"Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis," a new documentary, portrays filmmaker Gaylen Ross' attempt to understand why Reszo (Rudolf) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jewish leader who saved more than 1,600 people in war-time Budapest -- more than Oskar Schindler -- on the so-called Kasztner train, remains so controversial to this day.
In the course of the film, Ross tells several interrelated stories, including that of Kasztner's rescue efforts during the Holocaust, as well as the stories of his life in Israel, his infamous libel trial (Kasztner was accused of collaborating with the Nazis) and his 1957 assassination by Ze'ev Eckstein, a right-wing Israeli nationalist. Finally the various threads are brought together as Kasztner's daughter meets with her father's murderer and Israel's Yad Vashem acknowledges the importance of Kasztner's rescue efforts, and accepts the Kasztner archive as part of its collection.
Kasztner has been faulted on many counts: for whom he saved and how he chose them (even though Kasztner personally chose very few of the train's passengers, he did put his wife and 19 of his relatives on the train). For how he saved them -- by negotiating with Eichmann and other German officials.
And, finally, for not saving more people -- 600,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered during that time, at one point as many as 12,000 a day, and although Kasztner had received Rudolf Vrba's report on Auschwitz and the Nazi plans for the extermination of Hungarian Jewry, among the accusations made against Kasztner was that he did not sufficiently inform Hungarian Jewry of the report or its contents (a charge he disputed at his Israeli trial).
Kasztner is accused of allowing a few to live so that the others would go to their deaths without protest. As one of Kasztner's daughters asks: "Why Kasztner? Why is Kasztner blamed for everything?"
The emotion Kasztner provokes to this day is striking. It's as if those Jews who survived and those whose relatives were killed have displaced their anger at the Nazis and their own guilt feelings, both for surviving and for not saving others, onto Kasztner.
My father, Bruce Teicholz, knew Kasztner. They met in Budapest shortly after my father's arrival there in early 1942 as a Polish refugee. Kasztner was co-head of the Hungarian Jewish Rescue Committee, my father was co-head of the Polish Jewish Rescue Committee, both of which helped refugees. When the Nazis arrived in Budapest, Joel Brand and Kasztner were the ones to negotiate with Eichmann. My father went underground, leading a group of forgers, couriers, smugglers and fighters who worked with Brand and his wife, Hansi.
My father, who died in 1993, defended Kasztner, believing, as the Supreme Court of Israel would come to conclude, that in impossible circumstances Kasztner did what he could and that lives were saved. "The thing you have to understand about Kasztner," my father used to say, "is that he was a lawyer." By which he meant that although Kasztner was never a practicing attorney, his instinct was to negotiate.
