Peter Munk - Early Years

Early Years

Part of a series of articles on the Holocaust
"Blood for goods" proposals
Key figures
  • Kurt Becher
  • Joel Brand
  • Adolf Eichmann
  • Malchiel Gruenwald
  • Heinrich Himmler
  • Rudolf Kastner
  • Rudolf Vrba
  • Chaim Michael Dov Weissmandl
  • Alfréd Wetzler
Issues
  • Aid and Rescue Committee
  • Auschwitz concentration camp
  • Holocaust
  • History of the Jews in Hungary
  • Hungary during the Second World War
  • Kastner trial
  • Kastner train
  • Vrba-Wetzler report/Auschwitz Protocols
Writers, books, films, plays
  • Yehuda Bauer: Jews for Sale?: Nazi-Jewish Negotiations, 1933-1945 (1994)
  • Randolph L. Braham: The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary (1981)
  • Jeremy Davidson: Tickling Leo (2009)
  • Tuvia Friling: Arrows in the Dark (1998)
  • Ben Hecht: Perfidy (1961)
  • Raul Hilberg: The Destruction of the European Jews (1961)
  • George Klein: Pietà (1989)
  • Motti Lerner: Kastner (1985), The Kastner Trial (1994)
  • Ladislaus Löb: Rezső Kasztner (2008)
  • Anna Porter: Kasztner's Train (2008)
Kastner train passengers
Kastner train:
  • Avraham Deutsch
  • Dezső Ernster
  • Esther Jungreis
  • Ladislaus Löb
  • Egon Mayer
  • Peter Munk
  • Reuven Schmeltzer
  • Yonasan Steif
  • Leopold Szondi
  • Joel Teitelbaum
  • Béla Zsolt
See also: Joel Brand, Rudolf Kastner, and Kastner train

Munk was born in Budapest, Hungary into a well-off Jewish family. Hungary was invaded by Nazi Germany in March 1944 when Munk was a teenager. His family escaped the Nazis by obtaining seats on the Kastner train, a train carrying 1,684 Jews to safety in Switzerland, arranged by Rudolf Kastner of the Zionist Aid and Rescue Committee as a result of negotiations with senior SS officer Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann allowed some Jews to leave for Switzerland in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds, that was obtained from the wealthy among them. as part of a series of so-called "blood for goods" deals.

Munk graduated from the University of Toronto with a degree in electrical engineering in 1952.

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