I cannot refrain from expressing again my sorrow
over the impression which may have been made in some people regarding
the phrasing of my testimony about Becher, and the result of it.
Neither I nor my friends have anything to hide in this whole affair,
and we do not regret that we acted in accordance with our conscience,
despite all that has been done to us in this trial.
REZSŐ KASZTNER, FROM HIS STATEMENT AFTER THE GRÜNWALD TRIAL
We shall not rest nor shall we remain silent until your name is cleared.
ALEXANDER ROSENFELD, AT REZSŐ KASZTNER's FUNERAL
ON SUNDAY, MARCH 17, 1957, Rezső (Israel) Kasztner's coffin was set up in front of the Hadassah Hospital in Tel Aviv.1 The idea was to provide his many admirers with an opportunity to pay their respects in public and to show their solidarity with the family. His mother, his two brothers, Bogyó, and Zsuzsi stood next to the coffin. Though neither David Ben-Gurion nor Moshe Sharett came, the Mapai were well represented by Attorney General Chaim Cohen and State Secretary Teddy Kollek. There were also some of his old colleagues from Budapest and Kolozsvár. The halutzim who had worked with him paid their respects. Hansi stood near the coffin but out of Bogyó's immediate circle. Yoel Palgi was there, as were many of the passengers from the Kasztner train. At the Bilu Synagogue, Rezső's brother Gyula, his voice breaking as he read the words, recited the Kaddish, a prayer for the dead. Zsuzsi sobbed throughout the service.
Kasztner was interred at the Nachlat Yitzhak Cemetery in Givataim, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, amid numerous declarations of friendship and tears. Most of the speakers vowed to continue the struggle not only to clear his name but also to enshrine it among the heroes of the Holocaust. Those he had helped to survive promised to take care of his family.
Új Kelet published a moving obituary written by Ernő Márton. He praised Kasztner's capacity for wit and erudition and his obsession with saving Jewish lives, his death-defying courage, his self-sacrifice, and his ambition to do something great, something “eternally significant for his people.”2
Within days of the murder, the police arrested twenty-four-year-old Zeev Eckstein, who admitted his guilt during interrogation. Based on his confession, Joseph Menkes, a former member of the terrorist Stern Gang, was then arrested, as was, later, Yaakov Cheruti, a lawyer. The police found a large cache of guns and ammunition at Eckstein's and Menkes's homes. In a prepared statement, the police claimed to have discovered an organized underground with plans for further terrorist acts against the government, but, even at the time, there were serious doubts about this version of events. A year before the murder, Eckstein reputedly had worked for Shin Bet, the government's security service of the day. He had been used as an undercover agent in the right-wing underground. Some journalists suggested that the government, finding Kasztner an embarrassment, had been complicit in his murder. Adam Heller, who had been in a Boy Scout group with Eckstein, remembers him as somewhat slow-witted and craving acceptance, eager to show that he could do everything everyone else did, and better. He could not have been the man who planned the assassination.3
Uri Avneri, the journalist who—long before Halevi's judgment—had accused Kasztner of complicity in the murder of his fellow Jews, stated that Shin Bet silenced Kasztner at the ruling party's behest. Menachem Begin wrote in Herut that the assassins’ bullets prevented Kasztner from revealing secrets he knew about the governing party, secrets that would have damaged its standing with the people of Israel. He also hinted that the timing of Kasztner's murder had the desired effect of deflecting attention from the Israeli army's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, a controversial issue at that time. No evidence has ever been found to justify this accusation,4 though the rumors continued. Ben-Gurion's personal interest later in the early release of the convicted killers added fuel to the speculation.
The three men were tried, convicted of murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment on January 7, 1958.
A week later, the Supreme Court, in a four-to-one decision, exonerated Rezső Kasztner. The five judges’ words were read into the record on January 15. Justice Shimon Agranat noted that Judge Halevi had erred about the circumstances of the Rescue Committee in Budapest in 1944–45; that he had based his decisions on “knowledge gained from hindsight,” and that Kasztner had acted in what he believed to be the best interests of all the people, not only those he had managed to save. He refuted Halevi's statements point by point, including his wholehearted reliance on the testimony of Moshe Krausz. The only point on which Agranat agreed with the original judgment concerned Kasztner's confounding affidavit on behalf of Kurt Becher. Two of the other four judges concurred with Agranat in rejecting Halevi's verdict. They were sharply critical of the way in which the original judge had conducted the trial; the fourth judge, while agreeing with Halevi that Kasztner had become an unwitting ally of the Nazis, stressed that the man had firmly believed that he was achieving vastly more than the rescue of the few and had been working on a much larger plan, but that time was, in the end, not on his but on Eichmann's side. The Allies had taken too long to defeat Germany. The fifth judge, Moshe Silberg, wrote a dissenting opinion. He still believed that the Nazis could not have carried out their deportation program in Hungary with the speed and ease they did had the Jews been aware of where the trains were going and what awaited them at the end of the line.
In the key matter of collaboration with the Nazis, the majority accepted the attorney general's appeal and convicted Malchiel Grünwald of libel. In recognition of his advanced age, they handed him a one-year suspended sentence and a fine of £200.5
In the midst of the joys of vindication that followed the Supreme Court's decision, there remained a note of doubt and of unrelieved sadness. The doubt was voiced by several journalists who kept on criticizing the man who they claimed had sold his soul; the deal with Becher continued to haunt Kasztner's memory. The profound sadness was expressed both by his widow and his daughter: the new verdict had come too late to save his life.
JUDGE HALEVI was on the tribunal for the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann and was, finally, appointed to the Supreme Court of Israel in 1963. He left the bench in 1969 to be eligible for election to the Knesset on the Herut ticket. At the time, he told a journalist at the Tel Aviv newspaper Ma’ariv that his words about Kasztner had been misinterpreted by the media and that, on reflection, perhaps he should have chosen them more carefully. It had not been necessary to bring Satan into the verdict, he said; the facts of the case and his own two hundred carefully composed conclusions spoke for themselves. Contrary to his own high expectations, in the Knesset he became an indifferent, largely ignored backbencher, a considerable come-down from his days in the limelight of the two biggest trials in Israel's history.
URI AVNERI, whose columns had contributed to the atmosphere of hate and repugnance created by the Kasztner trial, had a chance in the late 1950s to reconsider his words: “Kasztner was caught up in events which were so much bigger than an ordinary—or even an extraordinary—person could handle,” he wrote in his own magazine, Haolam Hazeh. “How can we judge what was right and wrong in such a situation? In the end I must say I tend toward Kasztner. I don’t believe he was a traitor.” That fine summation of where Avneri stood would have been welcome a couple of years earlier. Now it hardly mattered.
BOGYÓ KASZTNER, deeply depressed after her husband's murder, tried to start a new life with her daughter, but few job opportunities presented themselves. Her early education in ancient history was not useful in the Israel of the 1960s. She had no work experience and no idea how to acquire the necessary skills to support them both. A few of Kasztner's friends put a small fund aside, but it was never enough. Teddy Kollek,6 who remained an occasional visitor to the Kasztner home, wrote to the president of the World Zionist Organization that Kasztner's widow had been left with money insufficient even to pay the meager rent on their apartment. Sharett and other members of the Mapai offered no assistance. Bogyó's claim for work-related insurance on the death of her husband was turned down: it was deemed that Kasztner had not died in the course or as a result of his work. In the end, she was given the opportunity to open a national lottery stall.
She never allowed anyone to call her a “widow” before she died in 1973. For Bogyó, as for Hansi, Rezső had not really died.
WHEN ZSUZSI KASZTNER was approached by Ben-Gurion in 1963 about the release of one of the three men convicted of murdering her father, Menkes, she said she felt nothing about his release. His serving the full sentence would not return her father to her, and at least she could return Menkes to his own children. She was not consulted about the release of the other two men. All three were set free six years after their arrest. When Eckstein was interviewed by Israeli television, he said he still believed he had done the right thing in murdering Rezső Kasztner.7
Zsuzsi Kasztner-Michaeli met Eckstein shortly before I spoke to her in April 2006. Her own impression from that conversation was that her father's murderer now regretted his hasty action. Zsuzsi lives today in a modest apartment in one of the outlying suburbs of Tel Aviv. She is divorced. She works as a nurse, six days a week. A dark-haired woman with a thin, intense face, she has her mother's long, aristocratic fingers and her father's keen, intelligent questioning of the obvious. Her soft, brown eyes follow me as I walk about in her living room. She has learned not to be trusting.
She cares for five cats and a crippled dog. In her living room there is a large oil painting of her grandfather, József Fischer. There are photographs of her mother, Bogyó, smiling, looking exceptionally beautiful with her hair pulled back, her dark eyes challenging the camera. In a back room there is her father's old Remington typewriter and his desk lamp. She plays me a disk of her father and mother chatting and singing in Hungarian, her own childish laughter in the background. It is a faked radio broadcast Rezső made for some family occasion. He jocularly interviewed his wife and daughter as if they were famous personalities, and then they sang some Hungarian songs together. She has nurtured their memory and will continue to do so till the end of her life
“My father taught me Shakespeare,” she says. “I could recite Hamlet's famous soliloquy when I was ten years old. Ironic that he loved that… ‘To be or not to be / That is the question.’ ” She met Kurt Becher for the first time when he was already eighty-five, still handsome, still a commanding presence. “He referred to me as Die Tochter von meinem guten Freund, Rudolf, ‘the daughter of my good friend, Rudolf.’ ”
Afterward, she visited Becher several times in Germany. He was proud of what he and Kasztner had done during the war. When she asked him why he had not offered to testify on behalf of her father in Jerusalem, he said anything he did on behalf of Kasztner would have hurt his friend's chances of a fair trial. Only at Zsuzsi's urging did he agree to the 1994 interview with Ilana Dayan. During that interview, Becher characterized the Kasztner trial as a crime. “He was the only man who was really successful in doing something for the Jewish people in that situation, at that time,” Becher said.
Zsuzsi's daughter Mayrav has become a celebrated television interviewer in Tel Aviv. She has the opinionated, direct style that was so characteristic of her grandfather—but now it is more fashionable to show off one's intelligence.
MOSHE KRAUSZ, the indefatigable bureaucrat, continued to blame everyone who had overstepped the bounds of his own limitations back in Budapest. As late as 1971, he wrote to Carl Lutz protesting angrily that what Lutz had done in 1944 with his, Krausz’s, covering letter had been illegal and unauthorized. The package containing the Auschwitz Protocols that should have gone to Chaim Posner of the Jewish Agency had been readdressed. The fact that the actual recipient, George Mandel-Mantello, by publicizing Rudolf Vrba's report may have saved thousands of Jewish lives did not matter to Krausz any more in 1971 than it had in 1944.8
HANSI BRAND continued to work and live modestly, as she always had. Her gloves operation supported her and her sons. Later, when the boys had grown up and she retired, she worked at an orphanage. “There were a hundred and twenty children in the home and they all called her ‘Mom,’ ” recalled her friend Eva Carmeli. “She always remained more interested in other people than in herself. Toward the end of her life, with both hips gone and barely able to walk, she continued to deliver chocolates to the homeless.”9 Hansi had many friends and admirers, some from the early days in Hungary when she had selflessly given whatever she had to refugees. “I think the most important thing was not to be a hero but to survive,” she told an interviewer. “No one who was not there, least of all the judge in that shameful trial, had any notion what it was like to live in Hungary in those days. We acted according to our consciences.”
One of her friends told me that Hansi continued her love of Rezső even after he died. She never stopped thinking and talking about him. In one of her last interviews she compared him to a butterfly that had flown too close to the flame—the flame fed by the fires of Auschwitz. As for the judge's metaphor, she said, Rezső in his supreme self-confidence had indeed thought he was dealing with the devil on an equal footing. And yes, he would have sold his soul to save the lives of others.
Hansi died on April 9, 2000.
SHMUEL TAMIR was elected to the Knesset in 1967. He tried to have the matter of the Mapai's purported culpability in the Holocaust reopened after the Eichmann trial, using Eichmann as a key witness. He failed. After donning the colors of several parties, he made it to the position of minister of justice. Late in life, he returned to the practice of law. He went to the media every time there was an event or memorial to Rezső Kasztner. His vilification of the man never let up. His memoirs reveal, perhaps unintentionally, that the Kasztner trial was the highlight of his life and career. It is, certainly, the largest chunk of a very thick two-volume work. To the end, he insisted that he had done the right thing. A few weeks before he died in 1987, he gave an interview criticizing a radio play that had spoken of Kasztner as a victim.
It is interesting to note that Tamir, too, faced what one of Kasztner's admirers referred to as a “Kasztnerian dilemma” when, in May 1985, he represented Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin at negotiations for the release of Israeli prisoners in the Lebanon war. He agreed to the exchange of 1,100 terrorists for only three Israeli soldiers.