The history of the Holocaust runs fathomless with tales of personal tragedy. Yet few remain more dramatic - or more contentious - than the story of Reszo Kasztner, the heroic Hungarian Jew who tried to negotiate directly with the Nazis to save a half million of his people from the gas chambers.
Kasztner ultimately failed in most of his grand ambition. But he did succeed in helping save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews, only to be accused in the post war years of being a villainous collaborator. .
Kasztner - and his brutal murder on the streets of Tel Aviv 12 years after the Holocaust had ended - are the subjects of a remarkable new film by prize winning New York documentary director, Gaylen Ross. Entitled " Killing Kasztner, the Jew Who Dealt with Nazis", the 116 minute film won rave reviews in Israel where it was dubbed as "one of the ten best films of the year", and again at the Toronto Film Festival.
It will have a special American premiere at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York on October 20 at 7:00 pm, then begins a national run on October 23 at New York's Cinema Village (22 East 12th Street) .
Reszo Kasztner was a dashing Budapest journalist, a Zionist leader who became active in Jewish community affairs. He faced a horrible dilemna. The Nazis had invaded Hungary in 1944. Europe's last intact Jewish community was scheduled to be the next victim of the Final Solution. Murder-mastermind Adolf Eichmann had already set up shop in Budapest and was wasting no time in preparing to pack Hungarian Jews into Auschwitz bound cattle cars.
Kasztner entered into a bizarre "blood for wares" negotiation with Eichmann himself. Hitler's war machine was deep in trouble. In exchange for $10 million in cash and 10,000 trucks ("for use only on the Eastern Front"), Eichmann promised he would halt the Hungarian killings.
Predictably, Kasztner failed to get Anglo-American backing for the scheme. But he gambled for time and ultimately raised a multimillion- dollar ransom of gold, jewelry, diamonds and cash that did buy tens of thousands of Jewish lives. Among them: 1,684 Jews who boarded a train in Budapest that finally reached the safety of Switzerland. A Jewish community committee chose those who made it to freedom . They included some members of Kasztner's own family (though not him). For the most part, the passengers were a representative range of the Hungarian Jewish community, from ultra orthodox rabbis to secular scholars, from some of the wealthy and prominent who'd supplied the ransom to workers and penniless members of Zionist and socialist youth groups.
It was the only incident during the Nazi slaughter when the Germans allowed any Jews to escape.
To those he saved and their descendants, Kasztner became a hero, a Jewish Oskar Schindler who made a difficult but responsible moral choice. To others, especially those whose families were not chosen to be saved, Kasztner became an unforgivable villain, a man who played God, consorted with the devil and actually caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews by withholding crucial information from the general public about the Auschwitz death camp .
Accused after the war of being a collaborator by another Hungarian Jew, he was the center of a tendentious libel trial that rocked Israel during the early 1950s and eventually was gunned down in Tel Aviv by a man convinced Kasztner had betrayed his own people.
But had he? For more than 50 years, there has been little or no discussion of Kasztner. While Schindler, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg and others became icons of righteousness for their role in saving Jewish lives, Kasztner was almost a taboo subject. His work was unmentioned in Israeli textbooks. Holocaust museums paid scant if any attention to him. When his name was raised, it triggered rage and bitter debate. Indeed, in "The Final Days," Steven Spielberg's Academy Award-winning documentary about the Hungarian Holocaust, Kasztner's name is never heard, his face never seen,
Was Rezso Kasztner a heroic rescuer of his people or a cold-blooded rogue collaborating with its worst enemies? Through reenactments of his politicized trial, accusations after 50 years by Kasztner's assassin, Ze'ev Eckstein, that there was a conspiracy, and a stunning confrontation between the now free killer and Kasztner's daughter, audiences can finally judge this forgotten man for themselves.
Not to be missed!
To view the film's trailer, click here: http://www.killingkasztner.com
