I FIRST HEARD OF Rezső Kasztner in 1999 from Peter Munk, a Canadian businessman-entrepreneur. Munk's energy and charm are legendary, as are his successful business ventures. And he owes his life to Rezső Kasztner.
We sat in a dark room with leather furniture, Persian rugs, heavy silk drapes, paintings that looked old, and bronze statuettes that looked recent. There were some faded black-and-white prints on a low-slung coffee table. I noticed pictures of a five-story, white-painted brick house, a shaded garden with puffball flowers, and a small, slanting lawn. Then a picture of his grandfather, Gabriel Munk, in the garden, hand resting on a brass-handled walking cane, dressed in a three-piece suit, with a gold watch-chain and a white kerchief neatly triangled out of his top jacket pocket. Next, Peter's father, also with felt hat and walking cane, and Peter's stepmother—“a great beauty,” as Peter said. Her face half in shadow, her chin raised, her short, flared dress a fashion statement of the early forties, she seems to be flirting with the photographer.
“I’ve been sorting some boxes,” Peter said, almost apologetically. “I don’t think about the past much, but we have to pack some of these old things…” He picked up another photograph, showing “the most elegant man I have ever known.” In this picture Grandfather Gabriel is framed by an ornate doorway. He stands next to a slight woman whose hand rests on his forearm.
Gabriel Munk had purchased seats on the last train from Budapest transporting Jews not destined for the death camps. The train left Budapest on July 1, 1944, three and a half months after the German occupation of Hungary, two and a half months after the first deportations of Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau.1
Munk showed me a photograph of gray and white people standing around a railway carriage. They seem aimless, as people often do when they are waiting. Some are lining up at metal steps, and one woman in a light, two-piece suit with padded shoulders and high-heeled shoes is looking back at the camera. A man in a long, belted raincoat is helping her up with one hand while holding her small valise in the other. In the background stands a German soldier, his rifle at ease. The woman is smiling.
It seems a very ordinary picture, except that this photograph was taken in the summer of 1944, at a time when Hungarian Jews were brutalized, robbed, beaten, and shot, and when many witnessed the slaughter of their children. It was the summer when 437,402 of them were packed into cattle cars destined for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most of them were murdered.2 At the time the photo was taken, Peter Munk's family was boarding a train toward the west.
It was Kasztner's train.
LIKE PETER MUNK, I was born in Budapest. My early education about the war years, however, was somewhat different from his. Although mine was full of detail about the Soviet “liberation” of the country in 1945, it contained few references to the victims of the Hungarian Holocaust. Searching for Rezső Kasztner, I read all the books I could find that dealt with the years leading up to the war.
I met Erwin Schaeffer, Munk's business associate in Budapest, who took me to the Great Synagogue on Dohány Street and told me the story of how his father had been thrown off the Kasztner train and murdered by the Arrow Cross Party's thugs, the Hungarian Nazis who assumed power in October 1944. I visited libraries and archives in Budapest, New York, Washington, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. I read everything I could find about Kasztner, only to become more confused by the irreconcilably different versions of him presented in memoirs, documents, letters, and testimonials. Adolf Eichmann described him as “an ice-cold lawyer” and talked of their mutual deals. Hansi Brand, Kasztner's lover, spoke of a “passionate believer in human values.” Tomy Lapid, a former colleague, remembers his extraordinary facility with words and his devastating wit. American script-writer Ben Hecht saw him as a smug Nazi collaborator. Thousands owe their lives to Kasztner. But thousands still decry his “deal with the devil.”
I listened to the stories of survivors. Some still remembered Rezső Kasztner, the brilliant raconteur, the idealistic Zionist, the humanist, the writer, the politician, the resourceful negotiator, the inveterate gambler, the romantic, the sarcastic critic of everyone less intelligent and less well informed. I met his daughter, Zsuzsi, who adored her father's warmth and humor. I had tea with Sári Reuveni, who said Kasztner could not have dealt with Eichmann without the support of Hansi Brand. “She was his soul,” she mused, his partner in saving lives, his lover during the months of the German occupation of Hungary. I met Hansi's son Dani in Tel Aviv. He talked about his strong, spirited mother, who had hidden him during the siege of Budapest. He was proud of her fearlessness, her extraordinary empathy for others. We did not talk about Hansi's affair with Rezső.
In New York, Egon Mayer, a director at the Center for Jewish Studies at the City University of New York, collected a massive archive of Kasztner information. He had a special interest in the train: his parents were on it, and he was born six weeks after its second detachment of passengers arrived in Switzerland. It was Mayer who first told me that Kasztner had supplied the funds to feed and clothe Oskar Schindler's Jews.3
Schindler, I discovered, had gone to Budapest in 1942 to meet Kasztner. Both men had powerful egos; both believed they were the only ones who could outwit the Nazis. Schindler, the big-boned, rough-talking Sudeten German industrialist, and Kasztner, the soft-spoken Jewish intellectual, had not liked each other, but they shared a passionate belief that one man could make a difference. During subsequent meetings, exchanging letters, cash, and information, Schindler grew to admire Kasztner: “He was utterly fearless,” he wrote in a postwar memoir, and “his actions remain unsurpassed.”4
After the war, Schindler was recognized as a Righteous Gentile, supported by grateful survivors, celebrated, and lionized. Kasztner, in contrast, became a symbol of collaboration with the enemy.
The deals Kasztner made with the SS (Schutzstaffel), the Nazi Party's protection and security service, raise questions about moral choices, courage in dangerous circumstances, the nature of compromise and collaboration, and how far an individual should go to save other people. These questions are as valid now as they were in the 1940s. They continue to haunt the world today.
This is a work of popular history. I have done my best to be accurate but have allowed myself the leeway to reconstruct scenes and dialogue based on the diaries, notes, taped interviews, courtroom testimonies, pretrial interrogations, and memoirs—both written and oral—of the participants in Hungarian, English, German, and Hebrew. My primary sources are listed in the bibliography. Where I have attributed emotions or thoughts to people, I based these on published and unpublished sources. I interviewed more than seventy-five people—those who remembered most clearly are credited in the text, notes, and acknowledgments. Discerning the truth is never an exact science when relying on people's memories, but I have done my best to cross-reference wherever possible, and only when convinced of the credibility of the testimony did I use it. Is it possible that some of my judgments or reconstructions are mistaken? Of course. But I do not consider anything in this book to be simply speculative.
After all the reading, listening, and searching, I feel I have discovered the real Rezső Kasztner—an extraordinary man who played a high-stakes game of roulette with the devil. And won. In the only game he cared about, that of saving human lives, he achieved more in his way than any other individual in Nazi-occupied Europe.
In the end, all he lost was his own life. Kasztner would have considered that a small price to pay.