Perhaps Churchill and Eden were thwarted by their subordinates. Or maybe their determination to act was more apparent than sincere , the determination to be documented demanding action stronger than the urge for action itself. Either way, the Allies never did bomb Auschwitz （except once, and that was by accident ）。 The Vrba–Wetzler Report had reached the very centre of Allied power and yet the inmates of Auschwitz would keep looking up at the sky , praying for a deliverance that would never come.
24
Hungarian Salami
R UDI WOULD HAVE been as disappointed by the inaction of the Allies as any prisoner still in Auschwitz. Even so, the summoning of British and American bombs was never the chief motive for his escape. Of course he would have been delighted that his words had reached a British prime minister and a president of the United States, but neither Churchill nor Roosevelt was his prime intended audience. The people he wanted to warn were his fellow Jews.
When the report had been checked and completed, Rudi had pestered Krasň ansk? on this point, demanding to know if the document would get to Hungary immediately, so that Jews there would have the one precious commodity their counterparts in Slovakia, France, Holland, Belgium, Greece and Poland had all lacked: advance knowledge. If they knew what he, Fred and all those hundreds of thousands of others had not known, then surely they would not allow themselves to be loaded like cattle on to freight trains or, at the very least, they would not go quietly. They might use what tiny force they could muster, their fists if necessary. They might stampede or panic, turning every transit point into a scene of ungovernable mayhem. Some might try to escape in the chaos. Whatever form their reaction took, those who knew they were being shipped to their deaths would not make it easy for their killers. They would be deer, not lambs.
Within a day or two, Krasň ansk? reassured Rudi that he had fulfilled his mission, that the report was now in the hands of the Hungarian Jewish leadership, specifically Rezs? Kasztner, whom Krasň ansk? described as ‘the most important’ of all of them. Kasztner had emerged as a key figure in the Va’ada, the mainly Zionist committee that, starting in early 1943, had led the effort to support and rescue Jewish refugees who had fled Poland and Slovakia to seek a haven in Hungary. On 28 April 1944, Krasň ansk? had personally handed Kasztner a copy of the document, in German , delayed only by the few hours it took him to make the journey from ?ilina to Bratislava.
Kasztner returned to Budapest, where he read and reread Fred and Rudi’s testimony. He did not sleep that night . The next day, 29 April, he presented the report to the members of the Jewish Council when they met at their headquarters on Sip Street , holding nothing back. And yet the men at that meeting did not rush out on to the streets or start hammering on doors, urging the Jews to save themselves. In fact, they said and did nothing. Part of it was incredulity. Samu Stern, the president of the council, had doubts whether the report could be believed: was it not more likely to be the product of the fertile imagination of two rash young men ? If that was right, then it would be reckless to disseminate it: council members themselves would be arrested by the country’s new masters, the Nazis whose occupation of Hungary was just six weeks old. They would be charged with spreading false information. The leaders resolved to do nothing that might spread alarm .
Less than a week later, there was another meeting. Kasztner went to see Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul in Budapest, clutching a copy of the Auschwitz Report. They met in Lutz’s official residence, a magnificent manor house in old Buda, in one of the lavish reception rooms. Surrounded by gold chandeliers, gilt-edged mirrors and epic paintings, Lutz read the testimony that Rudi and Fred had smuggled out of the darkness of Auschwitz. When he had finished, Lutz was shaking with rage and grief . Immediately, the pair got into Lutz’s car and headed to an impromptu meeting with two other Jewish officials in Budapest. There, Ottó Komoly, titular head of the Hungarian Zionist Organisation, urged his colleagues to do precisely what Rudi and Fred would have wanted: to let the Jewish community know what they knew and begin organising a self-defence effort. But Kasztner said no .
Why did Kasztner, who just a year earlier had won admiration as a devoted rescuer of refugees fleeing persecution, keep his fellow Jews’ imminent fate secret? The explanation lies, in part, with another secret. For within a fortnight of the start of the German occupation, Kasztner had been engaged in negotiations with the Nazis, specifically with the official now charged with solving ‘the Jewish question’ in Hungary: Adolf Eichmann.
The talks went through several variations, but their defining theme was a proposed swap: cash or goods in return for Jewish lives. In the first round, the Nazis demanded the colossal sum of two million US dollars; later the price would be 10,000 trucks for use on the eastern front. In return, the SS would spare the Jews of Hungary. Yes, such negotiations would mean supping with the devil, but there was at least one plausible reason to believe they might provide sustenance. For there seemed to be a precedent.
In Fred and Rudi’s community of Slovakia, the Jewish leadership had opened up their own channel of communication with Eichmann’s subordinate, Dieter Wisliceny, two years earlier. They rightly concluded that he was susceptible to bribery and they paid him at least $45,000 in two payments in August and September 1942. It appeared to get results: the deportations from Slovakia stopped, so that those Jews who had not been shipped off could carry on living in their own country, albeit under punishing restrictions. The leading lights of the Working Group believed it was that bribe that had made the difference.
It was a fateful error. In fact, the SS had halted the forced exit of the country’s tiny Jewish community for its own reasons , not least alarm at a Slovak government request to visit the new ‘Jewish settlements’ in Poland, a visit that would have exposed the reality of Auschwitz. It was not the cash the Jews had handed Dieter Wisliceny that had halted the deportation trains. But the Jewish leaders did not know that, just as they did not yet know that the deportations from Slovakia had merely paused and would start up again in the autumn of 1944. In their ignorance, and convinced of their success, they hoped to scale up their efforts, devising a ‘Europa plan’ whereby much larger bribes to the Nazis would save the lives not only of Slovakia’s Jews but of Jews across the continent.
In that spirit, they wrote to their counterparts in Hungary, assuring them that Wisliceny, now posted to Budapest, was a ‘reliable’ man with whom they could, and should, do business. Sure enough, Wisliceny emerged as the lead negotiator on the Nazi side in the talks with the Jewish leadership in Budapest that began on 5 April 1944 , the same day it became compulsory for Hungarian Jews to wear the yellow star . Facing him across the table was Rezs? Kasztner.
Almost immediately, Kasztner felt the change in his own status. As the designated representative of his community, but unlike the rest of his fellow Jews, he would now be eligible for permits to travel beyond Budapest, though he would have to ask first. Unlike the rest of his fellow Jews, he was allowed to keep his car and his telephone. And, unlike his fellow Jews, he would not have to wear a yellow star . Meanwhile, in Auschwitz, Fred and Walter were hiding inside a pile of wooden boards.
There were reasons to suspect from the start that the SS was not negotiating in good faith, that these talks were a trick, and the events of April only reinforced those suspicions. The Nazis were methodically rounding up Jews in the Hungarian provinces, confining them to ghettos which just so happened to be handily situated near railway junctions. Word came of an agreement reached by the rail networks of Hungary and Slovakia, allowing for the transportation of 150 trainloads of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz via Slovakia. These looked like the actions of a regime determined to implement its deportation plan, not abandon it.