THE SPINE OCTOBER 27, 2009
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You probably don't know who Rudolf Kasztner was. But, actually, I've know about him since I was a teenager. Was he a Jewish hero? Or was he a traitor to the Jews? I can still hear the familiar piercing locutions of my parents' bad marriage, fought out over politics, Jewish politics, daily, unrelenting, almost viperous.
My mother was for him, this Dr. Kasztner who in the late days of the Second World War, while 12,000 Hungarian Jews a day were being gassed almost rhythmically in the crematoria, bribed Nazi officers to release a train with some 1,600 otherwise also doomed men, women and children to their new destination: freedom. Actually, Switzerland.
My father thought Kasztner a recreant. To my father, the choice of "which Jews?" and "why?" were the questions that could never be put to rest. And, at our dinner table, they never were.
The rescue taunted the Jews of the West and of Palestine. If this one was feasible, why not others?
And it also played against the model anointed by history. The many small insurrections that saved some people's lives, like the Bielski brothers' partisan operation evoked in Edward Zwick's actually dazzling film Defiance; the others, many others, that started in fated failure and ended in a glory that was only of the grave. Like the Warsaw Ghetto.
The cash nexus of liberation could not be denied. It was, after all, a ransom.
Who were among the chosen? First of all, the 150-odd rich. They would pay also for the others.
Dr. Kasztner's family.
Perhaps also some friends.
A few Jewish leaders.
But the bulk were ordinary Israelites among whom were many orphans, now grown up and showing palpably what the Nazis took from the world.
Oh, yes, plus the "sainted" Satmar rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum (now with the redeemer...or not), who says in the hearing of this film that he and his epigones were saved "by God." The Satmar are the smuggest and most dogmatic of the Hassidic communities, certainly the most virulently anti-Zionist. If you think you're supporting some cuddly old Jews when you buy your computers and photo equipment at B&H Photo Video, the largest such store in the United States, believe me, you're not. These are claustrophobes.
Did I say a film?
Indeed, I did. Now showing at New York's Cinema Village and very appropriate for any morally serious audience, it is actually a searing documentary by Gaylen Ross. Called Killing Kasztner, it focuses on Dr. Kasztner's killer, a messed up man of first right wing ideological fantasies and now not-so-right wing ones. But this riveting, intellectually articulate fanatic is at the center of the whole Kasztner controversy that raged through Israel (and through Jewry) during the early fifties. Until, that is, the rescuer of 1,600 Jews was assassinated by a Jewish nationalist in the Jewish state after the government had insisted that Kasztner file a libel suit against one of his besmirchers.
Libel suits are dangerous for people who are in the public eye and where the issues behind case are combustible. Take Alger Hiss. I happen to have known the government lawyer who pushed the rescuer into the role of plaintiff. When I knew him, the attorney was an Israeli Supreme Court justice, Haim Cohn, who had a reputation for learning, for sanctity, for wisdom. Actually, he was a pompous ass who couldn't see a different fact anywhere if he had an illusion.
I suppose people who know the Israeli landscape will get a bit more out of the documentary, given that many of the characters involved were celebrities and other sorts of degrading public persons.
But this is a movie so philosophically contentious, also in the abstract, that anyone who ponders well will want to ponder here.
Jewish wisdom says that "he who saves one soul, it is as if he has saved the whole world." That's where I stand--with my long deceased mother, actually--on this movie, the intricacies of Kasztner's whole history notwithstanding. Including, by the way, having signed affidavits for Nazi officers, who had helped in this great humane drama, seeking clemency from post-war justice.
I have said nothing about how Israelis treated Kasztner's children. They treated them horribly. Even many of those who had been rescued were stigmatized.
A little argument broke out in the theatre after the movie ended.
10 comments
"You probably don't know who Rudolf Kasztner was. But, actually, I've know about him since I was a teenager. Was he a Jewish hero? Or was he a traitor to the Jews? I can still hear the familiar piercing locutions of my parents' bad marriage, fought out over politics, Jewish politics, daily, unrelenting, almost viperous." I too knew about him when I was a teenager. My reaction wasn't as absolute as either your mother's (she approved of him) view, or your fathers (codemnation). I felt that I had no right to judge him. The Jews I judged most harshly were those who like the New York Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, didn't allow articles about the plight of Jews in Nazi Europe in his paper worked tirelessly to get his own family out of Nazi Germany. I have never understood why the Jewish community hadn't condemned him more vociferously.
- jacksondyer
October 27, 2009 at 8:20pm
"Oh, yes, plus the "sainted" Satmar rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum (now with the redeemer...or not), who says in the hearing of this film that he and his epigones were saved "by God."" I didn't know that Teitelbaum was rescued by Kasztner. What a shocker!
- amidut
October 27, 2009 at 8:57pm
A couple of years ago I watched a 4-hour well-done docudrama produced by Israel Broadcast Authority (I think) about the trial and story of Rudolf Kastner, based on court records and contemporary press coverage. This was an attempted recreation of the trial that had shaken Israel in 1954 and exposed the weaknesses of Ben-Gurion's ability to deal with the subject of the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors in Israel. Much has been written yet the fog of that "grey zone" has hardly been cleared away. The more I read the drearier becomes that benighted time for the Jewish people. The TV drama manages to touch upon the many aspects of this sliver of history, provoking not emotion but thought. http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/19.1/luban.html It's kind of ironic how the evil of the Nazis, because it is so ungraspable by the standards of our own ethical rules, is simply shunted aside. Whatever evil is discussed and scrutinized, if evil it be, is that of harm, arrogance, lust, greed, power, pity, family, the stuff of human fallibility that the human mind can actually understand, relate to. One of the most chilling testimonies in the trial was that of Joel Brand, which demonstrated the ineffectual fumbling attempts by the Jewish Hungarian Leadership to help save some Jews in 1944, the impotence of the Jewish Agency when it came to mobilizing the British and American powers to intervene in any way on behalf of the doomed Jews, and the shrunken moral universe which the Nazis erected around the Jews where moral choices were shaven to their bare bones: "Brand later testified that Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East and a close friend of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was present during one of the interrogations and is alleged to have said: "What can I do with this million Jews? Where can I put them?" Lord Moyne was assassinated in Cairo a few months later on November 6, 1944 by Eliyahu Bet-Zuri and Eliyahu Hakim of the Lehi (Stern Gang). Ben Hecht writes that Ehud Avriel, the Jewish Agency official who had accompanied Brand to Aleppo and had assured him the British would not arrest him, insisted that it was not Lord Moyne who had said this, and asked Brand not to repeat Moyne's name in Brand's autobiography, Advocate for the Dead. However, Brand repeated under oath during Eichmann's trial that it was Lord Moyne who had said it." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Brand Lord Moyne's feeble dismissal of one million Jews echoes Canada's pre-war policy of refusing to accept any Jewish refugees from Europe: "none is too many". Except that in Canada's case, the more charitable might attribute this indifference to disbelief that actual harm may befall the European Jews. Moyne's retort comes in 1944, when reports of the mass extermination of the Jews have already filtered through and spread into public awareness. It's frightening how the obvious answer to that question was not readily available to Moyne's mind. The fact is, it was the kind of war which left decent people bereft of any of the usual tools we use to maintain our decency. No options were there that could be taken without harming other human beings, in some other way. Impossible, actually, for any mind to contain the magnitude of the evil that ruled this planet during those years. We speak and can comprehend a chain of compassion. We cannot understand the depths of that malevolence which created a chain of damages, of snowballing human debasement.
- noga1
October 27, 2009 at 9:12pm
mp: I can still hear the familiar piercing locutions of my parents' bad marriage, fought out over politics, Jewish politics, daily, unrelenting, almost viperous. gw: See what I mean about the existential links in the chain we lug around in reacting to the world around us? The present and the past intertwined such that predicting the future is always just a crapshoot. And that's just on the level of the individual. Put lots and lots and lots of individuals together, all with different sets of existential links, and human behavior can sink down into a malesrom of mental, emotional and psychological tendencies that only a naive fool would imagine are amenable to "yes", "no"...."either","or". mp: To my father, the choice of "which Jews?" and "why?" were the questions that could never be put to rest. And, at our dinner table, they never were. gw: No, and they never will. That's why so many invent political and moral narratives that do put them to rest. Some on the side of the Jews and the Zionists, others on the side of the Palestinians and Islamists. A few may even become hopelessly interwoven into both. The more sophisticated, in other words. But once Whole Truths are established, Jews may even kill Jews and Muslims may even kill Muslims over them. The sad paradox being that hatred of Them can often pale next to the hatred for one of Us who does not hate one of Them in the Right Way. Or, even worse, acts out the Wrong Way with the Wrong Behaviors. george walton d/a
- iambiguous
October 27, 2009 at 9:24pm
The creep Walton keeps posting the same crap on every thread. he does it to tell himself he is alive and active. he is wrong his posts show that he is on life support.
- jacksondyer
October 27, 2009 at 9:30pm
Interestingly, Kasztner and the bargain he made along with Brandt is mentioned in the book trashed by Ruth Franklin, "The Kindly Ones" (spelled "Kastner" there), as well as his assassination by a Jewish extremist in Israel in 1957. Ed Koch has a review of the movie over at The Atlantic, as well as a clip of the trailer. I will definitely watch as soon as I can.
- rlgordonma
October 27, 2009 at 10:57pm
«Put lots and lots and lots of individuals together, all with different sets of existential links, and human behavior can sink down into a malesrom of mental, emotional and psychological tendencies that only a naive fool would imagine are amenable to "yes", "no"...."either","or".» I don't undestand this. The case is not "putting lots and lots... etc.". The case is a specific action: to pay an enormous amount of money (part of it, probably used in killing Jews) to the perpetrators of the genocide of Jews in order to save 1600 Jews. The one who decides has to say "yes", "no" or "either" (more money for more people, for instance). The one who judges has to say that's acceptable, not acceptable or either (acceptable under the absurd circumstances at stake but not acceptable in general). What's the remark about "naive foolishness" about?
- luispc
October 28, 2009 at 1:29pm
Ed Koch's review, here; http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/ed_koch/2009/10/kasztner_makes_an_impact_once_again.php
- noga1
October 28, 2009 at 1:59pm
george walton's vacuous intervention in this topic proves once again that he has zero knowledge of history or the subject about which he deigns to opine. I'm willing to bet this is the first time he heard about Kastner and it is very clear from his comment that he never even made any attempt to inform himself as to what Marty is actually talking about. What does this mean "But once Whole Truths are established, Jews may even kill Jews and Muslims may even kill Muslims over them. The sad paradox being that hatred of Them can often pale next to the hatred for one of Us who does not hate one of Them in the Right Way. Or, even worse, acts out the Wrong Way with the Wrong Behaviors." in the context of Marty's post? george doesn't know but george feels no unease about erecting a whole building upon something that he vaguely assumes he understood about the facts of this case. george is emerging as a crude, simple minded subject conditioned to believe anything and everything about Jews. He would be one of those European medieval townspeople who, upon learning of a murder of a child would not lose a moment's hesitation in placing the blame where it belongs...
- noga1
October 28, 2009 at 2:29pm
I haven't seen the film. But in Peretz's post, the focus is on trying to reconcile the moral paradox of Kastner's deliberate actions that saved some from murder by the Nazis to his deliberate inaction that could have warned and (perhaps have saved?) others, but possibly at the cost of the lives of those he could save. The whole incident highlights the exceptional cruelty, cynicism, and cupidity of the Nazis in creating such a sadistic paradox. But what of Kastner writing those testimonial letters for SS officers involved in the "transaction" after the war?
- malahat
October 28, 2009 at 5:36pm