He was the most brilliant journalist I have ever met. He could
dictate a perfect column in sentences, paragraphs, without ever having to
look it over or change a single word. Three months after I had started
working for him atÚj Kelet, he was still in the habit of crossing out the
beginning and end of each of my pieces, without bothering to read what I had
written. He just knew that a young reporter would not get to the story
right away and would want to find some unnecessary conclusions at the end.
He was quick-witted, sarcastic, smarter than anyone else and happy
to show off in front of the less well endowed. I remember the day he grinned
at me and said: “Now that you are a seasoned reporter, you’re fully
qualified to go to the kiosk outside and bring me back a package of cigarettes.”
TOMY LAPID, KASZTNER's FORMER COLLEAGUE
AT ÚJ KELET AND FORMER MEMBER OF THE KNESSET1
THE KASZTNERS moved to Palestine in late 1947. They arrived at the end of the War of Independence, during the last days of the British in Palestine, the beginnings of the State of Israel, and the start of a war between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. The destruction of the King David Hotel in the middle of 1946 by Menachem Begin's Revisionist army (known as the Irgun), the murderous fights between the Jews and the Arabs, the continued attacks on the roads and railways, the pitched battles against the British, and the horrific, symbolic hanging of two British soldiers had successfully convinced the British government that it did not wish to continue its mandated occupation of Palestine. The initial plan, a three-part division of the area, had been rejected by both Jews and Arabs. The British turned the problem over to the United Nations,2 where, on November 29, 1947, the General Assembly endorsed the partitioning of Palestine into two states: one Jewish, one Arab. The Jews accepted this; the Palestinian Arabs did not, and the partition plan was never implemented.
Palestine was too preoccupied with its own problems to notice the Kasztners’ arrival. Little fanfare greeted them—a couple of newspaper articles and a small party given by one of the survivors from the train. Yoel Palgi wrote a warm, welcoming article in one of the local newspapers, presenting Kasztner as a hero, a man who had risked his life so that others might live. Kasztner was relieved to see that Palgi was not harboring ill feelings toward him. Even so, he had expected a more effusive reception. There were people here he had helped to save, people who would remember his role in Budapest and Vienna, people who would know that he had accomplished much on behalf of the Jewish Agency. He had kept in touch with several members of the Executive, including Moshe Sharett (formerly Shertok) and Chaim Barlas. His actions had been recognized, at least verbally, by David Ben-Gurion. Yet none of the Yishuv's leaders was there to greet him.
Only their families seemed delighted to see them. Kasztner's oldest brother, Ernő, and his mother were living near Haifa with the middle son, Gyula, who, as a small-arms instructor in the Haganah, was preparing young men for the next round of heavy fighting. The Fischers lived in Tel Aviv, and that was where Rezső and Bogyó settled. They moved into a one-room basement apartment on Adam HaCohen Street. Kasztner found a job at Új Kelet, the reborn, small-circulation, Hungarian-language newspaper he had previously worked for in Kolozsvár. The publisher, Ernő Márton, had been his boss before Rezső left for Budapest in the spring of 1941. Kasztner was also commissioned to create programs for Hungarian-language radio. His columns were tough, analytical statements, much as they had been in his early days as a journalist. On radio, he was an engaging, witty interviewer. He applied himself to the study of Hebrew. He began to use his Hebrew name, Israel, and dropped the z from “Kasztner,” as he had informally done already when dealing with the SS.
Some of the survivors of the Kasztner train, led by Dezsö Hermann, set up a small fund to allow the Kasztners to move to a slightly larger apartment on Sderot Emanuel Street.
In April 1948, when Kasztner returned to Nuremberg, it was at the behest of the new Mapai-led government, headed by Ben-Gurion. They believed there was still a chance that more of the Budapest Jews’ wealth would be traced and that Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust, would be brought to justice. Kasztner testified about the fate of the Slovak Jews and his own attempts to buy their lives. He added some color to Becher's account of his efforts to save Kasztner and the others. This time he also credited Hermann Krumey with sparing the Strasshof Jews in the last three weeks of the war and in the rescue of twenty-nine Jews from Bratislava. In a statement he made at the office of the chief war-crimes counsel in Nuremberg, he gave Krumey credit for “full understanding and sympathy,” as well as the rescue of thirty thousand Jews in the Theresienstadt camp who would otherwise have been murdered before the Soviet army liberated the area.3
While he was in Nuremberg, Kasztner visited Becher again. Afterward, he reported to the Jewish Agency's minister of finance in Israel, Eliezer Kaplan, that Becher told him of additional Jewish assets he had given to Lieutenant-General Hans Jüttner in Hungary. In his report Kasztner labeled these goods “the new Becher assets” and recommended that Kaplan should make every effort to recover them.
BOGYÓ KEPT very much to herself. Even in company, she was quiet. Most people ascribed her sadness to her father's illness, her caring for a young child at the same time as for a dying father. József Fischer, once a leading citizen of Kolozsvár, was now destitute, as was his family. Nevertheless, as Zsuzsi remembers, despite her worries Bogyó remained an elegant, stately presence. Any store she entered was quick to serve her. Strangers opened doors for her and offered their arm when she crossed the street.
Kasztner had not been aware of the deep divide between the old settlers and the new arrivals in Palestine. With thousands of European refugees landing every day, the existing Jewish community there, the Yishuv, felt in danger of being flooded. By 1948 there were more than 350,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel. The Yishuv wished to maintain its hard-won image of itself as a distinct, proud, uncompromising people belonging to this land through history and love—unlike the frightened, beaten Holocaust survivors who kept arriving and claiming their share of a common future. Most of them came as refugees from death camps, not as the idealists who had chosen to settle in Palestine in earlier times. As the author Yehudit Hendel put it in a speech on Israeli television, “I was taught that the basest thing is not the Exile but the Jew who came from there.” Perhaps the nastiest insult to the new arrivals was the slang term sabon, or soap, that came into use as a short form for “Holocaust survivor”—a reference to the Nazis’ alleged practice of making soap from the boiled bodies of their victims.4
When another writer, poet Leah Goldberg, spoke at a meeting of Ben-Gurion's Labor Zionists, she, too, made derogatory remarks about the Holocaust survivors: “This people is ugly, impoverished, morally suspect…”5 The Yishuv regarded the Jews of the Exile not only as a sad and bedraggled lot but, worse, as having let themselves be “herded like sheep,” without a fight, into ghettos and concentration camps. There was no sympathy for them. They were put to work with shovels and pickaxes to till the land and help create the new Jewish dream. There was little room for the doctors and lawyers, accountants and shopkeepers of the old world.
Adam Heller, who had been with his family on the Kasztner train, was only twelve years old when he left Switzerland for Palestine. Once there, he was quick to hide his identity as a Holocaust survivor. Who would want to be labeled a lamb for slaughter? Only twenty-three years later did he finally accept his survival and put to rest his own sense of guilt for the slaughter.6
The young were enlisted immediately. A couple of weeks after the Second World War ended, Haganah commanders had gone to displaced persons camps in Europe to sign up young men for military training. The quasi-governmental Jewish Agency was not interested in immigration for the sake of the survivors; rather, as Ben-Gurion said, it wanted “people from the ages of eighteen to thirty-five” to help win the war and to build a country.
When Ben-Gurion declared the “establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, which shall be known as the State of Israel,” on May 14, 1948, both U.S. president Harry Truman and the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin rushed to accord it immediate recognition. But the celebrations were short-lived. The day after the last of the British soldiers left, a massive force of Arab nations gathered to destroy the new state. Israel was invaded by 10,000 Egyptians, 7,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, 3,000 Lebanese, and the British-trained Arab Legion of Transjordan. The Jews were outgunned and outnumbered. Their army, including the untrained new arrivals from concentration camps, numbered only about 30,000 men and women. They lacked aircraft and heavy guns. Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab League, declared: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.”
But the Jews had experienced enough exterminations and massacres. The Czech government, under Soviet influence, began to airlift weapons to Tel Aviv, and Israel not only beat back the invaders but conquered new territories. Around 20,000 Holocaust survivors—one out of every three soldiers—fought in the war. Most of them didn’t speak Hebrew and barely understood their orders. It is not surprising that most of the casualties were survivors from the concentration camps.7
Kasztner volunteered for the army but, at the age of forty-two, was too old to be accepted, despite his assertion that he had trained young halutzim in Transylvania to fight. He boasted that he and his colleagues would have fought the enemy in hand-to-hand combat in Hungary, but they didn’t have a chance. “Here, we could have looked the enemy in the eyes and known where to aim.” Hansi, he was fond of telling those who would listen, had wanted to pour boiling oil on the heads of Wehrmacht soldiers when they paraded through the streets of Budapest.
By the end of 1948, the Israeli army was 100,000-strong and well equipped with Eastern European arms and armor. Through successive victories, it had gained confidence as a fighting unit and now occupied about 80 percent of what the United Nations had designated as Palestine. Peace negotiations began in January 1949 and ended, on July 20, with Syria signing an agreement. Although not all the Arab states signed on to the peace, the war was over. There was a sense of optimism, of hard-won security in Israel. A new flood of more than half a million Jewish refugees from surrounding Arab countries did not stanch the sense of victory. The fact that 656,000 Arabs fled from the Palestinian territories now occupied by Israel made room for the new exiles.8
Kasztner, as he declared in Új Kelet, was sure the Arab states would refrain from further attacks. As a family, Rezső and Bogyó were becoming more comfortable with life in the new country. A group of friends, led by Dezsö Hermann, collected £320 for them, enough money to pay for a two-room rental apartment above street level on Amsterdam Street. Zsuzsi remembers the parties, the living room full of cheerful Hungarian talk, jokes, laughter, music spilling out onto the balcony—1940s jazz and schmaltzy songs—and dancing until the sun rose. Kasztner decided to run as one of Ben-Gurion's Mapai Party candidates in the election for the First Knesset (parliament) in January 1949. A lifelong Labor Zionist, he felt he already knew this land. He certainly understood the major issues and had the necessary credentials. But because he was fifty-ninth on the party's slate, he had no chance of being elected. Undeterred, he told friends he would be ready for the next time. His Hebrew would be fluent by then, he spoke six other languages, and he had studied ancient, biblical Hebrew as a child.
In 1949 he was appointed communications director and spokesperson for Dov Yosef (Joseph), who held a number of ministries in the government. Yosef, a hero of the War of Independence and a former governor of Jerusalem, lacked the skills of a politician. He was uncomfortable in crowds, did not know how to handle personal appeals, and tended to be gruff when confronted by the media. Kasztner's job was to soften the minister's edges, glad-hand the public, receive visitors, accept petitions, and review requests. He had learned how to show patience and amiability in the company of tougher crowds than these, after all, and he had charm, particularly with women, and a cutting sense of humor that he could use to advantage with his minister's political opponents.
Kasztner tried again for the Knesset in 1951. This time he was fifty-third on the Mapai slate, so again was not elected. He was now director of public relations in the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. He continued to write for Új Kelet and to produce radio programs. He was still a superb journalist, and coworkers remember him as quick-witted, often at the expense of others, and self-confident to the point of arrogance about his own accomplishments. Bogyó thought Rezső was becoming his old self again. He was full of hope and ambition and had almost stopped talking about the Nazi occupation of his homeland.
Zsuzsi at three years old had attended a local nursery school. She learned Hebrew so fast that she could not be identified as a Diaspora Jew. Except when she was at home, she was a tiny sabra, a native of Israeli. Rezső proved to be an attentive and loving father, never too busy for her, and always proud of her achievements.
The Brands also ended up in Palestine. “My father was so involved with the past that he could not handle the present or the future,” Dani Brand remembered. Joel wrote a few articles and tried to make some money. He worked on his memoirs, but he could not finish the book or find a publisher. Finally, he gave his notes to Alex Weissberg, a journalist, who reconstructed the story—or, as both Hansi and Joel claimed, parts of the story—and had it published in 1958 as Advocate for the Dead: The Story of Joel Brand. Joel was never happy with Weissberg's version of his life and began, immediately, to work on another autobiography. He became increasingly depressed, started drinking heavily, and accused the world, especially former Jewish Agency politicians, of having let the Hungarian Jews die.
For a while, Hansi worked on a kibbutz near Haifa. She was, as she told Rezső, amazed at everyone's indifference to what had happened during the Holocaust. Even survivors seemed embarrassed to discuss their experiences. The Yishuv certainly did not want to hear about them. At kibbutz dinner tables, they talked about the success of new crops, the irrigation plants, and their fear of renewed hostilities with the Arabs. “Do you know,” Hansi once asked Rezső, “how hard it is to evince the right amount of sorrow at the fate of chickens killed in a sniper attack when your mind is still full of the people we lost in Hungary?” She was fond of repeating what an Israeli journalist said to her when she remarked on the total lack of interest in Israel in what she had done during the war: “If you had arrived in a coffin,” he told her, “we would have given you a reception worthy of a heroine.”
The feud between Joel and Rezső was now well known in the Hungarian exile community. Kasztner blamed Brand for mishandling the mission to Istanbul and told everyone what he would have said to Chaim Barlas, the British and the Americans, had he been chosen to carry Eichmann's message. Some who continued to blame Kasztner for their family's financial losses sought out Brand, in the hope of hearing damaging information. Although Brand was bitter and angry with Kasztner, he refused to cooperate in their schemes. Bogyó seemed to have shelved her own feelings about her husband's wartime love affair. He promised her it was over, and she accepted his word.
Despite her earlier resolution, Hansi and Rezső met more often after Hansi moved to Tel Aviv. She bought a knitting machine and, as in Hungary, began to make gloves and scarves. Before long, she hired other women to knit for her burgeoning piecework enterprise. Dani Brand remembers his mother as a woman who was always busy with her hands. She demanded very little of life—and life, as it happened, was true to her expectations.