Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland
Rudolf
Kasztner THE
KASTNER TRIAL - shown at the Jewish Film Festival in
1997 Shamash:
The
Jewish Internet Consortium: Holocaust Home
Page Perfidy is an indictment not
only of Rudolf Kastner but also of the wartime leaders of
the Jewish Agency for how they acted with regard to the Jews
of Hungary toward the end of World War II. In those
days,before the establishment of the State of Israel, the
Jewish Agency was the unofficial government of the Jews in
Israel, and whose leaders included men such as Moshe Sharett
and David Ben-Gurion. The Nazis had decided to
slaughter the one million Jews of Hungary. They promised
Kastner, then a Jewish leader in Hungary, that for his
silence about their plan, he could choose 600 Jews who would
be allowed to escape to Switzerland. Kastner agreed and
promptly arranged the escape of his family members and the
prominent people of the town where he had once lived. This
town, and not only this town, was so close to the Romanian
border that if the Jews had known of the Nazi plan they
could have easily escaped men, women and children to
Romania. At the same time, Eichmann said
he was willing to make a deal - trucks for Jews. The Germans
badly needed materiel for the war effort and if the Jews
could come up with enough trucks, etc., he would let the
Jews of Hungary go. Joel Brand, one of the Jewish leaders in
Hungary,went to Turkey to meet with someone from the Jewish
Agency. Instead of trying to persuade the British and their
allies to adopt a plan to save the Jews of Hungary, the
Jewish leaders in Israel turned Brand over to the British
who detained him. British policy was to keep Jews out of
Israel. Hecht claims that not only the British wanted to
keep the Jews out but that the Jewish Agency itself was not
that interested in a million Hungarian Jewish refugees! Thus
Eichmann and his henchmen went ahead with their diabolical
plan and more Jewish bodies were added to stoke the fires of
Auschwitz. Perfidy should be read by all.
I was moved to read it after the docudrama incident
described above. It turns out to be a damning portrayal of
those first leaders of Israel who were the mentors of
Israel's present leaders. This book is hard to find as
copies of it have mysteriously disappeared. Its pages are
full of facts that one would be hard-pressed to find in any
"official" history books.-Y.A. JUDEA Magazine is offered
without charge on the Internet. All material may be
reprinted with attribution to JUDEA Magazine and original
source as cited. Comments are welcome. © Israel 1994 A docudrama called the
The
Kastner Trial, was
shown government-owned Channel 1 television in
1994.
