Kasztner was ambivalent about the prospect of a trial in which he would be the central focus.82 He saw the wisdom of ignoring Grunwald’s insults, but he didn’t want to resign his position and he wanted to fight back. Moreover, Kasztner, who always loved the limelight, assumed that the trial would “shine a light on his actions” and win him the recognition he felt he deserved. So finally he agreed to fight Grunwald, and the government filed criminal libel charges against Grunwald.83
The trial proved to be an unmitigated disaster for Kasztner.
Grunwald’s newsletter rant had been a confused jumble of charges, but the trial judge organized them into four potential instances of libel: that Kasztner had (1) collaborated with the Nazis; (2) worked to save his own relatives and a few elite Jews while leaving the masses to die; (3) stolen money intended for rescue operations; and (4) helped Becher evade justice after the war.
The trial lasted for months and there were scores of witnesses. A good deal of the testimony focused on May 3, 1944—the day Kasztner had spent talking with the Jewish leadership in his hometown of Cluj. At issue was what Kasztner had said in those discussions. Did he simply tell the Jews about the train, or did he also warn them of the danger of deportation?
Although Grunwald was technically the defendant in the case, he had a brilliant right-wing lawyer who successfully turned the trial into an indictment of Kasztner—and by extension, of the entire Israeli political establishment for its failure to do more during World War II to save European Jewry.
In 1955, Judge Benjamin Halevi delivered a 240-page judgment that has been called “one of the most heartless in the history of Israel, perhaps the most heartless ever.”84 The judge not only cleared Grunwald of all but one of the libel charges,85 but he took the opportunity to condemn Kasztner for having actively colluded in the Holocaust.86 In the judge’s view, Kasztner had known full well about the Nazis’ extermination plans but had deliberately withheld this knowledge from the Jewish masses. Indeed, the judge found that Kasztner had made a deal with the Nazis, a quid pro quo: in order to save a small number of privileged Jews—the Kasztner train—Kasztner had agreed not to warn the larger Jewish community of the true danger they were in. The judge framed this deal as a contract in which Kasztner and the Nazis had exchanged promises,87 with Kasztner agreeing not to warn “so that the deportations could proceed without encountering panic or resistance.” In essence, the judge held Kasztner responsible for the fact that some half million Hungarian Jews had gone passively to their deaths, never knowing they were bound for Auschwitz. The judge ended by drawing on two literary metaphors—he compared the Nazis’ release of Kasztner’s train to the idea of Greeks bearing gifts (the Trojan Horse) and Kasztner’s deal with Eichmann to the legend of Faust, stating that Kasztner had “sold his soul to Satan.”88
As I see it, the judge’s opinion was not only heartless, but gratuitous. The judge could have spared Grunwald from a criminal conviction, on the grounds that the essential facts could not be established “beyond a reasonable doubt.” He did not have to cruelly demonize Kasztner. Much of the judge’s opinion is overblown, rhetorical nonsense. The Nazis, not Kasztner, were responsible for rounding up and slaughtering Hungary’s Jews. Nothing Kasztner could have done would have saved most of those who perished. Moreover, I find it stunning that the judge blamed Kasztner alone and said nothing to condemn the behavior of the leaders of the Jewish council (“Judenrat”) in Cluj. There was a great deal of testimony at the trial suggesting that these leaders urged people to cooperate with the SS and to board the Nazi trains. They were not encouraging people to flee. Moreover, some of these leaders, including Kasztner’s father-in-law, probably suspected that these trains might be headed for an extermination camp.
So what explains the vicious nature of this opinion?
In part, the opinion reflects the broader attitudes in Israel in the 1950s. The Holocaust had traumatized the Jewish world. The slaughter of six million Jews raised profoundly troubling questions. How did the Holocaust happen? Why had so little been done to prevent it? Why had so many Jews died without putting up a fight? Israel, a fledgling state surrounded by hostile Arab armies, was creating a new identity as a nation of warriors who would fight for their survival. Kasztner, by contrast, could be portrayed as the old-style Jew of Europe, who would haggle and make concessions rather than take a stand.89 As one scholar writes:
[T]he Jews who had settled in Palestine before the war and watched the Holocaust from a safe distance felt impatient with the Jews of Europe who had allowed the Nazis to drive them “like lambs to the slaughter” while the survivors from Europe, in their turn, struggled to get over the loss of their loved ones and their own sufferings. In addition, there was guilt—on one side from failing to give help when it was needed, on the other side for surviving when so many died.90
Regrettably, Kasztner also played a role in his own destruction. Early in the trial, he was his usual self-confident self, swaggering and strutting, enjoying being the center of attention.91 But under cross-examination he was asked whether he had testified in Becher’s favor after the war. He denied it. When his affidavit on Becher’s behalf was introduced into evidence, he was caught in the trap.92 That lie, and a few others, destroyed Kasztner’s credibility in the judge’s eyes on issues far more central to the case. As a result, many historians believe, the judge lost all sympathy for Kasztner’s predicament.93
The impact of the ruling on Kasztner and his family was devastating. “Their block of flats was daubed with graffiti saying ‘Kasztner is a murderer’ and worse.”94 There were death threats. There was also political fallout. The Mapai party was tarnished, its coalition government lost its majority, and new elections were called. Kasztner was advised to leave the country until things calmed down, but he issued a defiant statement: “History and all those who know what really happened during those woeful times will bear witness for me. … I will do everything in my power to clear my name and regain my honour.”95
The third tribunal to judge him was the Israeli Supreme Court, which reviewed the case on appeal. In 1958, the Supreme Court reversed—with a four-to-one majority—the trial court’s judgment and resoundingly cleared Kasztner of collaboration with the Nazis and complicity in mass murder.96 The majority opinion, written by Justice Shimon Agranat, criticized the trial judge for evaluating Kasztner’s actions with the benefit of hindsight. The court held that Kasztner: (1) did not know for certain what the fate of the Jews not selected for the rescue train would be; and (2) had reason to hope that many more might be saved through negotiations.
Agranat’s opinion was also rich with commentary. He affirmed that Kasztner’s sole intention had been to save the Jews of Hungary. Although the train was only meant for a small group, this “was just part of his goal and never became for him an exclusive objective.” (The judge noted in passing that Kasztner also provided money and resources to help others not on the train escape Hungary.) Moreover, the judge wrote, Kasztner did not negotiate with Eichmann as an equal. To the contrary, Eichmann held life-and-death power over Kasztner, who behaved reasonably as a Jewish leader under the circumstances. Agranat described Kasztner as a leader with no real power who was forced to make on-the-spot decisions under conditions of extreme pressure and great uncertainty. Against such odds, Agranat wrote, “God forbid us to regard Kasztner as guilty.”
This ruling should have been a vindication for Kasztner, and in some ways it was. But he did not live long enough to know that his honor had been restored. While the appeal was pending, on the evening of March 3, 1957, a member of a radical Jewish underground movement approached him outside his home and shot him at close range. Although he survived for eight days, he died in the hospital.
Eichmann was tried, convicted, and hanged in Israel in 1962.
Becher was never convicted of any war crimes. He prospered in postwar Bremen, Germany, and died a rich old man in 1995—nearly forty years after Kasztner’s assassination.
Assessment
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What are my own thoughts about this case? Was Kasztner wise to negotiate with the Nazis? I approach this task with reticence. Attempting to assess decisions made in such dark times is treacherous. Primo Levi, himself a Holocaust survivor and a renowned Italian author, eloquently warned that those who haven’t lived in such times have difficulty grasping what life was like in what he called this “Grey Zone.”97
I am not critical of Kasztner’s initial decision to negotiate with the Nazis. Wisliceny’s first response to the Relief and Rescue Committee proposal was promising. But it was hardly reliable. Like Spock, I believe it would have been wiser for Kasztner and his colleagues to begin to develop a Plan B as well—to make every effort to warn the Jews in the provinces to go into hiding or flee. Such a mixed strategy would have been optimal.
What of Kasztner’s decisions in Cluj on May 3, when he obtained new information? He learned that Wisliceny’s earlier promises were worthless and that Eichmann was in charge. He also learned that the Nazis were beginning to round up provincial Jews and that in all probability this was a prelude to mass deportations to Auschwitz.
This information demanded two decisions.
One was whether to continue negotiating with the Nazis, despite their lies. Kasztner decided to continue, and I don’t quarrel with that. I agree that the negotiation track was still worth pursuing.
The second decision was whether to spread the alarm among the Jews of Cluj. We will never know for certain what Kasztner said or did. At the trial he testified that he issued a warning.98 If he was telling the truth, I have no real complaint, since he would have done what wisdom required. But his testimony was contradicted by several Cluj witnesses at the trial who testified that they were unaware of the dangers of ghettoization and deportation.99 The trial court found these witnesses more credible than Kasztner, and the Israeli Supreme Court did not reverse the trial court’s findings on this factual point.100 On balance, I am skeptical about Kasztner’s testimony that he issued warnings during his visit to Cluj. My best guess is that he and his colleagues didn’t pursue a mixed strategy, either on May 3 or in the weeks that followed.
But even if he had warned, would it have made any difference? Would it have saved more lives?
Some commentators suggest the answer is no: that what Kasztner knew about the danger facing Hungary’s Jews, nearly everybody knew.101 Additional warnings would have made no difference in people’s behavior.
I don’t buy the first part of this argument. Kasztner knew more—much more—about the danger than most Jews in Hungary. He knew with certainty that Auschwitz was an extermination camp, not simply a labor camp, and that there was a substantial possibility that many Hungarian Jews would be deported there—to be murdered, not to work. Other Hungarian Jews, especially in the provinces, did not know these things with certainty. They may have heard that many Polish Jews had been killed by the Nazis, but they knew far less than Kasztner about Nazi procedures with regard to trains and deportation.
Would strong warnings have saved additional lives? I believe that if Kasztner and his colleagues had acted early enough—in May 1944, just as the ghettoization process was beginning in the provinces—Plan B might have saved additional lives.102 How many? We will never know, and certainly Kasztner could not have known at the time. And that is my point. When one is negotiating under conditions of such terrible uncertainty, it is wiser to bet on two horses, if possible, than one.
Why didn’t they pursue a mixed strategy? I am sure many factors were at work. As Kasztner wrote later, events happened too fast. There wasn’t an efficient mechanism to “spread the alarm” in any systematic way through the provinces. He was probably being carefully watched by the Nazis. Anything he said, especially in Cluj, to disrupt the deportation could be reported back to Nazi headquarters in Budapest.
As I see it, on May 3 Kasztner was in a very complicated and somewhat compromised position. On the one hand, he wanted to encourage some number of people from Cluj to accept the invitation to be on his rescue train. To do so, he had every incentive to make sure they understood the danger of not joining his train. On the other hand, he obviously realized that only a small number could be accommodated, at least on this initial train. He may have (wrongly, in my view) emphasized his hope that there would be many more trains and that maybe the “big deal” would be accomplished.
I suspect there was another factor: Kasztner’s love of danger and intrigue and being at the center of the action. He was like a riverboat gambler who was willing to take chances, and who probably thought of himself as rationally calculating the opportunities and risks of various “bets.” Indeed, he often described his activities in terms of gambling—roulette, poker, etc. In assessing the costs and benefits of alternative strategies, how realistic was Kasztner?
Kasztner didn’t fall into any of the negative traps I discussed in chapter 3. He was always prepared to negotiate with the Nazis, and he had no illusions about the regime being evil. And he was far too cynical to fall into the “positive” traps that push people into negotiating when they shouldn’t. But in analyzing the costs and benefits of his alternatives, his apparent failure to pursue a mixed strategy may have been the result of three other common cognitive errors that psychologists suggest can distort decision-making.
1. Kasztner’s primary focus was on the train and on the lives that would be lost if the train project didn’t work. Because of the phenomenon known as “loss aversion,” Kasztner may have given less weight in his decision-making to the number of lives that might have been saved had there been a mixed strategy that encouraged flight, hiding, etc.103
2. The people listed for Kasztner’s train were individual human beings who could be identified. Those who might have been saved with a better warning could not be identified in advance but were instead nameless “statistical lives.” In decision-making, saving a few identified people counts for much more than saving more statistical lives. There is research suggesting that more money will be spent more readily to save an identified worker trapped in a mine than a similar amount on mine safety measures that might save many more (unidentified) miners in the future.104
3. Kasztner may have also fallen into the trap of overconfidence—he may have exaggerated the chances of his own success in pulling off the “blood for goods” negotiation.105
How did Kasztner himself evaluate the prospects that he and Brand could pull off Eichmann’s proposal of exchanging trucks and war materiel for hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives? Certainly, he should have recognized all along that the deal was nearly inconceivable. It would require the full cooperation of the Western Allies. Spock would have ridiculed the notion that somehow World Jewry might persuade the Western Allies—in the middle of a war in which Roosevelt and Churchill had called for “unconditional” German surrender—to allow the Nazis to receive war materiel. It seems highly unlikely that Hitler had any intention of allowing a large number of Jews to escape.106
A better rationale for Kasztner’s negotiation was that it might buy time and slow down the deportations. Abstractly, this is plausible. Why not try? Moreover, I applaud him for shrewdly linking the “small plan” (the train) to the “big plan” (blood for goods), and for his skill in persuading Eichmann to expand the number of Jews allowed on the train.
But as time went on, this second rationale became less and less persuasive. Eichmann flatly refused to stop or slow down the deportations. Boxcars were leaving the provinces daily. In other words, Kasztner’s plan wasn’t working. Yet he refused to give up: he continued to go to Eichmann’s office, smoke cigarettes, tell lies about Brand’s “progress” in Istanbul, and argue that Eichmann should stop the deportations. He never lost his focus or shifted his attention to another strategy. In a sense, his persistence was heroic. In another sense, it was perhaps willful blindness. Did he start to believe his own arguments that World Jewry could pull off the deal?107 Did he fool himself into thinking that if he just talked long enough, he could persuade Eichmann
to stop the deportations? I suspect that he got so caught up in the intensity of the negotiation that he exaggerated its potential, even to himself. He was negotiating with Adolf Eichmann, after all. The scope of the deal was huge. Foreign governments were involved.
When the dream ended, Kasztner was devastated. Porter writes: “When it seemed clear in Budapest that Joel [Brand’s] mission had been a failure, only Hansi managed to remain calm. Rezso wept like a child. She cradled his head in her arms and kept repeating that they could not give up.”108
Kasztner wrote a revealing, nearly contemporaneous letter to a friend on July 12, 1944. He acknowledged that “the dream of a big plan is finished, the hundreds of thousands went to Auschwitz in such a way that they were not conscious until the last moment what it was all about and what was happening. We who did know tried to act against it … without our being able to do anything of importance to prevent it.” He added that “we did not forget the flight to Romania, to Slovakia and attempts at hiding people.” But “the speed of the collapse was so wild that help and actions of succor and rescue could not keep up with it; even thoughts were too slow.”109
This last phrase is especially poignant, for it suggests that in retrospect Kasztner may have felt that he had not thought things through carefully enough—that his “thoughts were too slow.” And whose “dream of a big plan” could he have been referring to, if not his own?
Did Kasztner sell his soul to the Devil? Absolutely not. But he may have been outsmarted. One scholar argues that Eichmann pursued a brilliant strategy that distracted and beguiled not only the Jewish Councils, but Kasztner and the Relief and Rescue Committee as well.110 By dangling bait such as the rescue train, the Nazis raised false hopes and kept the Jewish leaders in a constant state of turmoil. Once there was a train, there was a “list” that had to be drawn up—which created bitter conflicts that consumed and divided the Jewish community. Perhaps Kasztner, too, was drawn in. He thought he was Eichmann’s equal, and this may have blinded him to the fact that he was being toyed with and bought off for a modest price. I am not persuaded that the Nazis were quite as diabolically clever as all that, but I find the argument intriguing.
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