And then, at the end of the month, came the testimony of Vrba and Wetzler, confirming in black and white exactly what deportation to Auschwitz meant.
Kasztner grasped the implications of their report immediately. He asked for a meeting with his SS contact, Eichmann’s deputy Hermann Krumey. Kasztner may even have shown the document to Eichmann himself, telling the architect of the Final Solution that he at last knew his secret : Eichmann’s response was said to be a demand that the report be suppressed and its authors captured dead or alive. If the Vrba–Wetzler Report were made public, the talks would be off.
When Kasztner finally got his meeting with Krumey on 2 May, he confronted him about a train that had left a couple of days earlier from Kistarcsa, carrying 1,800 Jews, the first such transport out of Hungary. Was that bound for Auschwitz, to the place Vrba and Wetzler had described?
No, Krumey insisted. Those Jews were being shipped to a camp in Waldsee, in Germany, where they would be used as farm labourers.
Kasztner knew the Nazi was lying. There was no camp in Waldsee. It was a Nazi fiction. Kasztner told him to stop playing games . That was the cue for the talk to get serious. Now they got down to business, hammering out an accord whose terms Krumey would classify as a ‘Reich secret’。
Even so, the nature of the bargain would soon seem clear enough. The offer to spare all of Hungary’s Jews receded; now the SS man held out a much smaller prize: exit permits for 600 Jews. That number rose to a thousand when Eichmann authorised the sparing of several hundred Jews from, tellingly, Kasztner’s home town of Kolozsvár. The figure would rise again with the addition of nearly 200 ‘prominent’ Jews from various ghettos around the country until eventually the number singled out for rescue would stand just short of 1,700. They would board a train – Kasztner’s train, as it would become known – that would, ultimately, ferry them to Switzerland and to safety.
What the SS wanted in return was money – the Jewish rescue committee handed over $1,000 per head for every passenger on the Kasztner train, a total of $1,684,000 in cash and valuables – and, more precious still, a Jewish community that would be sufficiently pliant and passive to enable the deportations to proceed smoothly. Eichmann made clear that he did not want ‘a second Warsaw’ , meaning no repeat in Hungary of the resistance the Nazis had met in that ghetto a year earlier. The Nazis wanted Kasztner’s silence.
And they got it. Rezs? Kasztner kept the Vrba–Wetzler Report to himself and the small leadership circle around him. He would issue no urgent warnings to his fellow Jews to stay away from the trains and resist deportation. He would not say that waiting for them at the other end were the ovens of Birkenau, that they should run for their lives or pick up whatever meagre weapons they could find. Instead, he would give Eichmann and the SS the one thing they deemed indispensable for their work, the one thing whose importance the teenage Walter Rosenberg had grasped as he stood on the Judenrampe through those long days and nights: order and quiet. The Jews of Hungary would board those trains calmly, even obediently, because they never heard the word that Fred and Rudi had fought so hard to bring them. They remained in the dark. They were led into the charnel house blindfolded.
Worse than that, they were actively steered in the wrong direction by those they trusted. Kasztner kept the Auschwitz Report hidden away, but he did order the distribution of the notorious postcards which purported to offer greetings from those who had been supposedly ‘resettled’ in new homes. In fact, those messages were written under duress by new arrivals in Auschwitz hours before their deaths. Even when Kasztner’s colleagues suspected that the cards were a trick to deceive the Jewish public and urged him not to pass them on, he ordered that a batch of around 500 such cards , brought to the Jewish Council by the Nazis, be delivered.
In late June, just as the Vrba–Wetzler Report was finally becoming public thanks to its circulation in Switzerland, Kasztner did something curious. He wrote to his own contacts in Switzerland, letting them know that thousands of postcards had arrived with a ‘Waldsee’ postmark, in which Jewish deportees reported that they were alive and well. This was nearly two months after Kasztner had had it confirmed from the SS that Waldsee was a fiction and from the Vrba–Wetzler Report that Auschwitz was a death factory. Eichmann himself had told Kasztner that the Jews were being gassed in Auschwitz. And yet on 24 June, the very day that the Swiss press began publishing information from the Auschwitz Report, Kasztner was spinning an opposing tale, contradicting the word of Fred and Rudi with bogus evidence that Hungary’s deported Jews were safe. If the SS had ordered a misinformation campaign tailored to blunt the impact of the Vrba–Wetzler Report, it would scarcely have looked any different.
Whether Kasztner truly believed that his negotiations with the SS might eventually save the Jews of Hungary, or whether he did the Nazis’ bidding solely to preserve the friends, relatives and ‘prominents’ he had handpicked for rescue – abandoning the many to save the few – the result was the same. While his talks with Eichmann went on, with his silence the apparent price, the Nazis conducted their largest and swiftest deportation operation. Starting on 15 May 1944 and over the course of fifty-six days , 437,402 Jews were transported from the Hungarian countryside, crammed into 147 trains. Almost all of them were gassed on arrival in Auschwitz.
Next in the Nazis’ sights were the 200,000 Jews of Budapest.
Eventually the frustration got too much for Rudi and his fellow escapees. They knew so little of the journeys their report had made, the dead ends it had hit in Budapest, London and Washington, whether thanks to Hungarian cardinals, American presidents, British prime ministers or Jewish leaders. All they knew was that it was June 1944 and, even though Fred and Rudi had brought out their testimony in April, Mordowicz and Rosin had seen with their own eyes that Jews were being shipped from Hungary to Poland through Slovakia, en route to their deaths. What few nuggets of news they could pick up in the pro-Nazi papers suggested the deportations were continuing, even now, weeks after the second pair’s escape.
Had the Slovak Jewish council and the Working Group within it not grasped the urgency of the situation? Did these people not understand what was happening? The four former inmates resolved that, if these supposed leaders could not do the job of spreading the word, they would do it themselves.
Rudi had already decided his best hope was to produce copies of the report in both Slovak and Hungarian, behind the back of the ??, and then somehow smuggle them across the border into Hungary. Now the four escapees could do that together. Except they were living illegally, on a modest ?? stipend of 200 Slovak crowns per week: running a samizdat publishing operation would not be easy. And it certainly could not be done in the mountain hideaway of Liptovsk? Sv?t? Mikulá?.
The answer was to head to Bratislava, where lived an old Trnava friend who had evaded deportation two years earlier. His name was Josef Weiss and he was working now in the Office for Prevention of Venereal Diseases which, thanks to the sensitivity of the personal information it held, was very well protected, even from the police. It was the ideal clandestine publishing house, the perfect place to produce the copies they would need.