Kasztner’s Train

Beating Adolf Eichmann

by Robert Murray

Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust,
by Anna Porter;
Scribe, 2008, $29.95.

This book is largely the story of the Hungarian Holocaust in 1944–45, the last, insane year and a bit of Hitler’s European war. The main Nazi attack on the Jews came late to Hungary, which until then had remained precariously independent, in reluctant alliance with Germany while neighbouring countries were under Nazi occupation. When the war ended, about half the Jewish population of Hungary were still alive, thanks partly to the attack on them coming late but also to many courageous strategies for escape and delay.

Until 1944, compared with most of Europe, life was not too bad for the Hungarian Jews. Jews comprised about 6 per cent of the population, though more like 20 per cent of professional, industrial and commercial classes, including some of the richest people in the country. Most were assimilated, unlike in Poland where much of the pre-Holocaust 10 per cent Jewish population had lived in enclaves, spoke Yiddish as their first language and dressed distinctively. Many Hungarian Jewish families traced their origins back to arriving from the east with the first Magyar tribes 1000 years earlier. Most spoke Hungarian as their mother tongue.

There had long been widespread but mild anti-Semitism, partly based on Jewish success, and the Magyar aristocracy were snobbish about them as about most things, but that was all. When war first came, the fascist Arrow Cross emerged, strongly anti-Semitic, but a rabid, unrespectable fringe force.

Deadly pressure on the Jews began when the Germans moved in with substantially direct rule at the beginning of 1944. The government under the Regent, Admiral Horthy, did little to stop Nazi moves against the Jews, who were forced to wear yellow stars, gradually rounded up, bundled into ghettos and then deported. Horthy’s gendarmes and the suddenly powerful Arrow Cross were more savage than the invading SS.

With the German intervention came an SS Sonderkommando under Adolf Eichmann, the operations chief of the Holocaust, apparently charged with not only destroying the Jews of Hungary, as the SS had destroyed most other European Jews, but also looting them. The word apparently is used, because Eichmann’s behaviour was decidedly strange. He was either a cold and calculating liar trying to keep the peace, or in a state of psychological denial about the hideous nature of his work. He kept talking to Jewish leaders about emigration and proposing deals under which they could buy a way out for substantial numbers of Jews. At one stage he suggested that all one million Hungarian Jews would be temporarily evacuated for war work while the war lasted, in exchange for their finding 10,000 trucks for the German war effort.

(Eichmann, a one-time oil company representative in provincial Austria who rose rapidly in the SS, insisted at his trial in Israel in 1961 that he had loved his job organising transport for Jews while they were only destined for emigration, but the pleasure went when Hitler ordered extermination.)

For much of his time in Budapest, Eichmann was the polite but punctilious bureaucrat, meeting regularly with equally polite Jewish leaders to discuss emigration proposals. But often the surface calm broke and he flew into a rage and reminded them who was boss. He became more hysterical more often as the possibility loomed of German defeat. “I am the commissar of world Jewry,” he told the Jewish leader Rezso Kasztner, hero of this book, at one point. “I decide how many Jews will live and how many will not. I am charged with cleaning the streets of Europe of Jews.” One gets the impression here of an Eichmann under pressure, not only from the nature of his work, but from Berlin to get on with it—or else.

In a fairly typical bureaucratic scenario, Eichmann had an equally ambitious younger rival ready to pounce and undermine him. This was the thirty-four-year-old SS Colonel Kurt Becher, officially an economist but in reality SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s man in Budapest and an ardent Himmler fan. In time, Himmler put Becher in charge of the “business” side. Eichmann complained bitterly that he was left with “the dirty work”.

The power of “World Jewry” was a key item of Nazi belief, and Jewish leaders such as Kasztner worked on it to the full while they played for time. They encouraged Eichmann and his cohorts to believe they could tap into this vast—but really fictional—source of wealth and power. Kasztner was one of a mostly younger group of unofficial leaders who were quicker than the established Jewish leadership to grasp the terrible nature of the situation, based on hunches and the limited information that had seeped into Hungary of the previous two murderous years in neighbouring countries. The established leaders had been tempted to think it could not happen to them.

While these various discussions were still proceeding, the Jews were being rounded up remorselessly, placed in crowded, filthy ghettos and despatched in packed railway trucks to Auschwitz and other death camps, at the rate of 12,000 a day in the spring of 1944. Many died within an hour of reaching Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The closing stages of the war were approaching. German forces were retreating as the Russians fought their way west, the Allies were bombing Budapest and the British and Americans landed in France in June. Hitler is thought to have demanded the destruction, while it was still possible, of this last big remaining Jewish population in central Europe.

Horthy withdrew Hungary from the war, and resumed, as well as neutrality, an earlier friendliness towards the Jews, but Hitler ordered him to a prison camp and installed a Hungarian fascist puppet buttressed by the Arrow Cross, which continued the deadly work, but in a much more bellicose way than the SS.

The final months of the war became an even darker nightmare. As the Germans retreated, armed gangs of loutish Arrow Cross boys, typically below military age, ran riot, shooting and looting mainly but not exclusively Jews. Next came the victorious Soviet troops, raping and looting indiscriminately what they supposed to be a defeated enemy.

The Jewish leaders had seen the chance that if by bluff they could slow the deportations many of their people would survive. It is not clear how much the bribes the SS wanted were for personal use after the war, but most seem to have been on orders from Berlin to assist the flagging German war effort. There was little support for the Jewish efforts from outside, even from other Jews—not much easy money, reluctance to give war equipment to the enemy, doubts about the practicality and sincerity of large-scale real emigration in wartime. (Australia claimed shipping shortages.) Jewish leaders scrounged what they could from local Jewish wealth and tried to have the rich subsidise the poor.

In the end, even Himmler decided to befriend the Jews and called the Holocaust off, as he manoeuvred to succeed Hitler and negotiate with the allies. His admirer, protege and career contortionist Becher went even better. He also reinvented himself as a friend of the Jews, Eichmann’s redoubtable enemy, and gave prosecution evidence at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals. He became an eminent, charming and very rich German businessman until he died in 1995, the source of his original capital of much interest.

Anna Porter was herself born in wartime Budapest. She emigrated with her mother to New Zealand after the 1956 uprising and later moved to Canada, where she is an author and publisher. Her book draws on an enormous volume of sources, including interviews with survivors and their friends and descendants. It is built around the personality of Kasztner, in pre-war Hungary a debonair lawyer, journalist and budding politician, and particularly the escape to Switzerland he organised for a trainload of 1684 Jews. He negotiated for another 20,000 to be kept “on ice” for a deposit of $100 each. But it was his fate, after emigrating to Israel after the war, to become unwittingly embroiled in local bitterness over “collaboration” with the Nazis. In 1957 extremists shot him.

Though Kasztner was an important figure in all these events, I felt that the two themes of his activity and the wider picture often became entangled, as if Anna Porter had started off with another Schindler’s Ark in mind. The tail wagged the dog a bit. It might have worked even better as a straightforward, highly readable account of the Hungarian Holocaust.