Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Deal with Nazis, A Flim by Gaylen Ross with over three hours of bonus features.
Before there was Eichmann, there was Kasztner. Now that I have your attention, permit me to explain.
The Kasztner trial as it became known, the formal title of the trial was the State of Israel versus Malkiel Grunewald, was the first of two Holocaust trials in Israel of the mid 1950s and 1961 that shaped the way that Israelis grappled with the Holocaust. The Eichmann trial united Israel, the Kasztner trial divided it.
Eichmann was a perpetrator, the highest ranking Nazi officer ever tried–or ever to be tried–by the State of Israel. His capture and his trial were global events. Eichmann was the SS officer in charge of the RSHA’s Jewish desk and indispensable in their deportation. He and his henchmen were responsible for putting Jews on the trains and getting them to the death camps in German-occupied Poland. Because he came into direct contact with Jews, tormenting them, negotiating with them directly, he was far better known to them and seemed a far more menacing character than his superiors, who were even more responsible but less directly instrumental in their murder. In a gross overstatement, Gideon Hausner, the Israeli prosecutor, likened him to Pharaoh. In a private note on Hausner’s grandiloquent opening address to the Court, Ben Gurion wryly commented: I think you must insert Hitler between Pharaoh and Eichmann.
Dr. Reszo “Israel” Kastzner was a Hungarian Jew who was part of the Vaada, the Zionist Rescue committee in Budapest during the fateful spring and summer of 1944. He negotiated directly with Eichmann and with other SS officials. With everything to lose and few tangible resources at his disposal, he bluffed. He played upon the Nazi myth that the Jews were a coordinated world power and presumed to negotiate as a representative of World Jewry to save the remaining Jews of Hungary. Eichmann offered Jews for sale: 10,000 trucks to be used against the Soviet Union for 1,000,000 Jews. Heinrich Himmler offered the West a separate peace; the Jews were the bait. Even as they were annihilating the Jews and reducing them to abject powerlessness, murdering them at will, the leading Nazis believed their own propaganda about the power of the Jews and their global reach. And Kasztner played on their delusions to buy some time.
His achievements were modest–a train was sent first to Bergen Belsen–not Auschwitz – and from there 317 Jews were sent to Switzerland in August 1944 followed months later in December by an additional 1353 Jews, all the while 437,402 Jews were shipped on 147 trains primarily to Auschwitz where four of five were immediately killed. (According to Prof. Yehuda Bauer, as part of the deal another 18,000 Jews were put “on ice” in Austria instead of being sent to Auschwitz.)
Yet, however modest his achievements, they were greater than any other wartime Jewish rescue effort.
To the survivors of the Kasztner train he was a savior, a rescuer. They called the train Noah’s Ark as it contained diverse Jews, religious and secular, rich and poor, children and the elderly–even the Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum and his family along with Kasztner’s own family. To other Hungarians, Kasztner was a collaborator who played God, saving some, while far greater numbers of Jews were murdered.
And to some Hungarian Jews, he became the most visible target of the failure of Jewish leadership. They lashed out in fury “He knew! Why weren’t we warned about Auschwitz?” The “he” is singular. Though Kasztzner was part of a Vaada, a committee, and he as well as many others knew about Auschwitz, and he alone did not compile the list, he was the visible symbol of their anger and blamed for their fate. Information about Auschwitz and other death camps was seeping into Hungary from many refugee sources but the news was either deemed “incredible” in the literal sense of the term, not believable, or could not be internalized. Until the very last moment, Hungarian Jews lived with illusions: We are Hungarians, we are different and Hungary is different–so they convinced themselves
An unknown and little regarded pamphleteer, Malkiel Grunewald attacked Kasztner accusing him of collaboration with the Eichmann in the deportation of the Jews. Few paid attention to the self-published pamphlet, one of many written by a very angry man. But Kasztner was ambitious and craved recognition so when Attorney General [and later Supreme Court Justice] Chaim Cohen approached him to urge Kasztner to sue Grunewald for libel, Kasztner took the bait. Shmuel Tamir, a young and very skilled right-wing attorney represented Grunewald. His goal was to attack the Zionist establishment and his partner was a leftist anti-establishment Uri Avnery, the ambitious editor of Haolam Hazeh, who joined forced to make the plaintiff the accused, and to put the Zionist leadership on trial for inaction during the Holocaust. Kasztner became exhibit #1 in their crusade.
Judge Benjamin Halevy, later one of the three judges to preside at the Eichmann trial, had been passed over for a Supreme Court approval and his decision, coming more than a year after the trial doomed Kasztner, finding that he had “sold his soul to the devil.” Halevy assumed that Kasztner had negotiated with Eichmann as equals, he did not comprehend that no Jew could stand before the SS with such a great imbalance of power as an equal. However, such a pretense was an essential part of the strategy. Kasztner stood accused in the court of public opinion. He was a beaten man. His quest for credit and fame became a personal tragedy. Months later he was assassinated. Three men were convicted–there may have been a fourth–and only months after his murder did the Supreme Court clear his name. By then it was too late. He was dead and his name muddied for history.
Only a scholar would understand the phrase selling your soul to the devil first appeared in a statement by Rabbi Michoel Dov Weismandl, who was part of the working group in Slovakia that bribed Eichmann’s deputy Dieter Wisliceny in the hopes that it might forestall deportations from Slovakia. Weismandl admonished that one must negotiate with the Nazi to save Jewish lives even if it meant that you had to sell your soul to the devil. But such subtlety was lost on the Israel public only a decade after the Holocaust. Halevy’s words doomed Kasztner.
In 2009, Gaylen Ross, an American filmmaker released her documentary, a decade in the making, to critical acclaim. Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With the Nazis explores the first Israeli show trial on the Holocaust from many different perspectives and features a long interview with Kasztner’s assassin, Ze’ev Ekstein as well as a meeting between Zsuzsi Kasztner, Reszo’s daughter and the man who murdered her father. Had the DVD merely presented the documentary, it would have been well worth the price and the time of any viewer interested in the Holocaust or in Israel’s representation of the Holocaust then and now.
But as a supplement to the original film Ross has gathered significant material. Three panel discussions featuring survivors and leading historians of the Holocaust in Hungary, the rescue efforts and of Israel’s public memory of the Shoah; interviews with the remaining figures of the trial and Kasztner assassination: Gabriel Bach, the charming and dapper former Israeli Supreme Court Justice who handled the successful appeal of the Kasztner verdict to the Supreme Court and later served a young prosecutor assisting Gideon Hausner in the Eichmann trial; Kasztner’s train survivors describing the trip to Switzerland and the their experience in Bergen Belsen as a semi-protected population. And finally a more extensive interview with Ze’ev Eckstein the complicated, conspiratorial assassinungaria who was a double agent working for the Shin Bet against right wing extremists before he joined their cause. He reveals much, yet conceals even more.
Many questions are asked: some institutional, some political, others deeply personal. And even when the questions are answered, they linger unsettled even now more than a half century later.
Human vanities are explored. Kasztner wanted recognition: he believed he was an effective hero who actually succeeded in saving lives. Yet Israel, then in its infancy, was seeking a different sort of hero, one untainted by the complexities of living as a Jew in the galut. Hannah Szenesh and the parachutists sent by the Yishuv who were dropped behind enemy lines to warn Hungarian Jews but the mission failed when they were captured. Some people admired Kasztner but did not like him; others were envious, still other despised him; even his friends thought him vain.
The most gripping part of the film was an interview with Eckstein who was a young man when he together with xxx, was spurred on by his handler and decided that Kasztner must meet his end. Hearing him describe his state of mind, his fanaticism and his commitment to violence one well understands the suicide bombers of today and all to easily one can imagine an interview 25 years hence with Yigal Amir, Prime Minister Rabin’s assassin, explaining his motivation, his passion, his certitude, confident in how much he has achieved. The encounter–too polite for my tastes–between him and Zsuzsi is breathtaking; each needs the other to better understand themselves.
Issues surrounding the trial and his execution remain unresolved, unanswered but not unasked:
Was Eckstein right in speaking of a second, unseen, unknown killer or was his teasing his interviewer, playing with history?
Why would Kasztner lie about his efforts to seek clemency for Col. Kurt Becher, the other SS official he dealt with in Budapest? How could he not have understood that the Defense had done its job and would uncover his complete record? Why did he make himself so vulnerable to protect someone else?
What was the Jewish Agency hiding by its own claim that it knew nothing of Kasztner’s letter to the de-Nazification court on behalf of Kurt Becher?
Why were the assassins freed by the President of Israel Zalman Shazar after serving only seven years?
Why did Israel glorify the resistance fighters whose accomplishments were so meager or the parachutists whose mission ended in failure, non-Jews who rescued Jews but not the rescuers who gave us a glimpse of Jewish agency–Jews acting within the limits of the terrible alternatives available to them. Would we have different heroes in our age as we have become powerful and experience the limits even of the considerable power of contemporary Jews from the Prime Minister on downward?
Were the DVD to present the film alone, Dayenu – it would have sufficed.
Were it to contain merely the interview with Eckstein or with Bloch, the survivors testimony of Bergen Belsen and the train, or the interview with Petertz Revesz, the last survivor of the Vaada, Dayenu.
Were it to have contained any one of the three scholarly panels that, too, would have sufficed.
But each of the segments only adds to the importance of the whole, and Ross has offered us a deep, courageous, and honest exploration of the controversy and for this we should be most grateful.
By Michael Berenbaum
