INEVITABLY, MY NEXT book was going to be about the Holocaust in Hungary. I had been thinking about it for some forty years, circling around it, but I couldn’t find a compelling way into the story. Vili had often talked about those terrible times, the horror and the inexplicable brutality of the murder of more than four hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. Some of them had been his friends and at least one of them had also courted my seventeen-year-old mother when she was home on school holidays. The last time she saw him, he was hanging from a lamppost in a small square on the Buda side of the river.
My grandfather had hidden a few of his Jewish friends in the basement of our home during the war but thought that was too little. He should have fought a valiant battle in their cause, but under the fascist regime that had brought in the anti-Jewish laws and arranged the deportations, it was too hard to be valiant. Still, according to Martin Gilbert’s book The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, Vili Racz is listed among the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.
I found the subject so overwhelming, so incomprehensible that I simply couldn’t write the book while I was still in publishing. I interviewed some survivors, but remained baffled by how this horror could have happened and by the fact that those wonderful, heroic, funny, interesting people—the Hungarians—had a major role in the murder of almost half a million of their fellow citizens. I went to Auschwitz II Birkenau, stood on the railway platform in the blazing sunshine, and tried to imagine the terror of those arriving after days of standing in tightly packed boxcars, the howls of the children, the desperation of the mothers as they were herded by dogs and whip-wielding guards into the showers—the showers that were gas chambers. Most of the victims at Birkenau were Hungarians.
The sheer magnitude of the task weighed me down.
Then, one Saturday afternoon in 2004, Peter Munk called to ask if I had time to come over for a talk. I had known Peter for some years. I had first spoken with him when M&S was planning to publish a book by Garth Hopkins about Clairtone, Peter’s first business venture in Canada. Jack McClelland, disinclined to be sued for libel, had thought I was the best person to find out how Peter felt about the book, as we were both born in Hungary.
Clairtone, a company that manufactured high-end stereo equipment, had collapsed, leaving a trail of unhappy investors and politicians. Peter and his partner, David Gilmour, had left Canada and spent a few years assembling a package of hotels, real estate, and mining companies. Now, years later, he was chairman of the largest gold producer in the world: Barrick Gold.
Peter said that Garth Hopkins had the facts of the sorry tale correct. We got to know each other during the next few years of lunches and dinners and the occasional trip to his Georgian Bay island. We shared friendships with both Andy Sarlos and George Jonas.
Now he and his wife, Melanie, were moving to a new house in Forest Hill, and he had been packing up old photographs and memorabilia that got him thinking about the past. He recalled his elegant grandfather, Gabriel Munk, his almost as elegant father, his beautiful mother, and the rest of his wealthy, privileged Hungarian Jewish family.
It was the first time I had heard of Rezso Kasztner. He was the man who had saved the Munk family, part of a group of 1,684 people he had rescued from almost certain death. He had managed to do this three and a half months after the German army and Adolf Eichmann’s Special Commands had marched into Hungary. Ironically, Rezso Kasztner was killed in Israel, after the war, by a fellow Jew who believed he had been a collaborator.
That was my entry into the world of Kasztner’s Train. By the time I finished the manuscript, I had read about two hundred books, hundreds of documents in three languages, and travelled to Hungary, Poland, Israel, the United States, Germany, and Austria to interview survivors. I had endured long sleepless nights living with their stories, and I knew how my book was going to tell the story of Rezso Kasztner and of the Holocaust in Hungary.
* * *
WHILE I WAS struggling with ghosts from the past, Michael de Pencier continued to invest in green businesses, such as the Green Living Show and the Environmental Guide (co-founded with Mary Anne Brinckman), Bullfrog Power, fluorescent light bulbs, smart cars, the Green Toronto Awards (which he managed in partnership with the city), and even LongPen, the remote signing device launched in 2006 by Margaret Atwood. LongPen’s plan had been to make it possible for authors to sign their books for fans without having to travel. Conrad Black, for example, could go on a virtual tour, signing his Richard Nixon book while sitting in his house.I
As chairman of World Wildlife Canada, Michael had become a poster man for the green movement. He volunteered for the International Conservation Fund and the Natural Burial Association of Canada (yes, we are considering this but it is a bit yucky). He and Honor use solar power at their farm near Rosemont, Ontario, and he has been busy planting and nurturing trees—ninety thousand at last count—on their property. I have witnessed, personally, the nurturing: Michael wrapping saplings for the winter and proudly unwrapping them in the spring.
In early 2005, to take a break from my writing, I went to Florence with Catherine for a short holiday, just the two of us. We walked, checked out the art galleries, laughed, talked, drank Prosecco, and ate. Our room looked out over the Arno, with a grand view of the Ponte Vecchio. Julian phoned from Vancouver on April 8. He was about to argue a libel case in front of the BC Court of Appeal. He was as nervous as a kid before an exam. The last time he was in a Vancouver courtroom, famous BC counsel Peter Butler had said to the judge, “Well, Mr. Porter’s an Eastern lawyer. What does he know?” Julian thought being a Toronto lawyer had counted against him then, and would, perhaps, now.
When he called the next day, he was somewhere along a river, surrounded by Douglas firs. “My God,” he shouted over the sound of rushing waters, “I think I won!”
While we were away, Harold Fenn fired Allan Ibarra, the best book business finance guy in Canada. Allan, who was rather more philosophical about his dismissal than I was, said he was not surprised that Harold would want his own man in place.II I quit Key Porter Books a week after Julian won his case, and I got on with writing my book.
Kasztner’s Train was published in 2007 by my friends Scott McIntyre in Canada and George GibsonIII of Bloomsbury in the United States. It won the 2007 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize and the Jewish Book Award. I spent much of the fall on a promotion tour, including a talk at New York’s famed 92nd Street Y. It was a great relief to finally share this story with the world. Vili would have been proud of me.
I. In 2014 LongPen was proud to announce that the invention had saved 1,764 lbs of CO2 emissions. It is now part of www.syngrafii.com.
II. Allan went on to be CFO at the House of Anansi.
III. George was an occasional member of the Quasimodo dinner group.