Opinion: Open letter to Rudolph Kasztner’s daughter

An alternate to a filmmaker’s opinion

By Edith Polak

Issue of November 20, 2009/ 3 Cheshvan 5770

"Honor thy mother and father” is one of the commandments that instruct our lives. You and me, we have several things in common: we share a deep love for our fathers; we have daughters, and are mothers; and we were born after WWII, enjoying, I’m sure, a weakness for good Hungarian pastries.

However, that is where our similarities end, Zsuzsi.

I was born in Cluj, Romania, to Shoah survivors: my mother survived by hiding from town to town in Romania with her youngest sisters while her future husband, my father, suffered the loss of his entire family, including his first daughter.

I remember happy Rosh Hashanah holidays from age 5 or so, running around, a happy, giggling youngster with the half dozen other little girls and boys my age. We were at the Horea Utca synagogue, a place that witnessed the Jews’ deportation to Nazi extermination camps just a few short years before my birth.

Last year I took my oldest daughter and flew back to this place. On a freezing Shabbat morning in December she reminded me, “Your parents, my beloved grandparents, were married in that very synagogue, so let’s walk there.” Upon arriving, we found the doors locked, for lack of funds. A plaque at the front read: “From here 16,763 souls were deported to the death camps.”

Gaylen Ross decided to make a movie about a man called Rudolph Kasztner, your father. It is a fatally flawed story.

She goes so far as to call him a hero, comparing him to the righteous Oskar Schindler. What can one expect of someone born in the States, who does not have all the facts, but, wants to have her 15 minutes of fame?

My love for the survivors is extensive, and one of the foremost causes in my life, as an only child of survivors, is to protect the memory of those who died, and those who are old now. Thus, I’m writing to you to clear the confusion.

What propelled your father to save the few souls he did?

A payment of $40,000 per head.

I want you to know that by mainly choosing some of the rabbinic dynasties, he passed over the Cluj businessmen, land owners, opera singers, the working man, the thousands of teenagers, children, babies, unborn children.

The historian Shlomo Aronson is interviewed in the film. He attributes to Kasztner the fact that most of the 15,000-18,000 Jews who were sent to Strasshof survived the war. This is false.

Kasztner neither initiated this nor can claim any credit. At your father’s trial in Israel, the judges, correctly, did not accept this argument. “If some Jews were finally saved from the fate which was in store for them, this was not thanks to the accused, but because extermination by gassing at Auschwitz was stopped by October or November 1944,” they stated. This is supported by Document 3803- PS, Exhibit USA 802 at the Nuremberg trials — a letter from Kaltenbrunner to S.S. Brigadefuehrer Blaschke. By broadcasting this claim by Aronson, Gaylen Ross assists in distorting the history of the Holocaust.

Kasztner knew about Auschwitz substantially in advance of the Nazis invading Hungary. He never denied that fact and even his supporters admit this was the case. He was told in November 1943 that Jews were “gassed and burnt” according to a “scientific system in Auschwitz (Ladislaus Lob, “Dealing with Satan: Rezso Kasztner’s Daring Rescue Mission, 2005, pp.54-55.) Despite this knowledge by Kasztner, thousands of testimonies show that the Jews of Hungary and what are now parts of Romania (Cluj) boarded trains to Auschwitz without any idea where they were going.

Professor Randolph Braham, a leading scholar of the Holocaust, commented: “As almost all the memoirs by survivors from Koloszvar (Cluj) attest, the Jews were not only left in the dark about the secrets of the death camp, but in fact were misinformed: while most of the leaders escaped on the eve of ghettoization and/or mass deportations, the masses were reassured that they were only being “relocated to Kanyermezo” (Randolph L. Braham, “Rescue Operations in Hungary: Myths and Realities” Yad Vashem Studies XXXII p. 27n5.)

It is known that four empty train cars were attached to the ones carrying people who paid their way out. Empty because families would not separate from each other and not many could come up with the $40,000 per head — not the $1,000 as told in the movie.

The documentary makes a reference to three Jewish parachutists from Palestine who were caught in Hungary. Not mentioned is the fact that when Hannah Senesh was caught, her mother, Katherine, who was living in Hungary, tried to get help from Kasztner. (I have proof: my only living uncle was in the same outfit.) Not only was he not available to see her every time she asked for him, but parcels and legal assistance for Hannah were not forthcoming. The two other parachutists, Palgi Nussbacher and Goldstein, made their way to Budapest where Kasztner informed the Gestapo of their presence. As a result of moral pressure by Kasztner, both of these parachutists gave themselves up to the Nazis! Goldstein died in a concentration camp. (5 Judith Tydor Baumel: “Parachuting to their People — the Operation of Parachutist-Emissaries During World War II in Historical Perspective,” Yad Vashem Studies XXV (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1996) pps. 137-180.)

On May 4, 1944, 17,000 Jews were sealed in a ghetto in the northern part of Cluj. They languished there with few belongings and without food for one month in the Ibis brick factory, which the Germans placed under the administration of the local police chief, Laszlo Urban.

Six transports were rapidly sent between May 25-June 9, 1944, liquidating the inhabitants of the factory. On one train, my father’s complete family — his four-a-half year old blonde, blue-eyed daughter, Erika Polak; his first wife; parents and in-laws, sisters and brothers. One of them, my uncle, was a prominent businessman whose store still stands today, three blocks from the Horea Utca synagogue, now converted into an HSBC bank.

My father used to tell me how 80 people stood in cattle car for four days — his little girl drinking her tears all the way until they arrived at the camp. My childhood friend, Eva Gold’s mother and father, had a four-month-old son who died in the heat and crowding. A Hungarian soldier stopped the train and placed the child under a tree. These are some of the precious people that could have been saved.

Kasztner never returned to Hungary after the war. Had he done so, according to the testimony of Yosef Krause, he would have been “torn by pieces” by the survivors who went back to try to rebuild their lives (Macabee Kaskin, “Kasztner Wanted for Trial in Cluj,” Jerusalem Post, June 18, 1954. Some survivors wanted to try him as a war criminal (See the judgment in the Eichmann Trial section 116 available on line at/hhtp:/www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/Eichmannm.htm). Instead, with the profits left after handling money over to Eichmann, he moved to Israel.

After the war my father returned to Cluj on foot. He was stopped in Budapest by Romanian forces, and drafted on the spot into the Romanian Army. One morning, now a lieutenant, he walked with some soldiers into the Dohany Utca synagogue in Budapest, rifle in a shooting position. He heard a young woman say in Yiddish, then in Hungarian: “Soldier, please do not shoot us!” Over 150 Jews were hiding downstairs.

At my father’s funeral in June of 1997, this woman, now a grandmother, told me, “Your father was our hero.”

And that, Zsuszi, is what my father was.

I wish this ugly story had stayed where it belonged — with the dead. But the dead have asked the living to correct the lies, and that is why I want the truth to be known.

“Honor thy mother and father,” yes, but not on the backs of those who died.