reichsführer had shown himself particularly diligent in rooting out the perpetrators and all their friends and relations. There had been a wave of arrests, gruesome torture filmed for the edification of the masses, and public executions, some of which were carried out with meat hooks and piano wire. It had been fortunate that news of Joel Brand's failure had been drowned out by the news of the retributions. No, Becher cautioned, it was not the time to mention Jews to Himmler.
Kasztner reached Bratislava on September 15. No sooner had he arrived at the Carlton Hotel than Brunner's Gestapo agents arrested him.
“Are you a Jew?” a young SS officer demanded.
“I am not considered a Jew,” Kasztner replied.
“Are you circumcised?”
“Yes, but I am still not considered a Jew.”
“By our laws, you are a Jew!” the officer shouted as they dragged the protesting Kasztner across the lobby and down the steps to a waiting car.3
When Becher heard about the arrest, he called Brunner. Soon after, Kasztner was released.
Kasztner went to see Gizi Fleischmann and Rabbi Weissmandel, who were still in their offices at Edel Alley. Their Working Group had been bombarding Mayer with cables, asking for immediate financial assistance. They were sure the government-supported Hlinka Guard militia would not oppose the SS. Kasztner offered to ask Becher to set up an “economic branch” in Bratislava where he could negotiate to exchange lives for more cash or merchandise. “On the spot we drew up a list of deliverable merchandise” for presentation to Becher, Kasztner remembered, and he returned to Vienna the next day to beg Becher at least to consider the Slovak proposition. Becher declined because he still had no word from Mayer.
On September 16 Ottó Komoly met Miklós Horthy Jr. in Buda Castle to discuss the removal of the anti-Jewish laws. The Lakatos government had announced its intention to return Jews to productive life, though not to their previously held positions. The young Horthy had spoken openly about stepping out of the war, about joining the Americans. His father had ordered the arrest of several Arrow Cross leaders. Horthy Jr. asked Komoly whether the Jews in labor battalions would be willing to join with the Hungarian army to fight against the Germans, should defending Hungary be necessary. Komoly was certain the Jews would welcome the opportunity to meet the Germans on a battlefield. They did not discuss how his father was going to regain control of the army from the largely Swabian senior staff. When Komoly mentioned his concern that the Germans would not give up Hungary, Miklós Jr. smiled. The Germans needed friends to the east of their Reich, he said.
When Komoly told Kasztner and Hansi Brand about the meeting, he described Horthy Jr. as an uninformed, hot-headed chip off the old block, a traditional anti-Semite, but with some decency—and that, he believed, was about all that was needed from men of influence in these times. A willingness to look at the facts might have been helpful, but one should not expect too much. Young Horthy had seemed genuinely horrified that extermination camps existed, Komoly reported, and had not tried to argue, as his father had done, that Auschwitz was merely another tough labor camp.
“They don’t have a chance” was Becher's view of Horthy's late resistance to the Germans. “We will hold the territory, no matter what the loss of life,” he told Kasztner. “Budapest is the cornerstone of the Margarethen line [named for Margarethen (or Margit) Island in the Danube between Buda and Pest]. We will defend it to the best of our ability and to the last man. Germany will not accept your tin-pot Regent's desire to make a separate peace.” The fact that Finland had just, on September 19, signed a separate peace treaty with the Russians was going to make Horthy's disobedience more irritating to Hitler now than it might have been earlier.
On September 24, Kasztner returned, empty-handed, to Bratislava. At his request, Grüson went to see Brunner to tell him, without due authorization from Becher, that important negotiations were taking place between the Reich and certain members of the Slovak Working Group and that they involved the delivery of war materials.4 He demanded that therefore Fleischmann's group be allowed to continue its work. Brunner refused. He took his orders only from Eichmann, he insisted. Grüson was arrested a few days later.5
Kasztner offered Becher a deal that included 30,000 Slovakian kronen and 110,000 yards of ready-to-wear canvas in exchange for fifty people. This small group would be taken directly to Switzerland, and the rest of the Jews who were awaiting their fate in the Sered camp would go to Theresienstadt. No Slovak Jews would be sent to Auschwitz. Mayer, Kasztner assured Becher, would compensate generously, and the War Refugee Board would supply food and clothing through the Red Cross. But this time Kasztner failed.
“You’ve done the best you could, Rudolf,” Becher tried to console him. “If we lose the war, there will be statues commemorating your efforts, streets named after you in Tel Aviv and Budapest.” They were both in Budapest again. Mayer's September 26 cable to Kasztner, asking for a meeting—his first after a three-week silence—was, they agreed, a good sign, but Becher predicted it was too late to save the Slovak Jews. They had been taken into custody for “military reasons.”6A large number of them had been picked up in areas formerly controlled by the partisans, he said, and Eichmann had succeeded in “poisoning the atmosphere in Berlin.” Becher showed Kasztner a copy of Brunner's telegram to Eichmann, sent after Kasztner had offered goods for the Slovak Jews. It read: “The claims of the Jew from the Joint, Kasztner, are a lie. And delivery of goods from the Jews would disturb German-Slovak relations. The Jewess, Fleischmann, has been caught by the Slovak police as she was composing horror stories to send abroad. I have taken the necessary steps.”7
Kasztner feared that Mayer's cable, indicating that the Joint (or whoever was behind Mayer) was no longer stalling, would not impress Eichmann. In it, Mayer reiterated his agreement to put money in a Swiss bank account for the Nazis’ use. So Kasztner returned once again to the passengers on his train and urged Becher at least to allow the rest of the Bergen-Belsen group into Switzerland. The “other side” would expect nothing less. Kasztner always presented his own views as though he were merely conveying the demands of this other side. Frequently, he acted aggrieved by the intransigence of the Joint or the Jewish Agency, an unwilling middleman who was doing his best.
“Surely this group can be considered as paid for long ago,” he urged.
Becher replied that, because the exchange rate for the dollar had changed considerably since the group had left and given that all the financial details were based on the old conversion rates, money was owing now. He showed Kasztner Himmler's personally signed telegram: “The other side must be crazy. The fee for a Jew from Europe to enter America is $1,000, the emigration fee for a Jew to leave Europe is also $1,000. Himmler.” The original deposit, as estimated by Becher's new man, First Lieutenant Karl Grabau, was worth only $400,000 to $500,000, not enough to pay for even half of the remaining Jews in Bergen-Belsen.8
Kasztner protested that the rates at the time of departure from Budapest would, surely, apply.
Becher demurred. The payment was only a deposit against the Brand deal, and the first group had been allowed to leave Bergen-Belsen without a single truck in return. There was continued silence from Switzerland on the important issue of trucks and on meeting with a suitable negotiating partner, someone other than Mayer.
On September 28 Kasztner traveled to Switzerland for another meeting with Mayer. Becher, when he learned that Mayer would once again have no one of higher authority to accompany him, decided not to attend himself and not to attempt the release of the remaining “Kasztner Jews” from Bergen-Belsen. Instead, he sent Herbert Kettlitz, another of his SS aides.9And Becher proved to be right. The third meeting was as inconclusive as the previous two had been. There was still no money in any bank, nor had any goods been bought. Mayer's lawyer, Marcus Wyler-Schmidt, did most of the talking. He promised to advance the $2 million after the Germans stopped all the deportations. He specified their awareness of the imminent danger facing Slovak Jews. He demanded improved conditions for both Jews and slave laborers in concentration camps. Mayer told Kasztner in Yiddish that he had nothing more to offer and that his total budget was frozen by U.S. government orders.10
Kasztner was relieved that Kettlitz did not understand Yiddish and that Becher had not come to another pointless meeting. As he recalled later, even Kettlitz had been reduced to entreating Mayer for some written agreement, something “my chief could use. Otherwise,” he warned, “it will be impossible for him to intervene further with the Reichsführer-SS on behalf of the Jews.”
Mayer's response was delivered with his usual stiffness: “A Swiss gives only those promises he knows he can keep,” he said.11
Kasztner was enraged by Mayer's seeming intransigence. Mayer had full knowledge of the impending fate of the Slovak Jews, and he knew how many Hungarian Jews had been deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Yet there he was, “an old, venerable, neurotic retiree, vain, overbearing, ignoring how many lives are involved and congratulating himself on his personal sacrifice of negotiating with the Nazis.” Mayer's notion of “playing for time” was no longer effective—a few more days and there would be no more time left.12
Becher, following Himmler's orders, now insisted that there would be no further meetings or discussions unless Mayer produced a representative of the Allies, preferably an American.
THE ALLIES HAD liberated France. In Italy, Canadian and American forces were fighting their way north toward Rome. The Soviet army was at the gates of Warsaw; they had been there since the beginning of the Poles’ uprising against the Germans on August 1, but Stalin had determined that he wanted Poland weakened. He did not wish to see any more attempts at independence. So the Soviet army sat and sunbathed on the far side while the Germans fought back, destroying whole city blocks in Warsaw and massacring some forty thousand unarmed civilians on the western bank of the Vistula River.13
Krumey called Kasztner in Budapest. With winter approaching, he could now give the International Red Cross permission to deliver the shoes and some warmer clothes for the Strasshof exchange Jews. He implied that further payments would be needed for transmitting the clothes—in other words, the usual SS bribe—but did not mention the sum. He complained that some local Austrians were handing their own clothes to the Jews, a situation he said had to be stopped if only for the benefit of the would-be humanitarians. They were endangering their own lives. Kasztner ordered five thousand pairs of shoes from a Slovak supplier and requested the money to pay for them from the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee.
THE COLUMBUS STREET camp continued to attract the displaced and the desperate. Some people hoped for another train, and, in the meantime, the camp seemed calmer than the rest of Budapest. There was still a hospital, a baths barrack, and even an ambulance service. Many of the new arrivals had been rescued from the provincial ghettos in exchange for steep bribes to the SS.14 Ottó Komoly was a frequent visitor, delivering letters and packages and collecting mail for relatives in Budapest. He believed the camp would be handed over to the Hungarian authorities now that Eichmann's contingent had departed from the city. Unlike Kasztner, Komoly had faith in the Hungarians’ ability to sustain their regained independence.
Kasztner moved his secretary from the pension where she had been living to the Columbus Street camp, with fake papers. He spent the nights dictating letters and cables to the Joint and the Jewish Agency. His reports on the situation in Budapest were starting to show the strain of his daily efforts, his lack of sleep, and his frustration over Joel Brand's failure to return. Unlike Samuel Stern and the Central Jewish Council, Kasztner was unconvinced that these days were any more than a brief lull in the terror.
The illusion that the Germans would pack up and go home had taken hold of the capital. The cafés and restaurants were full, and no one left even when the sirens sounded. It was a sunny, cool fall after the over-hot summer months. The kiosks along the Danube Corso played less Mozart and more Chopin. The Jews of Budapest gathered in their overcrowded Star House apartments to celebrate the two days of the New Year and the day of Yom Kippur.
The Soviet army, now joined by units of Romanians and encountering light resistance, rolled into Transylvania in northeastern Hungary with 59 divisions and 825 tanks, outnumbering German and Hungarian troops by more than two to one.
JOEL BRAND was, finally, released by the British on October 5. He had been given the choice of returning to Budapest, where he would probably have been killed, or going to Palestine. He chose Palestine. He saw Teddy Kollek, a fellow Hungarian15 he had met in Istanbul, and David Ben-Gurion, and, as he poured out his story to them, he blamed both of them for the failure of his mission. He was not comforted when Ben-Gurion tried to reassure him that the negotiations were ongoing. And he exploded when he learned that Saly Mayer was representing the Joint in meetings with the SS and that Brand's role had been assumed by Rezső Kasztner.
Brand continued to write reports, bombarding the governments of Great Britain and the United States with demands for action in Hungary. He called himself the “emissary for the dead” and believed he was speaking on behalf of Hungary's murdered Jews. He spent hours waiting outside the offices of various Jewish leaders in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, hoping to tell them how they had let down half a million Jews by not listening to his pleas in Istanbul. Everyone, he found, was too busy with his own unimportant tasks to pay attention to mass murder in Hungary. “Well-trained secretaries,” he recalled, “would tell me facilely that their bosses had gone out and that no one knew exactly when they would return.” Even now he thought there was still a great deal that could be done. But no one listened.
Brand was still unaware of how little influence the leaders of the Jewish Agency and the various American Jewish organizations had on the policies of the Allies. Furious with the British for arresting him in Syria and with the Agency for not making an effort to meet Eichmann's demands, he joined the bitterest enemies of the Jewish Agency and the British occupation forces, the Stern Gang. This was a Jewish terrorist group named for its founder, Avraham Stern, who had been killed by the British in 1942. The Stern Gang did not accept the policy of the Haganah, the Jewish underground army under the command of the Jewish Agency, to cease fighting the British while the Allies fought the Germans. It did not accept the British mandate, the White Paper limiting immigration, or any of the British policies governing the Jewish presence in Palestine. Its methods of showing disagreement included blowing up British installations and attacking British soldiers. In November 1944 the Stern Gang murdered Lord Moyne, the British minister for Middle Eastern affairs who had played such an active role in Brand's blood-for-goods mission.
IN MID-OCTOBER, Captain Alois Brunner began to empty the Sered camp of its almost twenty thousand Slovak Jews, even as the Slovak insurrection was defeated by four German SS divisions. Some of those who were sent to Theresienstadt survived the war. A few survived at the Sachsenhausen camp in Germany, Stutthof in Poland, and Bergen-Belsen. The rest, including all the children, were murdered in Auschwitz. Brunner had always taken great pleasure in the murder of children.
Rabbi Weissmandel, the man who had first tried to buy Jewish lives from Wisliceny, escaped from the train to Auschwitz. He hid in the cellar of a villa on the outskirts of Bratislava with seventeen other Jews. His wife and children were murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Gizi Fleischmann, the woman Wisliceny had commended for her extraordinary courage, was given a last chance to live: Brunner asked her to reveal the whereabouts of Jews in hiding.16 When she refused, she was chained to the floor of a boxcar. For the twenty hours it took the train to reach its final destination, she could move neither her arms nor her legs. Brunner had her transport marked “Return Undesirable.” On arrival at the Birkenau rail ramp, she was taken directly to the gas chambers.