Kasztner's Train
The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
In summer 1944, Rezso Kasztner met with Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, in Budapest. With the Final Solution at its terrible apex and tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews being sent to Auschwitz every month, the two men agreed to allow 1,684 Jews to leave for Switzerland by train. In other manoeuvrings Kasztner may have saved another 40,000 Jews already in the camps. Kasztner was later judged for having "sold his soul to the devil." Prior to being exonerated, he was murdered in Israel in 1957.
Part political thriller, part love story and part legal drama, Anna Porter's account explores the nature of Kasztner--the hero, the cool politician, the proud Zionist, the romantic lover, the man who believed that promises, even to diehard Nazis, had to be kept. The deals he made raise questions about moral choices that continue to haunt the world today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Porter (The Storyteller) seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of Rezso Kasztner. This Hungarian Jew was branded a Nazi collaborator by Academy Award winning screenwriter Ben Hecht in his 1961 book, Perfidy. But more recently Kasztner has been exonerated by Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem. After 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in 1944, Kasztner, a point man in a "goods-for-blood" deal with Nazi henchman Adolf Eichmann, arranged for a train to carry 1,684 Jews from Hungary to Switzerland, wealthy Jews paying $1,500 per person while the poor paid nothing. For $100 a head, Eichmann kept an additional 20,000 Jews alive in Austrian labor camps. After the war Kasztner relocated to Israel, where in 1952 he was accused of being a Nazi collaborator who saved a privileged few at the expense of thousands of others. Kasztner sued for malicious libel and lost on most counts; the trial made international headlines; and Kasztner was assassinated in 1957 by right-wing extremists. Although a well-researched counterbalance to Hecht's account, Porter's defense may swing too much in favor of Kasztner, given that most of the participants are deceased and much of the evidence is anecdotal. Readers, however, will welcome the opportunity to debate the ever-relevant moral issues of doing business with the enemy. Illus. 16 pages of b&w illus., 3 maps.
Customer Reviews
Great story; bad writing.
The man and his story are quite remarkable, and it's good to see the vindication this book attempts to give him. The fault of this book is entirely the author's. She can't seem to get a grasp on what kind of book she is trying to write. A good portion of the book is a very dry, fact, fact, fact reiteration of what happened. Then, every so often, an awkward page or paragraph appears which reads like a novelization of events. The rest of the pages are filled with off-topic stories of atrocity which distract from the story of Kasztner. (Don't misunderstand me as saying that the stories of pain and suffering are unnecessary, because I think they definitely do need to be heard, but these stories are not Kasztner's, and interfere with the story the author is trying to tell.)