Kastner Train

The Kastner train consisted of 35 cattle trucks that left Budapest on 30 June 1944, during the German occupation of Hungary, carrying around 1,700 Jews to safety in Switzerland. The train was named after Rudolf Kastner, a Jewish-Hungarian lawyer and journalist, who on behalf of the Budapest Aid and Rescue Committee negotiated with Adolf Eichmann – the German SS officer in charge of deporting Hungary's Jews to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland – to allow a number of Jews to escape the Holocaust, in exchange for gold, diamonds, and cash.

Compared by Kastner to a Noah's ark, the train was organized during the deportations to Auschwitz in May–July 1944 of 437,000 Hungarian Jews, three-quarters of whom were sent to the gas chambers. Its passengers were chosen from a wide range of social classes and included around 273 children, many of them orphaned. One hundred and fifty of the wealthier passengers paid $1,000 each, which allowed the others to board for free. After a journey of many weeks, including an unexpected diversion to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, 1,670 of the passengers reached Switzerland in two batches, the first in August, the second in December 1944.

Kastner emigrated to Israel in 1947, and was a spokesman for the Minister of Trade and Industry when his negotiations with Eichmann became the subject of controversy. Kastner had been told of the mass murder taking place inside Auschwitz, particularly in April or May 1944 when he received a copy of the Vrba-Wetzler report, written by two Auschwitz escapees. Allegations spread after the war that he had done nothing to warn the wider community, but had focused instead on his negotiations to save a smaller number. The inclusion on the train of his family, as well as 388 people he rescued from the ghetto in his home town of Kolozsvár, reinforced the view of his critics that his actions had been self-serving. In his defence, the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer argues that the Hungarian-Jewish community already knew that Jews were being killed in Poland, and there was nothing further Kastner could have done to warn them. Bauer also argues that Kastner could hardly have been expected to exclude his own family from the train.

The allegations culminated in a libel trial in Israel that lasted from January 1954 to June 1955, after Kastner was accused in a self-published newsletter of having been a Nazi collaborator. The government sued on his behalf, and the defendant's lawyer turned the trial into an indictment of the Mapai (Labour) leadership and its alleged failure to help Europe's Jews. The judge found against the government, ruling that Kastner had "sold his soul to the devil" by negotiating with Eichmann, and by selecting some Jews to be saved while failing to alert others. Kastner received numerous death threats after the ruling and was assassinated in Tel Aviv in March 1957. Nine months later the Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the lower court's ruling, stating in a 4-1 decision that the judge had "erred seriously."

Read more about Kastner Train:  Rudolf Kastner, The Passengers, Kastner Trial

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