On Trial

To the proud, nationalistic Jews of Israel, it is not pleasant to have to recall a time, only too recent, when survival itself depended on the capricious favor of hated oppressors. Yet many a transplanted European in Israel remembers well the days of Nazi power when his life and welfare hinged on the diplomatic skill of a stadlan (fixer), some fellow Jew either tactful, suave, or thick-skinned enough to curry favor with the enemy and thus win a measure of reprieve for his people. That memory, stirred by a court trial, agitated all Israel last week and brought down the Cabinet.

Young Rudolf Kastner had been a fixer in a small Hungarian town. When Admiral Horthy capitulated to Hitler in 1944, Kastner was head of Budapest's Jewish Rescue Committee. Soon after the Nazis took over, Kastner and some of his colleagues were called before Karl Eichmann, a top Nazi official, to listen to a proposition. "I want to do business," Eichmann told them. "Blood for goods, goods for blood. I am willing to sell one million Jews for ten thousand trucks, a thousand cans of coffee and tea and some soap. Go to Switzerland, Turkey, Spain--go where you will, but bring me back goods."

As Kastner and his friends pondered this dreadful bargain, the hostages in the case--Hungary's million-odd Jews--were rounded up at the rate of 12,000 a day and herded off to "labor camps" to wait their fate. The bargain was never consummated. Kastner's contacts overseas (one of them, Moshe Sharett, is now Israel's Prime Minister) told him to make a noncommittal answer and keep bargaining. Day after day as the bargainers waited through the spring and summer of 1944, packjammed trainloads of Jews chugged through the pleasant green Hungarian countryside to the camp at Auschwitz, where, instead of being set to forced labor, the prisoners were herded naked into gas chambers, killed and cremated.

A Day or Two. Among the more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews who died that year in Auschwitz' deadly shower rooms were 52 members of the family of Malchiel Greenwald. Malchiel himself managed to escape, found his way to Palestine, and cast his lot and his hopes for the future with the Irgun Zwei Leumi, the party that fought with the fiercest zeal against the British for Israel nationalism. But uppermost in Malchiel's mind was the fate that had befallen his relatives in Hungary. A bent, grief-stricken man in his 70s, he set himself the task of finding out who had betrayed them. Last year, after poring through mountains of yellowed records, he pointed the finger of blame at Rudolf (now Israel) Kastner, by then a citizen of Israel himself, a promising politico in the Mapai Party and an assistant to Cabinet Minister Dov Joseph.

Kastner ignored Greenwald's accusation, but the Mapai Party chiefs, eager to scotch any gossip, confidently haled Greenwald into court on a charge of criminal libel. When Greenwald's trial began more than a year ago, few Israelis expected that it would last more than a day or two, or that it would result in anything more than a nominal fine. Kastner, who had already resigned from government service to become a newspaper editor, readily admitted his dealings with the Nazi, Karl Eichmann, but, he added: "I was simply doing all I could to save my people." At the end of five days, the evidence was so much in Kastner's favor that the court asked Greenwald if he would like to change his plea to "guilty." The answer was a stubborn no.

How to Know? From then on, Greenwald's lawyer, Schmuel Tamir, an ardent ex-Irgunist who has never forgiven the Jewish Agency's wartime partnership with the British, pressed his client's case remorselessly over ten long months of testimony, drawing from witness after witness a tale of terror, tragedy and betrayal. At the end of twelve days under crossexamination, Kastner himself broke down in sobs.

As the trial wore on, Kastner not Greenwald became the defendant. Like a heavy stone cast into still waters, the trial's revelations ruffled the surface of Jewish unity with ever-widening circles of doubt. Last week, in the wake of these revelations of a time before the nation was even born, the government of Moshe Sharett resigned, only to be reorganized in a new atmosphere of bitterness and distrust; and the evidence itself was hashed over again and again, wherever the Jews of Israel gathered together. "How would I have behaved if I had stayed in Hungary until the Nazis came?" asked one young schoolteacher. "Would I have been stronger than Kastner?" "How are we to know?" said another. "How are we to judge?"

A Terrible Obligation. One of the questions posed by Lawyer Tamir during the trial was whether Kastner himself knew at the time the real fate that awaited the Jews bound for Auschwitz. Had they been aware that death was to be their certain lot in the early days of the terror, the defense held, the Jews of Hungary might have revolted instead of submitting meekly to the "labor camp" myth. Hungary's ghettos were poorly guarded, and any attempt to make a break for the Rumanian border might well have succeeded. Kastner had told his people nothing; and when two parachutists were dropped into Hungary by the British to help organize a revolt among the Jews, Kastner persuaded them to surrender to the Nazis. For all this time Kastner had dangling before him a Nazi promise to deport one trainload of 600 Hungarian Jews (including 19 members of his own family and 300 from his home town of Cluj) to the safety of Switzerland. But what was the price of the salvation of those 600? "It was done," shouted one witness, "solely in order to put Kastner under a terrible obligation, tying him inescapably to the Nazis and forcing him to collaborate in the greater plan of total extermination." "Don't forget," pleaded Kastner, "I saved lives that otherwise would have been snuffed out."

"The fact that Kastner was an intimate of the Nazis makes him worthy of the profoundest pity." said the government's lawyer, "since it shows to what limits he was prepared to go to prostrate himself for his people. Kastner could not have called himself a man if he had not favored his friends and relatives on the rescue train. Everyone acts to save his loved ones first. He who denies this is a hypocrite." Defense Attorney Tamir saw it differently. "You began as an ambitious leader," he shouted at Kastner, "and ended up as a Nazi agent."

The Few & the Many. By the time the trial was done, all the old rifts in Zionist Jewry, the rifts between Left and Right, moderation and extremism, Irgunist nationalism and Mapai Socialism, were rent wide open again. Fortnight ago, the trial judge found Greenwald guilty on one count--that of falsely accusing Kastner of sharing Nazi profits--and fined him one Israeli pound (52-c-).

But the court found Kastner even more guilty. "When he accepted the Nazi offer to save 600 Jewish souls," said the judge, "Kastner sold his soul to the devil. Masses were sacrificed for the sake of a few. He broke his trust with Jewry. That was collaboration in the fullest sense of the word." Among the wider jury of Israel's people, the balance between the few and the many was not so easily struck. The violence of the judge's remarks redounded in a certain sympathy for Kastner. Last week, going back and forth to work in a closed car, he had become a recluse, living with his wife and child in what he calls a loneliness "blacker than night, darker than hell."

"Malchiel Greenwald," said one Israeli, "may have satisfied his own doubt, but he has raised bitter doubts in the heart of every other survivor of the gas chambers."

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