Was he a Holocaust hero who saved thousands or a Nazi collaborator who sent many thousands more to their deaths?
That's the central question behind the legacy of Rudolph (Rezso) Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who through negotiations with Nazis bought the freedom of nearly 1,700 prisoners en route to a death camp and was later branded a traitor in Israel.
His story, told in a chilling documentary by American director Gaylen Ross, comes to Atlanta this weekend in a short run at the Regal Tara Cinema. Kasztner's tale is largely unknown outside Israel, the country to which he fled after the war and the country that ultimately condemned him as "the man who sold his soul to the devil" in a 1955 court case gone awry. Kasztner was killed by an assassin in 1957, and the details of his life and allegiances continue to be debated today.
Ross' film, "Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis," goes beyond the questions of whether he withheld information about the Auschwitz death camp and explores the ambivalence many of those he rescued had toward him after the war.
Understanding Kasztner's role in history is done only by exploring Israel's relationship with the Holocaust and its survivors, Ross suggests in her film. The two-hour documentary was composed through interviews with Kasztner's family, those he rescued, his opponents and even his assassin -- a man who served seven years in prison for his crime.
We talked with Ross about the making of the film and Kasztner's controversial legacy. Here is some of what she said.
Q. What compelled you to embark on this project, in which you spent eight years compiling interviews to tell his story?
A. I found it one of the most amazing unknown stories of the war. And not just the war, but of Israeli history and of rescue and negotiation. It was an amazing period, this last year of the war. Everybody thought the war would be over, and here came this occupation [in Hungary.] And [the Nazis began] deporting Jews at a speed that was unheard of even in the first four years of the war. And then in the middle of this was a Jew who was really a nobody. He came from a tiny Zionist group ... and was able to pretend he represented something. He ended up saving almost 2,000 Jews on this rescue train and later, I learned, some tens of thousands of Jews through negotiation. I’ve heard more rescue stories, but mostly after I finished and released the film.
At the time, it had the qualities of those kind of epic stories: the Greek tragedies and the Shakespearean dramas, the larger- than- life tale of a single man who walked into the S.S. headquarters every day.
Q. How did you make sense of the people he saved who didn't come to his defense, or refused to acknowledge he bought their freedom?
A. The survivors who went to Israel were in a terrible time. [Israelis] couldn’t understand the Hungarian survivors who knew what was coming and didn’t resist, and why they didn’t fight back, which would have been tantamount to suicide for them in Hungary if they had. So already the survivors coming from Hungary felt ashamed having survived and not having fought.
[In the mid-1950s, Malchiel Gruenwald, an amateur Israeli journalist, published a pamphlet accusing Kasztner of collaborating with the Nazis during the Holocaust, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews. The Israeli government sued Gruenwald on Kasztner's behalf for libel, but Kasztner, the plaintiff, suddenly found himself on trial.]
The trial turned and the headlines read that he was a collaborator and worked with the Nazis. Why didn’t he tell others to flee? Instead, he sat down with [the Nazis].
When we opened the film last year in Israel…survivors who were afraid to come forward before wanted to finally testify for Kasztner. They had been intimidated all those years or ashamed. Most of the survivors were grateful, but were frightened.
Q. Did you come away with a strong conclusion of his guilt or innocence?
A. One of my biggest challenges was to separate the misinformation and falsehood and rumor that had accompanied the story for 50 years to find where the facts were. It was an incredible politicization that happened in Israel about the Holocaust ... and the enormous amount of guilt and shame that happened among the survivors. I came away with the facts, I thought. The facts at least show that Kasztner rescued thousands of lives... then the question always becomes what people choose or choose not to believe, but at least I present the context.
Event preview
Documentary. "Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis." Through May 21. Regal Tara Cinema, 2345 Cheshire Bridge Road N.E. For show times, call 404-634-5661.
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