While doing research for a film on Swiss banks and Holocaust accounts, documentary producer and director Gaylen Ross heard a survivor tell of being on the “Kasztner train.” That encounter nine years ago has resulted in her latest film, Killing Kasztner, a documentary about Rezso Kasztner, “the Jew who dared to negotiate with Adolf Eichmann.”Killing Kasztner opens today in limited release in Beverly Hills and West Hills.
“It was remarkable to me that this rescue train went to Switzerland out of Hungary during the worst deportation of Jews, and I knew nothing about it,” said Ross in a phone interview from New York. “I knew nothing about the deal for 10,000 trucks for the last million Jews. It was an incredible story about the largest rescue of its kind during the war. And it was as if it had been erased.”
Ross was told not to pursue a story considered so complicated and complex. “People said, ‘go find a more simple straightforward rescue story.’ Which made me want to do this film even more,” Ross said.
The film, which won critical acclaim at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, the Audience Award for Best Feature Documentary at the 2009 Boston Jewish Film Festival, a theatrical release in Israel to sold-out houses, and a seven-week run in New York asks the question: “Was Rezso Kasztner a heroic rescuer of Jews or a villain colluding with the Nazis.”
Kasztner secured a rescue train for 1,684 Jews from Budapest and bargained for tens of thousands of more lives, yet, he was accused of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of other Jews for withholding information about the Auschwitz death camp.
The story is told through interviews with family members including his daughter and granddaughters, figures on all sides of the story including the infamous trial, most chillingly, Kasztner’s assassin Ze’ev Ekstein, and survivors, like Beverly Hill’s George Bishop, the only Kasztner Train survivor in California
Bishop was 17, from Kasztner’s hometown of Cluj, Romania, when he was picked for the train.
Bishop, who knew Kasztner until Kasztner moved to Budapest in 1940, knew him as an active Zionist and leader of Va’adat Ezrah Vehatzalah —the Aid and Rescue Committee, or Vaada—a small Jewish group in Budapest that helped Czechos-lovakian as well as other European Jews—as a newspaper man and as a hero.
After the war, Kasztner and his family moved to Israel where he rose through the ranks of the Ben-Gurion government.
Malchiel Gruenwald, who Bishop says “hated the government,” published leaflets accusing Kasztner of collaborating with the Germans, and saving some at the expense of others.
The government sued Gruenwald for libel in a two-year trial that Ross says, “ripped apart the nation.”
Shmuel Tamir, Gruenwald’s attorney turned the libel case against him into a political trial of Kasztner and, by implication, the Labor Party, Ross said.
In his ruling, Judge Benjamin Halevi branded Kasztner “the man who sold his soul to the devil.”
It’s clear in interviews with Tamir’s son in the film that he still wholeheartedly agrees with the decision and his father’s work.
The Israeli supreme court overturned most of the decision in 1958, but it was too late for Kasztner. He was gunned down on the doorstep of his Tel Aviv home by Eckstein.
“It took a while to get him to cooperate,” says Ross. “But I think he wanted to have his story told.”
“I think he regrets what he did,” Bishop said. “He was under the influence of radical false ideas.”
The scene between Eckstein and Kasztner’s daughter Zsuzsi is among the film’s most powerful.
“It was really important for my mother to meet with him and I admire her for doing it,” said Merav Michaeli, Kasztner’s granddaughter.
Michaeli also appreciates that Ross was able to grasp the story from it’s many complex angles. “This is one of her big achievements in the film; this is the first time someone sees the big picture.”
“As an outsider, the story of Kasztner I came to realize is also the story of Israel—a young nation coming to terms with the unimaginable, the early years after the Holocaust,” Ross said. “Kasztner was understood in the context of the country’s own struggle to define itself under that horrendous shadow. Here, he became the center of a trial second in importance only to Eichmann’s. For Israelis, it was the first real dialogue about what happened in the Holocaust.”
The concept of heroism also figures prominently in the film.
Ross points out that Yad Vashem the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel has added a category for Jewish rescuers.
“Many of them have become anonymous,” Ross said. “The only categories were for non-jews who rescued and those who picked up a gun. But there were courageous daily acts that should be in books and museums.”
“I think highly of him,” said Bishop. “Most people I know who were in Auschwitz and other camps say he was a hero.
“We’ve slowly been able to remediate Kasztner,” Bishop says. There have been books like Kasztner’s Train by Anna Porter and Rezso Kasztner: The Daring Rescue Of Hungarian Jews: A Survivor’s Account by Ladislaus Lob and now a monument in Budapest.
“This guy was so maligned,” Bishop adds. “And he did so much more than Schindler did. I was an Israeli paratrooper and I pride myself on having made 60 jumps. But Kasztner, who really had no power, faced down Eich-man.”
Bishop, who came to California in 1971 and had a successful career as a rubber manufacturer, keeps in touch with his fellow Kasztner train survivors. “We are an aging crowd,” he says. This week he was in touch with a survivor in Argentina to arrange a screening there.
Part of Ross’ satisfaction with the finished product is the “changed feeling among survivors. The trial was filled with accusations of collaboration, that Kasztner was in cahoots with the Nazis; and they were branded under the same banner.”
When the film opened in Israel, during the Gaza War, the cinemas were overflowing, Ross said. “Survivors who had been afraid to come forward during the trial were now giving their testimonies.”
Michaeli, a recognized TV host in Israel, whose family was skeptical of cooperation at first, says, “people are overwhelmed at the wrong that was done. People come up and hug me and say, ‘You can’t believe it. Thank God they did this film.’”
