By the end of the trial, Kasztner — who wasn’t even the original defendant — was condemned as a collaborator who “sold his soul to the devil” according to Judge Binyamin Halevi, who exonerated Grunwald in a verdict in 1955. Three years later, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned Halevi’s decision, but Kasztner — who had become a shadow of his confident self during the proceedings — never lived to see it. In March 1957, Kasztner,then 51, was ambushed by Zeev Eckstein, Yosef Menkes, and Dan Shemer in front of his house and mortally wounded. The three attackers — presumed vigilantes who were out to avenge Kasztner’s alleged duplicity — were convicted of murder but released in 1963. It turns out that both Menkes and Eckstein had previous connections to the Shin Bet secret service, which raised suspicions that Kasztner was actually neutralized by government operatives who didn’t want him to reveal information that would cause more damage to Mapai. Both left-wing journalist Uri Avnery and right-wing Herut leader Menachem Begin — on opposite sides of the political spectrum but both foes of Mapai — publically claimed Kasztner was silenced.

Kasztner’s List? In the Israel of the 1950s, there was no shame worse than being a collaborator, of pandering to the enemy, even if it meant saving Jewish lives. Heroes were black and white: the pioneering Jews of Eretz Yisrael building the land with their sweat and blood, or the brave Jews of Europe — forest partisans, underground rebels, or anyone else who picked up a gun and tried to shoot the enemy, not those who went “like sheep to the slaughter.”

But with the breadth of seven decades, heroism has taken on broader hues. Today there’s room in the secular Holocaust narrative to honor the bravery of a mother who wouldn’t abandon her child on the way to the gas chamber, of a young man who gave his starvation rations to his friend to keep him alive another day, and even to honor a “collaborator” who knew he couldn’t save a million Jews, but maybe there was a chance to save 1,600. In an interview with a Dutch journalist published in Life magazine, Adolf Eichmann himself stated that Kasztner “agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation… if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate to Palestine. It was a good bargain.”

Perhaps Kasztner realized it was a good bargain too.Rudolph Kasztner’s checkered past notwithstanding, today there is a renewed interest in revisiting his rescue operation and rehabilitating his name. In 2007 the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum accepted several boxes of his archives and included him in their list of rescuers. Writer Anna Porter compiled a riveting narrative of his controversial rescue work in the book Kasztner’s Train. Kasztner’s granddaughter Merav Michaeli, a popular Israeli radio and television presenter who was elected to the Knesset in 2013, has become outspoken about her grandfather’s heroism and his fearlessness in dealing with the mastermind of the Final Solution.

But there’s probably no one who’s been more influential in rehabilitating Kasztner’s reputation than an American documentary producer named Gaylen Ross. Her riveting 90-minute long DVD documentary entitled Killing Kasztner — until now shown to private Holocaust study groups and broadcast on Holocaust Rememberance Day — is currently available to the public — sold online or through the documentary’s site killingkasztner.com — in honor of this summer’s 70th anniversary of the transport Ross spent eight years on the project, researching, interviewing survivors, and even arranging a meeting between Kasztner’s daughter Zsuzsa — a nurse in Tel Aviv — and Zeev Eckstein, the alleged assassin. “I just knocked on his door and asked if I could speak to him about the project,” she tells Mishpacha, still amazed that Eckstein was willing to cooperate so willingly. In one of the film’s most shocking disclosures, Eckstein reenacts the night of the attack in 1957, and then states that after he fired two shots in Kasztner’s direction, he heard another shot coming from the opposite direction, and only then did Kasztner cry out in pain. Was the “vigilante” murder just a setup? Who else wanted Kasztner dead?..

Ross leaves the question hanging. She doesn’t need to give answers. She wants people to understand why Kasztner, for all the accusations, rumors, and conflicting information, was a tragic figure entangled in a web of political allegiances and aspirations (some of them, admittedly, his own).

Gaylen Ross, whose father is a Holocaust survivor from Lodz, says she grew up in a “pretty assimilated” family in Indiana, but her documentary work began putting her back in touch with her Jewish heritage. Her first documentary was an inside look at New York’s 47th Street diamond district, and although it wasn’t a Jewish documentary per se, “there are so many Jews all over the industry that it was pretty ethnic.” (She’ll never forget what one chassidic dealer told her: “The real gems are in the Torah.”). Her next big project was an exploration of the Swiss banks and lost Holocaust accounts, and that’s what led her to Kasztner. “A woman I interviewed, whose father told her about the accounts he stashed away in Switzerland, was a young Orthodox girl from Munkacz named Alice Fischer. Before they were deported in June 1944, her father arranged for a smuggler to get her to Budapest, where she waited by the train station every day for her family to join her. This was just when people were scrambling to get on the Kasztner transport, and a young Jewish boy spotted her and asked what she was doing there. She told him she was waiting for her family from Munkacz. ‘Munkacz?’ he said. ‘Forget it, they’re already dead.’ So he slapped a Jewish star on her and pushed her onto the Kasztner train.

“At the time, this information was of no value to me, because I’d never even heard of Kasztner,” Gaylen continues. “I was just interested in her bank account. But later, when I was looking for other projects, I started to think about it. How did a young girl get from Hungary to Switzerland?”

Gaylen’s professional contacts and research assistants told her to forget it — too complex, too many rumors. She wasn’t deterred, but what she eventually realized was that the Kasztner transport wasn’t just about rescue, it was about context. She also believes that in the trial, Kasztner was unjustly lumped together with other operatives within the Zionist movement.

“It was already 1944, the Russians were at the border, the Allied invasion was imminent, and until then the Jews of Hungary were somewhat protected. Thousands of refugees poured into Hungary, because everyone knew that if you made it to Hungary, you were safe. So even if the Jews were warned, they really didn’t think anything would happen to them. And then, when the deportations started in March, it was faster than anything in the entire war. Over 400,000 Jews were deported in a few months — they were killing 12,000 a day in Auschwitz.

“What was so hard to understand was how it went so fast, and how the Hungarians seemed so clueless. In fact in Hungary there was a very small German occupying force. The Hungarian gendarmes were the ones who sent the Jews to the ghettos — they didn’t even need the Nazis. So after the war, the Israelis couldn’t understand the Hungarian survivors: Why didn’t they run? Why didn’t they fight back?

“The only image being held up was of the Warsaw Ghetto, of revolt,” Gaylen explains. “According to the Zionists, that was the only legitimate response.”

When Gaylen had her first screening in the US, everyone was asking the same question: Oskar Schindler was no tzaddik either — he was an opportunist and collaborator, in addition to his other vices. So why was he considered a hero for saving 1,000 Jews, and Kasztner condemned for saving 1,684?

“It’s such a good question, because no one condemns Schindler for only saving 1,000 and not saving another million, or even another thousand. In 1944, you saved who you could save. But everyone condemns Kasztner for only saving 1,600 and not saving 400,000. And that he saved his relatives. Well, wouldn’t you save your friends and relatives if you had a transport going out of that hell? Actually, only about 300 of them were people he was affiliated with. The other 1,200 were random, and many went on for free. They say he didn’t warn the rest. But if he had, would they have even believed him?”

Perhaps Kasztner said it best himself in his final statement to the court at the end of the trial: “Within our limited possibilities, we did our best. Compared to the dimensions of the catastrophe, that was very little.”

Under the Rebbe’s Wing “Honestly, I never even met Rudolf Kasztner, but when I heard he was killed, I was very saddened,” remembers Devorah Spira (née Halberstam), who was 18 when she, her sister, and two brothers managed to get onto the transport, thanks to the intervention of the Satmar Rebbe who became her guardian. “It hurt me very much. They claim he didn’t tell the Jews what was happening. He didn’t have to tell. Everyone already knew, but no one wanted to know. When they still could have gotten out, no one wanted to know. My husband [Tzvi Elimelech Spira, who escaped Hungary before the deportations] was already on the run and knew the horrors that awaited them when he entered the shul of a certain village, banged on the bimah and said, ‘Yidden, get out!’ They ignored him. Years later he was in London and met a Yid who recognized him. ‘You were the one who banged on the bimah, and I left. That’s why I’m still alive,’ the man told him.”

Mrs. Spira’s father and grandfather — the Sucha Rav and the Tchekoiver Rav, who was the son of the Divrei Chaim of Sanz — were much admired by the Satmar Rebbe in Hungary who tried unsuccessfully to rescue them from the Bochnia ghetto. They were murdered in a subsequent aktion, but through a series of circumstances which Mrs. Spira can only describe as miraculous, she and her siblings managed to cross several borders and reach Hungary, where they were cared for by the Satmar Rebbe.

One of the main “connectors” who passed information to the refugees was a community activist named Chaim Roth, who was instrumental in raising the sums to cover the tickets of the rabbanim. When Devorah’s young siblings each arrived in Budapest separately, Roth helped them find each other. Now he sought out Devorah with a message from the Satmar Rebbe, who had fled several weeks before to Cluj/Klausenberg, and had been brought back to Budapest for the transport. “Where is the daughter of the Sucha Rav?” the Rebbe asked Chaim Roth. “She must get on the transport with me.”

“Just then I met up with another rav I knew who told me he’d actually purchased two places but decided to back out. At that point no one knew for sure whether we’d actually make it to safety — they told us we were going to Eretz Yisrael, but who really knew? Maybe it was just a ploy to send us to our deaths. ‘I don’t want to willingly go into the mouth of the lion,’ he told me, offering the tickets to me and my sister instead. But what would be with my two brothers? They were eight and ten, yet they were so undernourished they were tiny, and Kasztner had arranged that any child up to age five could get on without a reservation — so my brothers became five-year-old twins.”

The account of the Satmar Rebbe and the Kasztner transport is its own narrative with several variations, but one thing Mrs. Spira is sure of: Joseph Fischer, Kasztner’s father-inlaw and a leading Zionist in Cluj, made sure the Rebbe got on, despite the Rebbe’s known fiery opposition to the Zionists.

“Fischer was a special man who thought very highly of the Rebbe,” she avows. “He didn’t agree with him, but he respected him greatly and often referred to him as ‘a worthy opponent.’ When we were interned in Bergen-Belsen, Joseph Fischer was extremely solicitous of the Rebbe, and was concerned for his health. I remember how he would come up to the Rebbetzin on certain days when he heard the soup was “clean” and would tell the Rebbetzin, ‘today the Rebbe can eat the soup.’ The Rebbe, of course, never ate anything cooked in the camp. He subsisted on some dried food that he brought with him, and there was someone who cooked him one potato every day.”

Years later, the Rebbe himself revealed some details of his relationship with Fischer. Once they were safely in Switzerland, Fischer shared with the Rebbe that his own mother came to him in a dream warning him to make sure to include the Satmar Rebbe on the list — and only then would there be hope of the transport reaching freedom. In fact, Fischer’s mother was a righteous woman and his father was a Torah scholar and the uncle of Rav Yisrael Yaakov Fischer of the Eidah Hachareidis beis din in Jerusalem. (Kasztner’s father too was a religious man; he died of a heart attack on Shvii shel Pesach in 1928, while reading the Torah in shul.)

In the end, Mrs. Fischer’s warning from the Other World turned out to be prophetic. At the beginning of the journey when the transport was turning in the opposite direction at the Austrian border — possibly to Auschwitz — the Satmar Rebbe managed to get word to Chaim Roth of the impending disaster, and Roth and Kasztner ran to Eichmann crying that he had betrayed them. Another large bribe organized by Roth put the train back in the direction of Bergen-Belsen, where the refugees waited for six months until more ransom funds and trucks — secured by Reb Yitzchok and Recha Sternbuch of the Orthodox rescue committee in Switzerland — made their way to the Nazis.

Who Can You Trust?

While there were many acts of chesed that helped refugees secure places on the transport, some people turned those precious tickets into bad business. At what level this was sanctioned is impossible to pinpoint, but Reb Yirmi Goldschmiedt of Melbourne, Australia says his father Binyamin, who was 27 at the time, nearly got sucked into a deadly scam over a ticket he purchased for traded gold and black market dollars. “

“There were about 400 extra tickets, and not only were they being ‘scalped,’ each spot would be sold several times under bogus names,” explains Goldschmiedt. “When my father showed his purchased ticket to his brotherin-law, a savvy black market trader, his brother-in-law turned white and ordered him to tear it up immediately and flush it down the toilet. That ticket was issued under the name of a Jewish underground operator wanted by the Germans. Had my father presented that ticket, he would have been thrown off the train and arrested or shot. But the spot wouldn’t go to waste — it had already been resold with at least one more bogus name and maybe more.”

Goldschmeidt’s father went back to the seller —a Jewish man to whom he’d already given a small fortune — and demanded a proper ticket. “This man who nearly sent my father to his death over greed also survived the war, and they actually lived near each other in Melbourne, although my father never told me who he was.”

Shady dealings and all, Kasztner was responsible for saving Binyamin Goldschmeidt’s life. His two brothers were killed in a Hungarian work camp by Arrow Cross thugs, and his parents were killed when they took what they thought would be safe refuge in the Jewish hospital in Budapest. Did he consider Kasztner his savior? “He talked about it a lot,” says his son. “Sure, he was grateful to be alive, but he also felt there was a lot of double-crossing going on. He never trusted Kasztner.”

During the months in detention, the transport inmates had no idea whether they would actually live through the war, but every day they weren’t deported to Auschwitz they breathed a sigh of gratitude. Naomi Hershkowitz (mother of former government minister Professor Daniel Hershkowitz) said that before her sisters and mother got on the train in Budapest, her father handed them a “present” — a vial of cyanide, although he knew in his heart that this wasn’t the halachic option. “When you see it’s the end, take it. Don’t let the Nazis kill you first,” he told them. When the train took its first detour in the direction of Auschwitz, Mrs. Hershkowitz remembers looking to her father. “We asked with our eyes, ‘Should we take the cyanide now?’ But Abba signaled, ‘not yet.’ So we began to say Vidui — a Jew always wants to return clean — and then we saw the train turning around and heading west. We knew we were no longer headed for Auschwitz, but where were we going?”

During the time the transport was stalled in Bergen-Belsen, Kasztner was undeterred and realized he could still curry favor with the Nazis, especially with senior SS officer Kurt Becher. Many historians credit him with negotiating for an initiative called “Jews on Ice,” where about 20,000 Jews — including the elderly, women, and children — from southern Hungary were diverted from Auschwitz to the Strasshof labor camp near Vienna, which probably saved their lives.

According to Rabbi Jungreis, toward the end of the war Kasztner arranged for two trucks to take 24 rabbis out of the labor camp. “One of those rabbis was my zeide, Rav Tzvi Hirsch Cohen. Kasztner admired him and wanted to protect him, but the Zeide gave up his seat for a woman with a newborn baby. You know who that baby is? Today that baby is the Tzelemer Rav in Williamsburg.”

Rabbi Jungreis was at the baby’s bris in the Szeged ghetto just before deportation, in the dark basement of his father’s shul. “After the bris, everyone was crying hysterically. ‘What did you do? You just killed a baby!’ Because if a German caught a child with a bris, that was the end. During the war people avoided doing brissim because of this.” Rabbi Jungreis, who was a wiry 11-year-old then, says his job was to remove his yellow star and yarmulke and hop the ghetto fence in order to get diapers for the baby. “Years later, the Tzelemer Rav wrote in a sefer that I risked my life to get him diapers.”

How to Be a Hero

To understand the Israeli attitude to Kasztner after he’d been publically accused of collaboration, is to examine the story of another Hungarian national whose life intersected with Kasztner’s: Hanna Szenes. On March 15, 1944, 23-year-old Szenes — who immigrated to Eretz Yisrael from Hungary in 1939 and enlisted in the pre-state Palmach commando corps — was dispatched by parachute over Yugoslavia in order perform espionage for the British and rescue Jews. But the very day she crossed into Hungary, she was caught by the Hungarian police, tortured and tried for treason.

She was executed that November, without saving any Jews. Still, she was seen as a symbol of all that was noble in the steadfastness and resistance of Jews during the Holocaust, and she became a national hero — an Israeli Joan of Arc.

During the libel trial, Szenes’s mother took the stand and accused the well-connected Kasztner of abandoning her daughter during the months she was languishing in a Hungarian prison. In fact, Kasztner feared that his imminent transport and the negotiations with the Strasshof labor camp would be in jeopardy if he made contact with Szenes and the other two parachutists who fell with her, which he considered a stupid, irresponsible suicide mission. Their presence in Hungary was like an albatross around his neck. “Who even asked your daughter to come to Budapest?” Kasztner railed at Mrs. Szenes. “What was she thinking? It was because of the arrogance and recklessness of those who sent her that she crossed the border like a novice and was caught five minutes later! Was I supposed to suspend the rescue operations of Budapest’s Jews and go to the Germans to beg them to save her?”

Still, Hanna Szenes remained Israel’s heroine, and Kasztner — although he rescued 1,684 souls and possibly saved thousands more — represented all the negative feelings Israelis had about collaborators, galus Jews, and those bedraggled European immigrants who managed to survive without raising the flag of rebellion.

“The survivors who went to America after the war had no connection to the scandal or the shame,” says Ross, “But in Israel in the early days of the state, it was an embarrassment to be ‘just’ a survivor. And if you happened to survive on the Kasztner train, which had all that shadowy collusion attached to it, you were doubly branded. You could have just gone under a rock.”

If her film accomplished something, Gaylen says she hopes it will make people reevaluate the multi-hued concepts of bravery and heroism. “Hanna Szenes was ‘brave,’ but she went on a suicide mission. What about people like Gisi Fleischmann? Does anyone even know who she is?”

Gisi Fleischmann was a cousin of Rav Weissmandl who worked with him directing rescue operations for survivors of Polish ghettos, including groups of orphans, guiding them across the Polish-Slovak-Hungarian borders. She saved hundreds of children, but was arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz with a special instruction: “return undesirable.”

“I would like to see people reframe the idea of who is a hero,” Gaylen Ross says. “Gisi Fleischmann was a hero. A woman who propped up her friend during the appel was a hero. And with hindsight of 70 years and a flexible heart, maybe Kasztner — even if he really did sell his soul to the devil — could be called a hero too.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 522)