Book Alert / Kasztner's Train

Kasztner's Train -- The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust by Anna Porter, Walker '08, $27.95, 431 pages, ISBN #0802715966. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

The saga author Anna Porter recounts is surely the stuff of novels. Consider this paradox: the man who saved more Jews than anyone in the Holocaust immigrates to Israel after the war and is convicted as a Nazi collaborator. How can this be?

As Porter tells it, lawyer Rezso Kasztner, a leading member of the Hungarian Jewish Rescue Committee, "desperately negotiated" with the Nazis to buy the lives of 1,684 Jews, who would be packed onto "Kasztner's Train" and ridden to safety in Switzerland. Here's the hitch: most of the travelers had paid their patron $1,500 each for their tickets, thus establishing a threshold which might be called, "How much freedom can you afford?"

Kasztner appealed his conviction and was ultimately exonerated, but while awaiting appeal, he was assassinated in Tel Aviv on March 4, 1957. But not all Jews, by any means, felt Kasztner's actions were a simple Faustian bargain. Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem unveiled Kasztner's private archive on the 50th anniversary of his death, in a mission to restore his reputation.