[  CHAPTER SEVEN  ]

THE FIRST DOUBTS ABOUT THE KAPO TRIALS

A FEW WEEKS BEFORE the Jungster verdict in late November 1951, a well-dressed man, age seventy-four, sat in an SAS airliner en route from Karachi to Copenhagen with his wife, thirty years younger, beside him. As the plane descended for a fueling stopover at Lod International Airport outside Tel Aviv, the woman became visibly nervous, while the man struggled to maintain his composure.

The aircraft touched down and taxied to the airport terminal. Passengers disembarked and proceeded to the transit area. The two sat down in the terminal’s coffee shop and ordered breakfast. A few workers, immigrants from Germany, spotted the man and congregated around him. The man finished his coffee, and the coffee shop owner approached and asked him if he would be kind enough to sign the airport’s VIP book. The man agreed and inscribed his name—Hjalmar Schacht.¹

Twenty years earlier, in the early 1930s, Schacht had ensured the support of the heads of Germany’s industrial sector for the Nazi Party and its rising political star, Adolf Hitler. In return for his help, Hitler appointed Schacht to head the Reichsbank and later nominated him as the Reich’s finance minister. At the end of the war, the Allied forces put him among the defendants at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg alongside people like Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Alfred Rosenberg. That court narrowly acquitted Schacht, but a Stuttgart denazification court sentenced him to eight years’ imprisonment, only to have a higher court overturn the verdict.²

Under ordinary circumstances Schacht never would have set foot in Israel. But he had mistakenly booked a flight that stopped over there. Three journalists—from the dailies Maariv and Davar and from the United Press news agency—who were awaiting the arrival of the chairperson of the Dead Sea Works, Lord Glenconner, noticed the commotion in the airport coffee shop and spotted Schacht. Heading over to his table, they conducted an impromptu news conference. Did West Germany plan to pay reparations to the Jewish state, and was it capable of doing so? one journalist asked. Ever since it had been revealed earlier that year that representatives of Israel and West Germany had been holding secret negotiations on possible reparation payments, the issue had created a deep divide in Israeli society. The former head of the German economy responded diplomatically, “Germany will pay if it is able to do so.” He added, “From what I see in the airport and according to what I read in the newspapers, you are progressing greatly and I believe that this country will continue to develop.”³

The plane finished refueling, Schacht reboarded, and the plane took off and disappeared into the sky. But that afternoon Maariv broke a story with the headline “Dr. Schacht, Hitler’s Adviser, Visited Israel.” And in Jerusalem, Knesset member Aryeh Ben-Eliezer, of the opposition, interrupted the session to demand that the government explain how one of the architects of Hitler’s rise in Germany had “arrived today in Lod without being arrested under the law existing in the State of Israel that requires prosecution of war criminals and murderers of a nation and a race.”⁴

Two days later, the Knesset discussed the topic again. Another stunned opposition member, Yochanan Bader, asked how it could have happened that Schacht, Hitler’s associate, “the man who supplied him with the means for his crimes, the person who collected in the Reichsbank gold from the teeth of tens of thousands to serve as tools of murder, a person whom a denazification court in German identified as a Nazi,” had not been arrested and in fact had been permitted to leave the country. How was it, he continued, that not one of the many armed guards at the airport had assassinated Schacht? Bader answered his own question: the attitude associated with the reparation negotiations was responsible for such complacency. The negotiations with West Germany, he declared, had led people to believe there was no reason to go on hating the Germans for their murderous actions.⁵ The greed of the country’s leaders had blinded them to the crimes committed by Schacht, wrote journalist Josef Vinizky.⁶

Another writer wondered who had come up with the policy of arresting and trying the “small (and miserable) fry” from the camps “who were nothing but tools in the hands of the gestapo … who mostly wanted nothing but to save themselves from the fire.” The true focus should be on the perpetrators, who “planned the fire [and are] enjoyably touring our country.” Members of the Jewish public, he added, had lost their sense of national dignity. In Israel “there is no pride, no honor, no nationalism and no ethics.” This writer distinguished between the “planners” and their “tools,” between Nazi architects of the crime such as Schacht and their instruments such as the Jewish functionaries. But still, for the first year and a half of the implementation of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law, most people made no distinction between the two groups.⁷

Overturning a Death Verdict

On January 7, 1952, thousands of demonstrators congregated in downtown Jerusalem to protest what they saw as the national humiliation of the reparation negotiations, a topic that the Knesset would deliberate that day. The leader of the opposition party Herut, Menachem Begin, delivered a stirring speech that many saw as a direct incitement to civil war. Standing on a balcony at a hotel in Zion Square, he proclaimed that if the Knesset approved the reparation negotiations with West Germany, he would order his men in the IZL paramilitary organization to open hostilities. He accused David Ben-Gurion and his associates of besmirching the nation’s honor. “And now you have come, despotic profiteers, you have come to demolish all that was achieved with our blood. And again the nation will be turned into mud, [a victim of] the sword of pogrom and annihilation.” Signing the agreement would be an international humiliation, he contended. “How will we be seen in the eyes of the nations when our humiliation is made public, when we approach the murderers of our fathers to receive blood money?”⁸

The demonstrators marched on the Knesset, hurling stones through the windows and injuring a few Knesset members. More than a hundred police officers and demonstrators were hurt in the clashes. The military joined the police in its efforts to control the crowds.⁹

It was not only the right-wing nationalists in the Knesset, such as Herut, who opposed the agreement; the far left parties, such as Mapam and the Communists, were against it as well. They likened accepting the agreement to betraying the nation and collaborating with its worst enemies—the Nazis and their heirs. Members of Mapam, who, as noted in Chapter 3, saw themselves as the preservers of the Jewish rebel legacy, viewed Israel’s ties with West Germany and other countries as part of a new Western fascist-capitalist coalition standing in opposition to the Soviet Union. One of its representatives, Abraham Berman, a member of the Warsaw ghetto rebel movement, told the Knesset:

No, not for this did the ghetto fighters raise the flag of the revolt, so that but a few years later, representatives of the Jewish people would sit with those who drowned the ghetto in blood, those who burnt it in fire! … I am pained to say that the deliberations I hear [now] in the Knesset are not new to me. I heard the [same] spirit and the [same] arguments in the Warsaw ghetto. There a harsh internal struggle ensued between the fighters of the underground and the defenders of “realpolitik,” … those [who believed one must] make peace with the Nazis and negotiate with them. And there were many such people, not only in the Jewish Councils.… We all know to where these people’s fatalistic views lead: only to disgrace and shame, to betrayal and national humiliation.… Do not bring upon our people and state this humiliation!¹⁰

Berman saw Ben-Gurion’s negotiations with West Germany as equivalent to the actions of the Jewish Councils and other “practical” people who had advocated working with the Nazis, not against them. Collaboration had not ceased with the end of World War II, he held; it continued in Ben-Gurion’s negotiations with the West Germans.

Three days before the demonstration, the Tel Aviv District Court had issued its death sentence in the case of Yehezkel Jungster. In the controversy surrounding the reparation negotiations and the upcoming vote on the reparation agreement in the Knesset as well as the violent demonstration that followed the Knesset’s approval of the negotiations, the newspapers and public largely ignored the death sentence meted out to the former kapo.

The harsh verdict in Jungster’s trial, however, did not go unnoticed by the attorney general’s office. Faced with the consequences of its choice to charge alleged collaborators with crimes against humanity and war crimes—that is, the specter of the Jewish state putting Jews to death—the office hastily altered open indictments against other defendants.

Miriam Goldberg, a former kapo in Bergen-Belsen, faced one count of war crimes and another of crimes against humanity. Months earlier, in October 1951, prior to the opening of her trial at the district court level, her attorney sent a five-page letter to the attorney general requesting the immediate release of his client, at least on bail, as she had been detained for ten months at that point and was the mother of a two-year-old. But the attorney general turned down the request, as the law stipulated that suspects who faced charges that potentially could result in capital punishment had to remain behind bars until the completion of their trial.¹¹

Following Jungster’s death sentence, however, the prosecution unilaterally removed both counts from Goldberg’s indictment.¹² With only minor exceptions, after the Jungster verdict prosecutors avoided charging Jewish defendants with crimes against humanity or war crimes. This move marked a first major shift in the kapo trials, one that established a distinction between functionaries and Nazis. The harshest charges allowed under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law would no longer be applicable to Jewish defendants, only to non-Jewish ones.¹³

This alteration in policy did not diminish the sense of mission that drove prosecutors in their quest to convict and sentence functionaries. Arguing years later for sentencing a defendant to jail time, one prosecutor explained that the court had to consider what kind of punishment the victims would have wished as payback from their oppressors. He added another justification for a severe sentence: that it would help “to enhance the public’s trust in the justice done by the court” and “would help prevent victims from punishing the Nazis’ helpers with their own hands.”¹⁴

These arguments did not persuade Judge Yitzhak Raveh, who would go on to serve on the panel of judges at the Eichmann trial. He was concerned that problems with witnesses’ memories, confusion, and a desire for revenge tainted their testimony, and so he imposed a sentence of just one month and then suspended it. The prosecutor was enraged at the judge’s failure to put the defendant behind bars: “I’m shocked [by] what happened to Raveh in this case! Of nine prosecution witnesses who all testified to the cruelty of the defendant, Raveh believes only one.… I believe we must appeal. It is not enough for a judge to say that he doubts the credibility of the prosecution witnesses. The doubt must be reasonable and rational, which is not the case here.”¹⁵

In this case, as in many of the kapo trials, the defense appealed district court verdicts. But in Jungster’s, the death sentence triggered an automatic appeal to the Supreme Court. Without publishing an opinion—a rare occurrence—the justices vacated Jungster’s conviction on the count of crimes against humanity but left standing the conviction for assault, an offense that carried a two-year sentence.¹⁶ Jungster began serving his time at the Tel Mond correctional facility, but two months into his term, his health deteriorated. The police minister, Bechor-Shalom Shitrit, signed a release order. Two weeks later, on July 10, 1952, Jungster died of natural causes.¹⁷

Following the Supreme Court’s setting aside of the Jungster verdict, the editor-in-chief of Yediot Aharonot, Herzl Rosenblum, wrote an editorial praising the high court’s decision and drawing a line between the punishment of Nazis and the punishment of Jews. “No German swine,” he contended, had been executed primarily for the mass murder of Jews, and so it would be unfair “to hang the few Jewish helpers in these circumstances—who did what they did under the most unbearable pressure.” Furthermore, the prominent journalist argued, no one who had not experienced the hell of the camps could ever comprehend that reality. “To judge here those who were there—and precisely by our common laws, that are normal here according to our everyday logic—that is difficult!” Putting a few survivors on trial, he concluded, might result in casting a moral shadow on all survivors. He added that it was said with regard to most survivors that they survived “not necessarily in ways that would make them eligible for the position of chief rabbi.… Indeed, different moral laws reigned there. For everyone! Also for us—had we been there!”¹⁸

The view that the Holocaust took place in a different moral universe applied not only in cases in which judges issued death sentences but also in all kapo trials involving lesser offenses. Yet neither Rosenblum nor others questioned the overall legitimacy of trying Jewish functionaries, and the trials continued.

A Convicted Collaborator’s Changing Image

In March 1953, the fifth legal proceeding against Julius Siegel opened in Tel Aviv District Court. In 1946, two honor courts in Italy had examined accusations leveled at him by residents of Bedzin and Sosnowiec regarding his actions as a Judenrat member and as Judenältester and Lagerältester in several labor camps. After the first honor court procedure was terminated by a higher court for administrative reasons, the next honor court proceeding found that he had acted out of “loyalty to the Germans” and barred him from filling any public position in the Jewish community.¹⁹ In 1948, after he immigrated to Israel, the World Zionist Congress honor court heard his case, but the lead judge died midway through the trial, and the proceedings were halted. The fourth proceeding took place in April 1952, a preliminary examination in Tel Aviv Magistrates Court that cleared the way for his fifth indictment, in Tel Aviv District Court. At the end of this process, Siegel was portrayed in the criminal courts very differently from the way he had been characterized in the honor court proceedings.²⁰

The presiding district court judge, Max Kenneth, administered the oath, and Siegel swore to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He refuted the accusation that he was responsible for handing over Jews to the Germans for forced labor, saying, “I received orders [to do so] from the community [council, the Judenrat].”²¹ He maintained that when he worked in the Judenrat he was not in charge of the lists of deportees; he was just one of ten people who compiled those lists. Long forgotten were Siegel’s boastful statements in his previous trials that the Germans had admired his organizational abilities in managing “his Jews” and that thanks to his achievements he “was famous throughout Europe.”²²

In the Tel Aviv courtroom, Siegel recounted that he had failed to provide the Germans with 1,200 men. Accusing him of sabotage, the agitated German commander pulled out his pistol, aimed it at Siegel, and ordered him to literally run on ice. Then the German locked him up in a local jail.²³ But in 1946, in Italy, Siegel had testified that when he headed the employment office of the Judenrat he won the Germans’ appreciation after he delivered to them 600 Jews they had demanded.²⁴

Two counts in Siegel’s indictment were for beating inmates. “I did not beat or torture Jews,” he told Judge Kenneth. Only in one exceptional instance, he continued, had he lost his temper and struck a person. “In Auschwitz it happened that I struck [someone]. I found there a Jew who traded gold dental crowns in the black market.… My [deceased] wife and daughter also had gold teeth, and when I saw this I could not restrain myself and I struck him.”²⁵ Yes, Siegel admitted on cross-examination, he carried a small stick in the camp, but “I carried it just for the heck of it, not to prove my authority.”²⁶ No, he repeatedly stated, he had never struck anyone. No remnant remained of the remorseful Siegel who, while testifying in 1946, admitted that he had treated Jews harshly and beaten them. “In retrospect I always regretted this,” he had said then.²⁷

Before the honor court in Milan he had also described another assignment he had carried out for the Germans, the mission of selecting Jews. “When I worked at the [Bedzin Rossner] workshop, a few times during screening events [selections], I took out [and saved] several dozen Jews who were destined for Auschwitz, that is, for death.” He never took bribes to save people during these selections, he emphasized. “It was not my way to take money for these kinds of things. I pulled out [from among those destined for death] the people who had relatives at the Rossner workshop, where uniforms for the Wehrmacht were sewed. In this way, about 1,000 of those ordered were handed over to the Germans for transfer.”²⁸ Facing an accusation in the Tel Aviv District Court of surrendering Jews to the Germans, he again denied any wrongdoing. “I never informed on or handed over any Jew and I did not help the Germans search for Jews. I tried my best to save Jews.”²⁹

Unlike Siegel’s accounts, which had changed drastically between Italy and Israel, those of the prosecution witnesses remained largely consistent. They accused him of having served as a close collaborator of the Germans, informing on the Jews who worked at the Rossner workshop.³⁰ “He collaborated with the Germans from [the time of] their entry [to Bedzin] until the end [of the war],” one witness reported. In Auschwitz, this witness continued, “I saw that Siegel beat Jews for minor things.”³¹ Another witness stated, “The defendant sent people to work [in labor camps] and whatever he said transpired.”³²

In his verdict, Judge Kenneth cleared Siegel of the charge of surrendering Jews to the Germans. He wrote that “in fact, the testimonies point only at suspicions, and none of the witnesses testified about any concrete fact on the basis of which I can convict the defendant.” This was something that even the prosecution conceded in its summation.³³

In examining the accusation that Siegel had systematically beaten inmates, Kenneth first analyzed the defendant’s personality. “The accused seems to me,” Kenneth wrote of the former Austrian army officer, “like a principled person when it comes to order and discipline. He required order and cleanliness wherever he took a position. It does not seem at all that he wanted to abuse people.”³⁴ This assessment was very different from the one made by the honor court in Italy, which had found that Siegel was loyal to the Germans, acting on his own initiative in abusing Jews, and caring only about his own prestige and power. Judge Kenneth viewed him in a positive light, as acting with people’s best interests in mind.³⁵

Kenneth accepted, however, the testimony of one witness, Dov, who related that when he was standing in line for food in one of the camps, the defendant struck him twice. Kenneth concluded that Siegel struck Dov in the belief that “it was justified and in the interest of his people” but that Siegel’s belief was wrong. While the judge seemed to have taken a liking to Siegel, who had studied engineering in a polytechnic institution, on this charge he did not exonerate him, the way other educated defendants had been exonerated (see Chapter 6), but rather convicted him of beating Dov. The judge also credited the defendant for voluntarily coming to Israel and subjecting himself to trial, assuming that it pointed to an inner conviction of innocence. He sentenced Siegel to a month in prison or ten days’ imprisonment and a 100-lira fine, one of the lightest sentences in the kapo trials.³⁶

Portraying Kapos on the Stage

In late 1950, journalist Z. Klinov expressed an uncommon feeling of empathy with the alleged Jewish collaborators. Was it possible to compare a Jewish and a non-Jewish collaborator? he asked. “Did the collaborators among the Christians … see their families annihilated, see millions of their brethren being led into the gas chambers, and therefore fail the moral test and lend a hand to the Nazis?” How could one judge these people? Could anyone who lived in a ghetto or camp withstand the difficulties and not become a policeman or kapo if given the opportunity? Then Klinov explained that he was not attempting “to give any justification for a Jew, an individual Jew, who had collaborated with the Nazis.… I’m not intending to argue against punishing the criminals, specifically the Jewish criminals, but all I want is to express the background on which the tragedy of the Jewish individual who failed took place.”³⁷

While Klinov was one of the few journalists who expressed a mitigated empathy toward kapos, a focused exploration of the justice of trying survivors would first arise in the realm of imagination. In 1954, during the week commemorating the eleventh anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the Cameri, a leading Tel Aviv theater, premiered the play Heshbon hadash (New account), by a young and aspiring Israeli writer, Nathan Shaham. In the play, Ami, an idealistic young Israeli employed at the Dead Sea Works, learns that the plant manager and engineer, Auerbach, served as a kapo in Auschwitz. Shaken by the revelation, Ami determines to take revenge and comes up with a plan to assassinate Auerbach. He confides in a fellow worker, an Auschwitz survivor, who dismisses the idea. “The old account is finished,” the survivor tells Ami. “There is a new account.” The choice for those who served the Nazis in Europe, says the survivor, is between being “a human being in Sodom or a dog on Lilienblum Street,” the location of Israel’s black market. By choosing to help build the new state in a desolate outpost such as Sodom, the plant manager and former kapo had changed his ways and become human. “A new account has been opened,” the survivor repeats.³⁸

However, the naive young Israeli rejects this view and seeks revenge in the name of the nation. On a dark night, Ami, whose name literally means “my nation,” breaks into Auerbach’s home. With his pistol aimed at Auerbach, he speaks in the name of Israeli youth: “The government has proved its powerlessness in punishing the guilty and in combating those who are contaminating our country’s air. We have taken that job upon ourselves.” Legal procedures with their due process, Ami seems to believe, are not the appropriate way of dealing with collaborators. Operative actions such as executions, he thinks, are the right way to act.

Startled, Auerbach orders him to place the pistol on the table, but Ami continues to aim the gun at him, the exile and the native-born pitted against each other. Auerbach responds, “You think you can understand everything? Kapo, not a kapo. Do you know what a concentration camp is? You are too young to judge me.… You want to judge me? What right do you have to do so?”³⁹

The playwright questions what Israeli society and its legal system took for granted—namely, that Israelis have the right to try those who transgressed during the Holocaust. In his oversimplified answer that rebuilding the state compensates for past transgressions, Shaham ignores the complexities of the relations between past and present and evaluates the kapo’s behavior solely on the basis of his current actions and contribution to the national project. He ignores the ways the past penetrates and shapes present societies, the manner in which humans treat each other based on memories of the past. “The past is dead. A new account begins now,” one of the protagonists utters for the third time. Yet Shaham’s mere questioning of the legitimacy of the trials is significant.⁴⁰

Watching the premiere of this play in the Cameri Theater was the former Warsaw ghetto rebel Yisrael Gutman, who could not accept Shaham’s erasure of the past. Gutman, who would go on to become a famous historian and a leading figure at Yad Vashem, wrote an angry op-ed:

In the agonizing paths of Majdanek and Auschwitz I came to know Jewish kapos. I saw them carry out their despised work of beasts of prey, hated by all. Devoured by sadism and free of any inhibitions, they were obedient tools in the hands of the murderers. We cannot invent any social or public motive that forced them to accept the “position.” All they saw was the contemptible goal of assuring themselves an hour of life and entertaining themselves with the illusion of “authority,” at the price of the lives of others.

Gutman continued to view the functionaries as people who had acted for selfish reasons and ignored the collective national goals. For him and his rebel friends, he wrote,

there are crimes for which there is no forgiveness and for which one is prohibited from introducing the idea of pardon and absolution. Someone who served as a kapo has removed himself from the public, and his place is outside organized society. One shouldn’t erase the mark of Cain from a kapo’s forehead, and even if he goes on living physically, we will consider him dead.

Unlike some members of Israel’s cultural elite who expressed dissenting views about judging functionaries, Gutman and others who had been there rejected any expression of forgiveness for collaborators, even in a play depicting an imaginary figure.⁴¹

The Kastner Trial

In 1954, when the filing of indictments against functionaries had tapered down to almost zero, another proceeding began in a Jerusalem courtroom that touched on the alleged collaboration of a Jew with the Nazis during the Holocaust. Yet this trial, which ostensibly was about defamation, stood out starkly from all the kapo criminal trials that preceded it and was not part of that set of trials. Unlike the kapo trials, which focused on the brutality of alleged collaborators toward an individual or a group of a few thousand at most, in this case the Jerusalem defendant, a man branded by one attorney as a collaborator worse than the French general Philippe Pétain, was accused of having taken part knowingly in the Nazi plan to rid Hungary of half a million Jews. From the moment the audience rose upon the first entrance of Judge Benjamin Halevi to the final knock of the gavel in the hand of Supreme Court chief justice Yitzhak Olshan, this trial lasted four years and shook Israeli society. For the first time, the issue of collaboration in the Holocaust became a major public and political topic.⁴²

The events that led up to the trial began to unfold in the summer of 1952, weeks after Jungster’s death sentence was overturned and with the controversy surrounding the reparation negotiations with Germany still raging. Malkiel Gruenwald, a seventy-year-old Jerusalemite who had lost his son, a member of the IZL, during the Israeli War of Independence, mailed a few hundred copies of issue no. 17 of his Letters to Friends, a pamphlet that regularly lambasted Israeli political figures in vicious language. Possibly inspired by the death penalty issued to Jungster, Gruenwald wrote, “The stench of a carcass is irritating my nostrils! This will be the finest funeral yet! Dr. Rudolf Kastner must be liquidated!”⁴³

Ten years earlier, in 1944, Rudolf (Rezso) Kastner had been one of the heads of a Zionist organization, the Rescue Committee, in Budapest. In this position, Kastner had a role in the “blood for goods” negotiations with Adolf Eichmann, in which Eichmann offered to “sell” all the Jews of Hungary in exchange for 10,000 trucks and additional merchandise. When this negotiation failed, the Jewish leadership in Budapest attempted to find another way to save some of the Jews from being deported to the death camps. One of Eichmann’s top aids, Hermann Krumey, suggested that in exchange for money and other valuables the Nazis would release a group of six hundred Jews to any Allied country (except Mandatory Palestine). Eichmann accepted the idea and ordered the release of a train, the “Kastner Train,” which ended up being loaded with 1,685 passengers, including friends and fifty-two members of Kastner’s family. The train departed Budapest on the night between June 30 and July 1, 1944, with the passengers not knowing what their destiny was, if to death in an Auschwitz crematorium or to freedom in an Allied country. After a ten-day journey the train arrived in Bergen Belsen, where the passengers lived in a separate section of the camp. After a few months of internment, those on the Kastner Train would eventually arrive safely in Switzerland.⁴⁴

Prior to the war, the Hungarian-born Gruenwald lived in Vienna. The Nazis offered him the opportunity to collaborate with them, but he refused, and in 1938 he emigrated from Vienna to Mandatory Palestine. During the war, fifty-two members of his family perished. Gruenwald was obsessed. “How did the events in Hungary unfold?” he asked. “What happened to my brethren who were led in the last train from Hungary to Auschwitz?”⁴⁵

From the bits of information and quasi rumors he gathered, Gruenwald surmised that Kastner had known about the killing fields and the death camps and did not want to inform Hungary’s half million Jews about the danger they faced. According to Gruenwald, Kastner feared that if he informed the Hungarian Jews, they might escape to Romania, hide among non-Jews, refuse to board the trains, or even revolt, any of which might have hindered the exit of the train loaded with his cronies. To ensure his train’s safe departure, Gruenwald continued, Kastner kept the Hungarian Jews in the dark about their fate. “Because of his criminal machinations and his collaboration with the Nazis,” Gruenwald wrote, “I regard him as implicated in the murder of my dear brethren.” The amateur journalist concluded that Hungarian Jewry’s leadership, headed by Kastner, had enabled and assisted the Nazis in executing members of Gruenwald’s family and their community. In his view it was not that the Jewish victims had reacted passively to the Nazis but rather that their leadership had misled them into “going like sheep to the slaughter.”⁴⁶

To this weighty accusation Gruenwald added another: after the war, Kastner enjoyed a good life in Switzerland, living off money that he and Kurt Becher, an SS officer on the team responsible for the destruction of Hungary’s Jews, had looted from Jews. (In reality, Kastner lived an impoverished life in Switzerland.) To prevent the exposure of this robbery, Gruenwald concluded, Kastner submitted an affidavit in support of Becher to the U.S. military tribunals prosecuting war crimes at Nuremberg, testimony that saved Becher from facing justice.⁴⁷

Letters to Friends no. 17, with its incendiary accusations, landed on the desk of Attorney General Haim Cohn. After he read it, he became convinced action had to be taken, and he mailed a confidential letter to the minister of trade and industry, Dov Yosef, for whom Kastner served as spokesperson. “It is my view that we cannot remain silent about this publication,” wrote Cohn. “If there is an iota of truth in the accusations that appear in this article against Dr. Kastner, it is incumbent upon us to investigate them and draw conclusions; if, as I presume, there is no truth in these accusations, the man printing them should be prosecuted.”⁴⁸

In a meeting with Kastner, Cohn informed him of his intention to file a criminal libel suit against Gruenwald for defamation of a high-ranking government official. Kastner hesitated; Justice Minister Pinchas Rosen as well as Kastner’s boss, Yosef, who was also an attorney, both advised against such a move. However, Cohn insisted and informed Kastner that if he did not agree to participate in the libel suit, the attorney general’s office would have no choice but to charge him under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law as a collaborator. Kastner consulted with family members and eventually consented to the attorney general filing a criminal libel suit against Gruenwald.⁴⁹

Haim Cohn, the attorney general who managed the kapo trials and later, as a Supreme Court justice, helped bring them to an end. He also initiated the Kastner trial.

In the courtroom, Gruenwald’s maverick defense lawyer, Shmuel Tamir, turned the trial on its head. From Attorney General v. Malkiel Gruenwald to a case that became known to the public as the Kastner trial, the proceeding saw Kastner, officially neither accused nor accuser, become the de facto defendant. Tamir manipulated the trial so that it targeted not only the former head of the Rescue Committee in Budapest but also current political leaders in Israel. Thirty-one-year-old Tamir, who had been born in the Land of Israel and who was until 1953 a member of the Revisionist party before leaving it because of what he viewed as its failure to oppose the reparations agreement with West Germany, held in deep disdain the old guard of exile-born Mapai leaders who controlled the state, for he viewed them as having taken over the reins of leadership illegitimately instead of passing them to the members of the underground who had fought and risked their lives to create the State of Israel. This trial was his chance to implicate them in the destruction of European Jewry during the Second World War.

On the stand Tamir questioned Kastner:

Q:  Is it right that the Joint and the Jewish Agency did not publicize the Holocaust and silenced it in America both before and during 1944?

PROSECUTOR TAL:  Objection. Not relevant.

Q:  Kastner actively and knowingly participated in the silencing conspiracy.

JUDGE HALEVI:  I will allow the question.50

In Tamir’s view, just as Kastner had kept the Jews of Hungary in the dark about the deportations to Auschwitz, so too the heads of Mapai and the Jewish Agency had avoided informing world Jewry about the catastrophe of the Holocaust as it unfolded. While Kastner had collaborated with the Nazis to benefit his cronies, the heads of Mapai collaborated with the British in silencing news of the Holocaust in order to secure power in Mandatory Palestine. In suppressing the story of the Holocaust in the media, especially in the United States, they had assisted the Germans, though with no intention to destroy European Jewry.⁵¹

Tamir’s dispute with the heads of Mapai was not solely ideological; he also bore a personal grudge against the party and its members. In 1946, when he had been deputy head of the IZL underground in Jerusalem, he had been arrested by the British. In previous years, members of the Haganah’s paramilitary organization, which was closely affiliated with Mapai, had collaborated with the British, surrendering members of the IZL. The British deported Tamir to Kenya, where he remained until May 1948. While there, he served as the prosecutor in a mock trial for collaboration of Jacob Gens, head of the Judenrat in the Vilna ghetto, who had died in the Holocaust. Now, he argued, it was time to try the true criminals from the Judenrat “who had been tools in the hands of the Nazis as part of their annihilation program.” He framed the historical event to the court as a binary choice in which one served either as part of a heroic revolt or in cowardly collaboration, a structure that fit well with the prevalent Zionist ideology and one that also matched the courts’ binary option of conviction or acquittal. There was no place, in his view, for negotiation as a saving tactic.⁵²

To divert attention from the crimes of Mapai and the Jewish Agency’s leadership, Tamir held,

this learned attorney general has prosecuted dozens of people, and they have been sentenced to death, to life sentences, and to decades of imprisonment. And who has been sentenced? Small kapos, a kapo who to save his own life beat a woman in a concentration camp, a barracks commander, people with only a limited role. All the power of the state has been mobilized against them.… Is it so, your honor, that in this country laws are created in such a way that only small fry will be caught in the net? Are large holes left [in the net] to allow the whales [to escape]?⁵³

“The whales” were national leaders like Kastner, who had run for the first and second Knesset at the bottom of the Mapai list. They had silenced the masses and in doing so prevented them from organizing a rebellion, which caused them “to go like sheep to slaughter.” In Tamir’s view, Kastner—and Mapai’s heads, who had covered up his actions—had kept half a million Jews in the dark about their fate.⁵⁴

To prove Gruenwald guilty of defamation, Attorney General Cohn attempted to refute the notion that Kastner had collaborated with the Nazis. He began by addressing Kastner’s intention. “From the first moment to the last moment of his activity,” Cohn declared, “Dr. Kastner had but one sole aim in mind: to serve his people.” Unlike members of Herut and Mapam, Cohn and members of Mapai believed that securing the freedom of some Jews via negotiations had been a legitimate tactic. They argued that Kastner should be viewed not as someone who had saved 1,685 relatives and friends at the expense of half a million others, but rather as one who had saved 1,685 people from among half a million doomed men and women.⁵⁵

Kastner and the Rescue Committee might have made wrong choices, Cohn told the court, but how could they be judged for those choices? “With all due respect, I am telling the court that it has no right to judge and [it] cannot set itself up as the judge of whether they did good or did evil, whether they were right or wrong, whether they weighed seriously or decided hastily, or whether they did what they did out of panic and fear or as part of a well-considered policy. We are unable to judge. This is a matter between them and heaven.” For the first time, Cohn admitted the limitations of the binary nature of legal justice, with its verdict of either innocent or guilty, in grappling with the complexities of actions taken by Jewish leadership during the Holocaust. The tragic reality that the Jewish leadership faced of saving one person at the expense of another was too complicated for the legal justice system to pass simple judgments of guilt or innocence.⁵⁶

These words coming from Israel’s prosecution’s most powerful legal figure represented a major shift in his view of alleged collaborators. Just four years earlier, in the Knesset Law and Justice Committee, Cohn had firmly asserted that anyone who had assisted the Nazis must be prosecuted. Now he took a “who are we to judge” approach with regard to Kastner. This approach did not fully apply to ordinary kapos, however; his office continued to prosecute them, though, as we will see, in a more restricted manner. For Cohn it would take this gradual change of mind and a move from the prosecutor’s chair to the justice’s bench to lead him to the conclusion that one should completely refrain from trying those who had lived under such extreme circumstances.⁵⁷

In the years since the 1950 enactment of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law, Cohn had also altered his views on the veracity of survivors’ testimony. In the Banik trial he had stated that witnesses who saw life-changing events in the Holocaust were trustworthy because they are “testifying about things that are fixed in their soul. A person’s memory does not easily blur the face of an enemy.”⁵⁸ Now, three years later, in the Kastner trial he admitted that he had been mistaken in the Banik trial and that the Haifa District Court’s dismissal of testimonies such as that of Yitzhak Freiman, who had imagined Banik tearing open the belly of a three-year-old boy, was justified. Cohn told Judge Halevi that “in general the court should be very cautious in accepting the testimony of witnesses who are testifying about events that took place ten years ago. Not only because of the long time that has passed since then, but also and especially because of the mental state of these witnesses.”⁵⁹ But Cohn’s change of mind about the quality of witness testimony in the kapo trials had not yet translated into a policy change regarding the trials of ordinary kapos, whom the attorney general’s office continued to indict.

Seven hours into his closing argument defending Kastner’s actions, Cohn paused for a minute. Turning to Judge Halevi, he read aloud a letter written by a rabbi in the depths of the Holocaust. “My Jewish brethren, have you gone mad? Don’t you know what kind of hell we are living in? Who has given you permission to ask him for a reckoning?” Facing Judge Halevi, Cohn asked, “Have we gone mad, your honor? Who are they who have come here to heap their obscenities upon people who have given their blood?” With these words he concluded his summation in defense of Kastner and sat down.⁶⁰

Tamir rose to deliver his closing argument. When Kastner served as the head of the Rescue Committee in Budapest, Tamir asserted, he had done so “as an agent of the Nazi gang”; he was “their confidant, their ally, one of them.” The judge should not only clear Gruenwald of the libel charges but must “also recommend that this Dr. Kastner be prosecuted under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law.” The Attorney General’s Office, Tamir insisted, must indict Kastner for crimes against humanity and for delivering persecuted persons to the enemy.⁶¹

The trial arguments concluded in October 1954, and for nine months Judge Halevi studied the detailed transcripts. On June 22, 1955, with the entire nation awaiting his words, the judge read out his 274-page verdict. What had caused the Jews of Hungary to board the trains obediently and not resist? asked Halevi, voicing a question that many Israelis shared. It was their ignorance about the destiny of their trip, an absence of knowledge that Kastner could have remedied but failed to do. Had Kastner informed Hungary’s Jews, the judge continued, they would have either escaped or resisted—though with what means they would have resisted or how they would have escaped en masse, he did not explain. Kastner’s collaboration in the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry, the judge determined, was criminal “in the full sense of the word.”⁶² “Kastner had sold his soul to the devil,” Halevi declared, a sentence that would reverberate in newspapers and households for years to come. He cleared Gruenwald of libel in all but one minor issue and sentenced Gruenwald to a symbolic fine of one lira.⁶³

Some, mostly opponents of the ruling Mapai party from both the right and the left of the Israeli political spectrum, commended the ruling. The political party Herut published a statement that linked Kastner’s political affiliation to his criminal actions. “The court ruled: A devotee of Mapai in the Rescue Committee and its candidate for the Knesset, R. Kastner, had sold his soul to Satan and was a quisling.”⁶⁴ In its editorial, the Communist newspaper Kol ha-Am expressed relief that at last the verdict had revealed to the relatives of the deceased the role Jewish leaders had played in the murder of their loved ones. The editors then added that “with the publication of the verdict, the episode has not come to an end. First of all, one must arrest and prosecute Kastner and all those who, together with him, are responsible for collaboration with the Nazis and for indirectly murdering half a million Hungarian Jews.” The attorney general’s office, some held, should file criminal charges against Kastner as a Nazi collaborator.⁶⁵ Instead, the attorney general’s office immediately filed an appeal of Halevi’s ruling to the Supreme Court, thereby delaying any possible criminal prosecution of Kastner.

Angered by the trial, in 1954 the acclaimed poet Nathan Alterman, who was closely associated with the Mapai Party, published a controversial poem, “Between Two Paths” (Al shete derakhim). During the Holocaust and during the 1948 War of Independence, he had written some of the nation’s most iconic poems praising the heroism and valor of the fighters. In this new poem he questioned the sharp line drawn by members of Mapam and the left-wing party Ahdut ha-Avoda between the path of the rebels and that of the Jewish Councils. “ ‘There were two paths,’—so we are used to saying—two divided and separated paths,” he wrote. “Is that so? When and where? What is the distinction between one path and the other?” Those leaders labeled as collaborators, he wrote, had also done their utmost to save lives. The critics who reproached those who negotiated with the Nazis were basing their views on hindsight. During the Holocaust, he pointed out, even the rebels had postponed instigating the revolt until the last possible moment. In some of the ghettos, such as Bialystok, he added, the Jewish Councils and rebellion movements had even cooperated with each other.⁶⁶

Half a year earlier, on the April 30, 1954, anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, he had published the poem “Memorial Day and the Rebels” (Yom ha-Zikaron ve-ha-mordim), which questioned the practice, common among organizers of commemorative events, of distinguishing between the rebels and the masses, between those who fought courageously and those who did not. In his poem, the rebels choose to blend in with the massacred masses and not stand out as venerated icons, and the dead rebels demand veneration also of “Jewish fathers who said, ‘the underground will bring a catastrophe upon us,’ and also of that boy or girl … who left behind nothing but a small white sock.” Those who supported the memory of the rebels, he argued, neglected to appreciate the memory of ordinary deceased small children and failed to empathize with a parent’s efforts to preserve his child’s life as long as possible.⁶⁷

Alterman refused to view all Jewish Councils, their leaders, and their members in the same light. At least in some instances, he asserted, their opposition to battling the Germans stemmed from the goal of preserving lives. Yet he held that some individual collaborators did not deserve any empathy or understanding whatsoever. For “those beasts of prey among these ‘collaborators,’ their helpers, who follow their commands,” there could be no forgiveness, he wrote. “There are acts and occurrences that a sane human being must not ‘understand.’ ” In his writing, Alterman no longer considered the collective guilt of collaborators but rather distinguished between individuals and their specific actions.⁶⁸

A few went further than Alterman and refused to question the morality not only of the actions of the Judenräte and the Jewish police but also of the actions of the kapos, whom Alterman did not address specifically. In the daily Maariv, writer Avigdor Hameiri asked, “Are we permitted to judge?” Hameiri believed that the Kastner trial was a “historic crime for which there is no atonement and no forgiveness.” In that context, what would permit anyone to judge Kastner and others like him? he asked. No law can apply to people who sought “to live, to live, to live.” Under those circumstances, he wrote, one cannot judge anyone, not even a kapo.⁶⁹

Members of Mapam and Ahdut ha-Avoda, who, as we have seen, had closely linked themselves to the rebel movement in Europe, strongly opposed the perspective taken by Alterman, the most prominent literary figure associated with the Mapai party. In May 1954 Abba Kovner and his wife, Vitka, both members of the Jewish revolt in Europe, traveled from northern Israel to Tel Aviv to meet with Nathan Alterman. They expressed their revulsion about his poem “Memorial Day and the Rebels.” The members of the Judenräte who opposed the revolt, said Kovner and Vitka, had been morally decrepit and aimed to save their own lives at the expense of others. In a newspaper associated with Ahdut ha-Avoda, one writer, Mati Meged, wrote that the question of collaboration was not an issue of the past; rather, “our treatment today of a phenomenon such as this still determines and may continue to constitute real precedents in political circumstances and national morals, in educating the public and educating individuals, in shaping the nation in its state and in shaping the image of its citizens.… The one who forgives and forgets—he may determine, and already determines, the way in which the present and future citizen in Israel will be educated.”⁷⁰

But Alterman, who between 1939 and 1945 had lived in Tel Aviv, refused to accept this generalization. Even if the Judenräte opposed the revolt, he held, often they had done so in order to save the lives of others, and not only for selfish reasons. Furthermore, one should not alter history for the sake of contemporary educational goals.⁷¹ Unlike Alterman, however, the common view was that there was not only a right but an obligation to judge the betrayers of the nation. And some issued their own verdicts.

While Kastner was waiting to hear the result of his appeal to the Supreme Court, he returned home a few minutes after midnight on March 4, 1957, after working in the editorial office of the Hungarian newspaper Új Kelet. He parked his car outside the Tel Aviv apartment building where he lived with his wife and their only child, a daughter. As he turned the car key in the lock, a man jumped off a Jeep and approached him. “Are you Dr. Kastner?” he asked. When Kastner said yes, the man pulled out a pistol. Kastner ran for his life. Three shots rang out. Kastner fell down, gravely wounded. In the hospital, he gave the police details about his attacker. Ten days later, he died.⁷²

The night of the shooting, Israel’s Shin Bet, which had just a few weeks earlier withdrawn the bodyguards it had assigned to protect Kastner, arrested three suspects: Yosef Menkes, Dan Shemer, and Ze’ev Eckstein. Within days, Eckstein admitted that he had shot Kastner. The other two had served as accomplices. All three were members of a right-wing underground cell that aimed to reestablish the Kingdom of Israel from the Mediterranean Sea to the Euphrates River. The court sentenced them to life in prison, but they served only five years.⁷³

In January 1958, nine months after the murder of Kastner and two and a half years after Halevi’s harsh verdict in which he acquitted Gruenwald of the criminal libel suit, the Supreme Court ruled on the attorney general’s appeal. The justices held that Cohn had been wrong in deciding to indict Gruenwald. In a statement never made in any of the kapo trials, Justice Shimon Agranat wrote in his opinion that the court lacked the ability to put itself in the position and context in which the historical protagonists had acted in Hungary ten years earlier. A committee made up of professional historians would have had more access to historical sources and a better chance to uncover the truth, he stated. This was a first acknowledgment by the court of the impossibility of trying certain people who had lived and decided within the circumstances of the war years.⁷⁴

Given that the case had come to the Supreme Court on appeal, however, the justices had no choice but to issue a ruling. All five justices criticized Halevi for mishandling the proceedings. He had treated rumors as facts and permitted witnesses to veer off topic and give testimony unrelated to the issues under consideration.⁷⁵ Four of the justices cleared Kastner of the allegation of collaboration; one justice, Moshe Zilberg, upheld Halevi’s verdict.

In determining whether someone collaborated or not, Justice Agranat wrote, the defendant’s intent is crucial. Even if a person knew that some of his actions would benefit the Nazis but his overall motivation was morally justified, one could not label him a collaborator. Kastner had clearly acted with the larger motivation of saving the Jews of Hungary.⁷⁶ Agranat wrote:

First, we should not jump to the conclusion that if a certain person who lived under harsh Nazi rule had taken an action that gave the latter a specific benefit—he had indeed seen this benefit as his main or final goal; that assisting the Nazis was the motivation that caused him to act as he acted. Second—and this is the key issue I wish to highlight—we should not cast a blot on such a person just because he had taken knowingly an act that might assist the Nazis’ goals when it became clear [to us] that his motivations were kosher and are not morally questionable; in other words, Heaven forbid that we shall name this person “collaborator.”⁷⁷

In other words, Agranat held that in the context of Nazi rule a person could have legitimately taken short-term actions that benefited the Nazis if his overall goal was to assist and save Jews. And Justice Shneur Zalman Cheshin pointed out that the results of Kastner’s actions “are miraculous. He saved not one person but … at least 1,700 Jews.”

As for Gruenwald, the high court sentenced him to one year of probation and a 200-lira fine.⁷⁸

A Shift in the Kapo Trials

For Cohn personally, the Kastner trial was an illuminating experience, one that taught him about the complexities of life and moral choices faced by victims of the Holocaust. Having learned about the events that unfolded in Hungary in 1944, Cohn wrote years later, “[I came] to believe that those of us who did not experience the Holocaust ourselves, have no ability or the right to try a person for his actions, intentions and constraints when he [was trapped in] that Hell.”⁷⁹ While Cohn’s office did continue to file charges against alleged collaborators, it did so to only a limited extent. The three years between 1955 and 1957 saw no indictments, and the years 1958–1959 saw five district court indictments.⁸⁰

Almost two years after the Supreme Court issued the Kastner verdict, in September 1959 Attorney General Cohn would rely on that decision to alter the course of a case before the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court. This would mark a new stage in the kapo trials: the attorney general’s office would place additional restrictions on who could be placed on trial, beyond the already existing restriction that the first paragraph of the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law no longer applied to Jews.

The current case focused on Eliezer Landau. During the war, Landau, his wife, and their three young children escaped the Polish town of Bochnia for Bucharest and from there sailed to Mandatory Palestine. Upon his arrival in Haifa in August 1944, rumors circulated that Landau, who had had close relations with leading SS men in Bochnia, had extorted money from Jews in that town in exchange for promises to save them from deportation. “Landau, who before the war was penniless, arrived in Bucharest with substantial amounts of money” and now in Mandatory Palestine had at his disposal hundreds of liras, investigators from the Haifa Bureau of Investigations wrote in a secret 1945 report. In Landau’s position as the Jewish community’s contact with the Germans, they wrote, “it seems that he took [for himself] a significant percentage of the money given to him [by Jews] as ransom for the Gestapo.”⁸¹

Learning of the allegations against him, Landau turned to the chief rabbi of the Land of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog, and demanded a public hearing. Nothing came of that request, but more than a decade later, in 1959, the police arrested the Tel Aviv–based wholesaler on charges that he had revealed to the Germans the location of one family’s jewelry cache, and that he had assisted the Nazis in ways that resulted in many Jews being sent to unknown locations.⁸²

In the preliminary process, the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court heard testimony from dozens of people saved by Landau’s actions, including influential rabbis, who organized and approached Attorney General Cohn demanding he withdraw the indictment. In the face of this outpouring of support, Cohn took a step back. In a lengthy letter to the court, described in one newspaper as “daring,” he explained that the Kastner ruling had taught that intention was crucial for determining whether a person’s actions fell under the Nazis and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law:

If the defendant thought that in order to gain or maintain the goodwill of the Nazis (which he needed for the sake of his actions of help and rescuing) it was necessary to reveal the hiding places of Jewish money, then even if, objectively, he was mistaken, and even if handing the money over to the Nazis was a bad action, the fact that he revealed these hiding places to the Nazis does not prove … that he intended to assist the Nazis in a manner such that the Nazi collaboration laws would apply to him.⁸³

That is, if a person acted with the motivation of saving and assisting victims but, to maintain good connections with the Nazis, took actions that resulted in negative consequences, that person should not be prosecuted, according to Cohn’s new interpretation of the ruling and the law.⁸⁴

Cohn drew a distinction between Landau, who had aligned himself with the Nazis’ goals so as to save or assist Jews, building up a connection with the Nazis for that purpose, and those whose intent was “to align themselves with the Nazis to achieve their own goals.”

This signaled that a third stage in the kapo trials had begun. From this point forward, the attorney general’s office would file charges only against those seen as having aligned themselves with the Nazis’ goals for selfish purposes.⁸⁵

Doubting the Necessity of Trials

The shift in the kapo prosecutions was influenced not only by the Kastner trial and the attorney general’s change in attitude but also by social and cultural transformations that had begun to take place in Israeli society during the second half of the 1950s. With the distance of time from the catastrophic era of the Holocaust growing, for the first time some survivors began to doubt the need to pursue alleged collaborators, believing it was time to put the controversies of “those days” behind. Others did not change their view and continued to believe it was essential to pursue figures from the past.

We can discern this shift in attitude among some survivors from the case of Aryeh Praport, which took place in the final months of 1957. Moshe Yavlonsky took the witness stand in Tel Aviv Magistrates Court and was describing how in 1941 the Nazis had uncovered a hideout in his apartment in the Pabianice ghetto and captured seven women, including two of his sisters, when District Attorney Itamar Pilpel interrupted him with a question: was Yavlonsky certain he was speaking the truth? Coming from the prosecutor, this question was surprising, not least because Yavlonsky was a prosecution witness.

Ten days earlier at the police station, Yavlonsky had described to the investigator how the Jewish policeman Praport had arrived with a group of Gestapo men at an apartment building owned by his father on 5 Warszawska Street to search for young women. They searched all the building’s apartments, including his own, but found nothing. Minutes later, Yavlonsky told the police, Praport returned alone to the building. He walked directly to Yavlonsky’s apartment and searched it high and low, stopping for only a moment to call in Gestapo men and sniffer dogs. In the apartment, Yavlonsky watched as Praport “moved the closet that hid a double wall and uncovered the seven girls,” including Sheindel and Dina, his two sisters. Yavlonsky stressed to the police that Praport was “the one that enabled the Gestapo to take the girls and kill them.”⁸⁶

On the stand in the magistrates court, Yavlonsky altered his account in dramatic and suspicious ways. Just as in his police account, he recalled the first search in the building’s various apartments, from which the Gestapo came away empty-handed. But in this later account, Yavlonsky said that Praport and the Gestapo left, only to return “a few minutes later … [and] they went directly to my apartment. I stayed on the ground floor [in his parents’ apartment] because I was afraid to go up.… Later I saw the Gestapo people leading the girls down. The Gestapo people gave orders and the defendant went with them.” Unlike his account to the police, Yavlonsky’s testimony in court was that Praport had only followed the Germans’ orders; he had not summoned the Gestapo to search for the young women. Yavlonsky also stated in court that he had not been present in his apartment during the search and did not see Praport move the closet to uncover the women’s hiding place, as he had said in his police deposition.⁸⁷

Yavlonsky’s wife, Tziral, who in her deposition to the police had corroborated her husband’s account, now also confirmed his altered court testimony. In the time between the two searches, she told the court, she was in the building courtyard. She saw the Germans assemble girls from different buildings, including the daughter of Mrs. Krotoschinsky, a neighbor of theirs. “Mrs. Krotoschinsky stood [in the yard] shouting—not shouting, but crying and shaking. She went up to the Jewish policeman and told him, ‘In fact, at Yavlonsky’s [apartment] there are two strong girls; if you don’t go up there, I will tell the Gestapo people.” It was Mrs. Krotoschinsky, Tziral told the court, who had been responsible for exposing the girls’ hiding place. Mrs. Krotoschinsky had even apologized later for revealing the hideout, saying she had been unaware that not two girls but seven were hidden there. To the best of her recollection, Tziral added, the Germans had ordered Praport to move the closet. It was not his own initiative.⁸⁸

At the request of the prosecutor in this trial, the judge declared both Moshe and Tziral Yavlonsky hostile witnesses. This trial was the first and possibly the only one of the kapo trials to be heard behind closed doors—because both the defense lawyer and the prosecutor agreed that publication of the defendant’s name “might tarnish him before he was found guilty.” For the first time, there was a sensitivity on both sides of the case to the public image of the accused collaborators.⁸⁹

Asked in both the magistrates court and the district court to explain their altered accounts, the Yavlonskys fingered the complainant in the case, Mendel Bogonsky, a forty-five-year-old tailor. Bogonsky had sought revenge against Praport for surrendering the seven girls, one of whom was Bogonsky’s seventeen-year-old “beautiful fiancée,” Dina Yavlonsky. In the seventeen years since her capture, Bogonsky had never married. He repeatedly referred to Yavlonsky as “my brother-in-law” when in fact they were never brothers-in-law. From his home in New York, he searched continuously for Aryeh Praport. And when he learned that Praport lived in a town south of Tel Aviv and worked as a truck driver, he boarded a ship and came to Israel.⁹⁰

According to the Yavlonskys, Bogonsky had pressured them into filing a false account with the police. If they did not file incriminating testimony against Praport, Bogonsky threatened, he would tell their relatives in the United States to stop sending them money. When they met Bogonsky at the police station, he warned them not to talk about Mrs. Krotoschinsky’s having revealed the hiding place—“otherwise I will be considered a liar.” “And when I saw the defendant,” Tziral went on, “we again saw the past, and the horror was before us again and we did not know what we were saying. We were terrified by Bogonsky’s screams.” Moshe Yavlonsky testified, “Bogonsky told me what to say; after all, I did not remember everything.”⁹¹

In the ten days that elapsed between the police investigation and their court appearance, both Tziral and Moshe Yavlonsky recalled the true events and the role their neighbor Mrs. Krotoschinsky had played in surrendering the girls. Tziral still harbored deep hatred toward Jewish policemen like Praport for handing over her family members; those who had served in the police, she declared, “are not worth a penny.” Still, at one point she acknowledged, “So many years have passed, what do we need this for?” With these words she expressed the sentiment shared by some survivors that it was time to move on and put the past to rest. A decade and a half had passed since these events had taken place, and while these survivors had deep reservations about the actions of these policemen and kapos, they no longer believed it was wise to prosecute them.⁹²

The panel of judges cleared Praport on the ground that the testimony of all the witnesses was flawed and so they could not determine which account was true, Bogonsky’s or Yavlonsky’s.⁹³ But a year later, Israel’s attorney general’s office filed charges against Moshe and Tziral Yavlonsky for their false testimony—for being “willing, in exchange for financial benefit, to sell their soul to the devil.” Unlike in the Kastner trial, where the devil was Eichmann and his men, here the devil was the Jewish policeman and collaborator Praport.⁹⁴

The Yavlonskys called to the stand as a defense witness Antek Zuckerman, a leader of the underground movement in the Warsaw ghetto, to explain the instinctive reaction that had led them to provide false testimony criminalizing a Jewish policeman. Zuckerman had strongly opposed poet Nathan Alterman’s call to blur the lines between rebels and collaborators and was one of the survivors who refused to forgive the policemen and kapos for their past actions. “Only in the lines of Nathan Alterman’s poem do the Judenrat men and the fighters live in peace. [Only] in the dead letters. But in [real] life there was a bitter fight, there was a battle, there were victims.”⁹⁵ The sight of Praport awoke in Moshe and Tziral “a primitive response, certainly a spontaneous one, of a desire for revenge,” Zuckerman explained to the judge. To that very day, Zuckerman added, he refused to shake the hand of former policemen.⁹⁶

“The Jewish police is a hostile organization and is an institution that bears guilt with regard to the Jewish people,” Zuckerman went on. “Of course there are exceptions, [but] I would say in general that anyone who served in the Jewish police must prove his innocence, because he did despicable jobs.” Zuckerman’s testimony helped clear the Yavlonskys.⁹⁷ The question of whether the Jewish police had indeed been a hostile organization would lie at the heart of a trial that would begin a few years later, the trial of a former head of a Jewish police force. That trial would take place shortly after the trial of a very different commander, the head of the department of Jewish affairs and evacuation in the Reich’s main security office—Adolf Eichmann.