Auschwitz (40 page)

Eventually, Eichmann and his SS colleagues agreed to allow a small number of Hungarian Jews to board a train which supposedly would take them out of the Reich. The primary motivation behind the action of the SS was straightforward—avarice. The price of a seat on the train started at 200 dollars (Eichmann's proposal), rose to 2,000 dollars (a demand from Becher), and was eventually was set at 1,000 dollars. A committee, on which Kasztner sat, selected who should go on the train. The idea, according to Éva Speter,
¹⁷
a Hungarian Jew who knew Kasztner, was that this should be a “Noah's Ark—everything and everyone should be represented: youth organizations, illegal refugees, Orthodox people, scientists, Zionists.” This was, in many ways, a strange “Noah's Ark,” however, one where personal connection could play a part in gaining admittance. For another class of people—which boarded the train in the hundreds—was comprised of Kasztner's own friends and family from his hometown, Cluj. Éva Speter's own father was on the committee that decided that Éva and her husband, son, uncle, and grandfather should get on the list.

Because many of those allowed onto the train could not pay the exorbitant
fee demanded by the Nazis, some of the seats were sold off to wealthy Hungarians who subsidized the rest. This led to some seemingly arbitrary distinctions within families. For example, Éva Speter, her husband, and her son were not asked to pay for their seats, but her uncle and grandfather were. This decision appears all the more illogical because Éva's husband (who was not paying for his space himself) was the one who stumped up the cash for the others: “My husband was pretty rich at the time and he gave the money to my uncle and my grandfather, and whatever money he had he gave it to Kasztner.”

Laszlo Devecseri
¹⁸
was another Hungarian Jew who managed to get a seat on the train, and he was allowed aboard because he helped organize the collection camp on Columbus Street in Budapest where those selected for the train stayed pending its departure: “Naturally everybody heard about it [the train] and wanted to get on the list, but many people could not, because you're talking about six hundred thousand Jews and only sixteen hundred could be taken by the train. Those who stayed made Kasztner a scapegoat.”

Kasztner was indeed to be heavily criticized after the war for his actions—not just in placing his own family on the train, but by not warning other Hungarian Jews of their impending fate. In Israel in 1954, Kasztner sued for libel a man named Malkiel Gruenwald who had accused him of being a “traitor” to the Jews, but the case quickly became an examination of Kasztner's own behavior, and the judge eventually declared that he was guilty of “selling his soul to Satan.” It was a judgment that seemed harsh, given the pressures of the spring and summer of 1944, for Kasztner had previously demonstrated that he was committed to saving Jews by helping many escape from Slovakia. As for not warning the other Hungarian Jews, to attempt to do so would most likely have jeopardized any future negotiations with Eichmann and, according to one leading scholar of the period, Kasztner “was in no position to warn anyone.”
¹⁹
This man, however, was by no means a perfect human being. He was not helped in his defense by his brash personality nor by the fact that he had conducted an affair with Hansi Brand while her husband was out of the country. He became a hate figure for some on the nationalist right in Israel and was murdered in 1957, just before the Israeli Supreme Court reversed much of the damning verdict against him pronounced at the original libel trial.

The train full of refugees finally pulled away from Budapest on June 30, 1944, after huge sums of money and other valuables had been handed over in suitcases to the SS (for, by now, Becher, Clages, and Eichmann were all involved in the extortion). There was, of course, still no guarantee that the 1,684 passengers were not going to travel the well-worn route to Auschwitz. “We were always afraid,” says Éva Speter, “and, of course, in the train we were afraid. We never knew what will be our future—but you don't ever know your future, whether in five minutes there will be an earthquake. And that's good.” But the train headed west, not north, and crossed into Austria, eventually reaching Linz.

In Linz, the train stopped because, the Nazis said, there was an opportunity for the Hungarian Jews to be medically examined and “disinfected.” This announcement spread enormous fear among everyone on the train, because the passengers suspected that this was the ruse that the Nazis used to send Jews to the gas chambers. “I remember I was standing naked before the doctor,” says Éva Speter, “and still looking very proud[ly], into his eyes, and I thought he should see how a proud Jewish woman is going to die.” She walked into the shower rooms, and from the taps came “fine warm water.” “It was a very relieving experience after we were ready to die there.”

Although the Kasztner train was not en route to a death camp, neither was it travelling out of the Reich as had been promised. Instead, it was heading for Germany, to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony. Bergen-Belsen was to become infamous when the Allies liberated the camp in April 1945 and pictures of the appalling condition of the surviving prisoners were transmitted around the world. The Bergen-Belsen at which the Hungarian Jews arrived, however, was very different. The camp had been opened in April 1943 charged with an unusual task: It was to house prisoners whom the Nazis thought at some later stage they might wish to deport from the Reich.

The situation at Bergen-Belsen was further complicated by the fragmentation of the camp into several sub-camps, with markedly different conditions existing between them. In the so-called “prisoners' camp,” built for the 500 “ordinary” inmates who had originally constructed the camp, conditions were appalling, while in the “star camp” for “Austauschjuden” (“exchange Jews”) life—though still full of privation—was comparatively better.
Here, families were able to stay together and prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothes. As a small boy, Shmuel Huppert
²⁰
was sent to Bergen-Belsen with his mother as a potential Austauschjuden. Because they were among the few Jews who held certificates from Palestine authorizing them to emigrate there, the Nazis considered them prime subjects for possible hostage exchange. Says Shmuel,

The idea that the Nazis were considering releasing Jews to the West seems, at first glance, completely at odds with the policy of extermination. But it must be remembered that before the Nazis had developed the “Final Solution” their preferred method of dealing with their self-styled “Jewish problem” was to rob the Jews and then expel them, a policy practiced assiduously by Adolf Eichmann in the wake of the annexation of Austria in 1938. It was therefore in line with Hitler's policy of “getting rid” of the Jews to try and ransom the richer ones for foreign currency. While nothing on the scale of the “million Jews for 10,000 trucks” deal had ever been attempted before, as far back as December 1942, Himmler had gained permission, in principle, from Hitler for individual Jews to be expelled from the Reich for money.

In July 1944, the 1,684 Hungarian Jews from the Kasztner train discovered for themselves that Bergen-Belsen was not the place of horror they had first feared. Éva Speter remembers the camp as offering a certain degree of “cultural life,” as lectures and musical recitals were organized by the prisoners. But the constant fear was that the Nazis would not keep their promise and the Hungarians would never be released.

Their fear grew in intensity as the months went by and conditions in Bergen-Belsen began to worsen, but they were eventually released. They owed their freedom to the negotiations that continued, chiefly via Becher, with Jewish representatives in Switzerland. In December 1944, Éva Speter
and her family boarded a train from Bergen-Belsen that took them south and, at last, out of the control of the Nazis. “The moment I knew we are in Switzerland,” she says, “a big stone fell from my heart, I must tell you. The Swiss behaved beautifully to us—Turkish towels, warm water and soap. It was heaven.”

Kasztner and Hansi Brand could not have predicted the fate of the train that had left Budapest on June 30, nor could they have guessed the dramatic turn of events that would lead, in a matter of days, to the cessation of deportations from Hungary. For, just more than a week before the train departed, the Allies received certain and detailed knowledge of the horrors of Auschwitz. Information about the extermination of the Jews had been known and publicized in the West since the killings of 1941. Churchill himself had spoken openly about the Nazis' policy of mass murder, and the Polish government in exile in London had informed the Allied governments about the existence of Auschwitz as a concentration camp for Poles and about the executions that had taken place there in May 1941.

In July 1942,
²¹
the
Polish Fortnightly
review, published in London, printed a list of twenty-two camps—including Auschwitz—where Nazi atrocities were taking place. On December 17, Antony Eden, the British foreign secretary, read a statement to Parliament condemning Nazi atrocities, including the murder of the Jews. After he had finished, the MPs (members of Parliament) stood for a minute's silence. A message sent by the Polish resistance in March 1943 also mentioned Auschwitz as one of the places where Jews were being killed, and on June 1st that year
²²
the
London Times
published an article about “Nazi Brutality to Jews” at Auschwitz.

The next most significant event that increased the Allied level of knowledge about Auschwitz occurred when a report from a Polish agent code named Wanda
²³
arrived in London in January 1944. It stated that “children and women are put into cars and lorries and taken to the gas chambers in [Auschwitz–Birkenau]. There they are suffocated with the most horrible suffering lasting ten to fifteen minutes.”
²⁴
The report went on to state that “ten thousand people daily” were being murdered in “three large crematoria” and that nearly 650,000 Jews had already been murdered at the camp.

Many of the documents relating to this subject are still classified, so we can only speculate as to why Wanda's report made such little impact. Part of
the reason could have been that the very complexity of Auschwitz—its multiple functions as labor, concentration, and death camp—made it harder to interpret. But it is also possible—given the short debate that was about to occur over the question of whether to bomb the camp—that, for the Allies, the existence of Auschwitz was almost a distraction from the main task, as they saw it, of defeating the Germans.

Information about Auschwitz was about to reach a new level of detail because of the actions of four prisoners. The first two, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, managed to escape from Auschwitz in April 1944, and the next two, Arnošt Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz, escaped in May. When they reached nearby Slovakia, the information they gave was collated to form what became known as the Auschwitz Protocols. Kasztner himself was given an early copy of the report based on the first two prisoners' evidence when he visited Slovakia on April 28, but he chose not to publicize its contents—presumably fearful of the effect on his negotiations with Eichmann. It was only in June that the Auschwitz Protocols finally reached the West. On June 18 the BBC broadcast news about Auschwitz, and on the 20th the
New York Times
published the first of three stories about the camp, reporting the existence of “gas chambers in the notorious German concentration camps at Birkenau and Oświęcim [Auschwitz].”
²⁵

In June and July 1944, however, knowledge of the mass murders taking place at Auschwitz did undoubtedly produce one change in policy–on the Axis side. In the wake of the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews, numerous protests had been made to Admiral Horthy, the Hungarian head of state. Even Pope Pius XII, whose failure during the war publicly to denounce the extermination of the Jews has been much criticized, appealed to Horthy to stop the deportations. President Roosevelt and the King of Sweden also lobbied Horthy in close succession.

Finally, on June 26, Richard Lichtheim, a member of the Jewish Agency in Geneva, transmitted a telegram to England containing information about the Auschwitz Protocols, and called upon the Allies to hold individual members of the Hungarian government responsible for the crime. This cable was intercepted by the Hungarian authorities and shown to the Prime Minister, Dome Sztojay, in early July and the contents were then communicated to Horthy.

It was all too much for the seventy-six-year-old Hungarian leader. In 1940, thinking the Germans would win the war, he had ardently supported them; in 1943, thinking they would lose, he had tried to sidle up to the Allies; in March 1944, he had cooperated with Hitler and stayed in office after German troops occupied his country. Now, in the wake of threats of personal retribution, this weathervane of a man changed direction once again, and informed the Germans that the deportation of the Hungarian Jews must stop. With Hungarian troops protecting him in the capital, Horthy enforced his order and, on July 9, the deportations ceased.

Horthy was challenging the Germans at a time when they were at their weakest, for June 1944 had been a catastrophic month in the fortunes of Nazi Germany. On June 6, Allied forces had landed on the Normandy beaches and, by early July, it was clear that they were not going to be pushed back into the sea as Hitler had foretold. Meanwhile, on June 22, the Soviets had launched Operation Bagration, a massive push against German Army Group Centre in Belorussia. This latter action which, unlike D-Day, has not entered the public consciousness in the West, was of much greater import to Horthy who ruled a country in the center of Europe. While the Germans fielded thirty divisions in an attempt to deal with the D-Day landings, they had a massive 165 divisions facing the Red Army, and yet they were still being pushed back. It could only be a matter of a few months before the Soviets were at the gates of Budapest. Horthy, like Werner Best in Denmark before him, knew it was time to construct an alibi.