In the summer of 1944 in wartime Budapest,
two men, a Nazi and a Jew, sat negotiating through a fog of cigarette smoke.
One was notorious: Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust.
The other was less well known: A Hungarian lawyer
and journalist called Rudolf [Rezső] Kasztner… The topic of their
discussion was a train to be filled with Jews.
ADAM LEBOR, “EICHMANN's LIST: A PACT WITH THE DEVIL,”
THE INDEPENDENT, AUGUST 23, 2000
THE TRAIN WOULD CARRY 1,684 passengers out of German-occupied wartime Hungary. They were a motley group: industrialists, intellectuals, and Orthodox rabbis, Zionists and anti-Zionists, Polish and Slovak refugees from pogroms and concentration camps, the oldest eighty-five, the youngest a month old. The wealthy Jews of Budapest paid an average of us$1,500 for each family member to be included; the poor paid nothing. The selection process was arduous. Its memory is deeply distressing to those whose relatives did not survive the Holocaust.
It was a deal that would haunt Rezső Kasztner to the end of his life.
There were others he saved, too. In addition to those on the train, Kasztner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to keep twenty thousand Hungarian Jews alive—Eichmann called them “Kasztner's Jews” or “the Jews on ice”—for a deposit of approximately $100 a head. And in the final weeks of the war, Kasztner traveled to several concentration camps with SS Lieutenant-Colonel Kurt Andreas Becher to try to prevent the murder of the surviving prisoners.
As he fought fearlessly for Jewish lives during the Holocaust, Kasztner met many of the now recognized heroes of wartime Europe, including Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, and Carl Lutz. But his most fateful meetings were with Becher, Eichmann, and members of the SS Sonderkommando, whose chief purpose was to rob and murder all the Jews of Europe. These connections with high-ranking Nazis were to cost him his own life—and, for decades, his reputation too.