Because Kasztner was a government official, this was no private matter. The attorney general of the young state sued Gruenwald for criminal libel. The trial lasted a year, attracting huge interest from both press and public, domestic and foreign, as it became clear that, in truth, it was Kasztner, not Gruenwald, who was in the dock. Was he a dogged rescuer who had used every wile and ruse to save 1,684 Jews from the gas chambers? Or had he helped smooth the Nazis’ path to murdering the Jews of Hungary, rewarded with the right to smuggle out his own friends and family along with a few chosen notables? Did he believe that by negotiating with the Nazis he was buying time for Hungary’s Jews? Or did he understand that, on the contrary, he was buying time for the SS to murder them? A libel trial in Jerusalem had become the forum for the infant Israel to wrestle with what the German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt would later call the ‘darkest chapter in the whole dark story’ : the role Jewish leaders such as Kasztner were accused of playing in the destruction of their own people.
Running through the proceedings were variations on the same, pivotal question: what did Kasztner know and when, exactly, did he know it? And in that argument, the report written by Fred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba was central. Gruenwald’s lawyer accused Kasztner of keeping the Vrba–Wetzler Report from those who needed to see it. He said that the ‘VIP train’ for Kasztner’s relatives and friends was the Nazis’ reward for his silence .
A turning point came on 25 February 1954 with the courtroom revelation that Kasztner had been a helpful contact for the SS not only when the Nazis had a knife at the throat of the Jews – when the desperation of the times might indeed have called for desperate measures – but after the war too. When he could no longer claim that he was trying to save Jews by negotiating with the SS, Kasztner had acted as a character witness for some of Eichmann’s most vicious henchmen. He had travelled to Nuremberg in 1947 and had vouched in writing for SS-Standartenführer Kurt Becher, the man charged with the looting of Jewish-owned economic assets in Hungary, saving him from prosecution as a war criminal. Later it would emerge that Kasztner had produced similar testimonials for several senior SS officials he had dealt with, including Becher’s commanding officer, Obergruppenführer Hans Jüttner, as well as the two men with whom he struck his eventual bargain: Obersturmbannführer Hermann Krumey and Hauptsturmführer Dieter Wisliceny. Kasztner had even stayed in touch with the SS men’s families. He had written to Krumey’s wife offering to send ‘food packages’ . Perhaps Kasztner’s motivation was less compassion for Nazis in need than a blackmailed man’s fear of exposure .
The trial was only narrowly a contest of two Hungarian Jews, Kasztner versus Gruenwald. It was also a battle between Israel’s ruling Labour party and the rightist, Revisionist opposition. It was a clash too between a new Israel that imagined itself fearless and strong in the face of all enemies, and what it saw as the Jewish past, a diaspora of weaklings that had let itself be led into the gas chambers like sheep to the slaughter and whose leaders had tried to cut a deal rather than fight back. To his defenders, Kasztner was a convenient vessel into which the new state could pour all its rage and its shame. ‘They need someone to blame ,’ Kasztner’s lover, Hansi Brand, told him during the trial.
On 22 June 1955 the judge delivered his ruling, and it was damning. He concluded that the one-time leader of Hungarian Jewry was guilty of ‘collaboration in the fullest sense of the word ’， that he had ‘sold his soul to the devil’， making a diabolical bargain in which the lives of most of Hungary’s Jews were traded for a privileged few. Central to his crime was his failure to share knowledge. Thanks to the words of Vrba and Wetzler, Kasztner had known the destination of those trains; he knew what Auschwitz meant. But he had kept that knowledge to himself. He had not urged his fellow Jews to resist or escape. On the contrary, he had denied them the essential spur to such action: the facts that spelled out their fate.
The judgment shook Israeli society, triggering a political crisis that would eventually bring down the government. The attorney general appealed against the judge’s decision, so that a case that touched on the most neuralgic spot in the psyche of an ancient people and a new state – probing how its leaders had handled the threat of murderous eradication – would now move to its highest court.
Kasztner worked on the appeal, eking out a living in the cramped office of ?j Kelet , the same small, Hungarian-language newspaper that had operated in pre-war Kolozsvár and was now reborn in Tel Aviv . It was after a night shift there in March 1957 that he parked his car and noticed two young men approach, with a third loitering behind. One of the men asked if he was ‘Dr Kasztner’。 When he said that he was, the man held out a gun and pulled the trigger. But it misfired. Kasztner bolted out of the car, shoving the gunman aside, only for the assailant to shoot again, twice. Kasztner collapsed on the street, the blood draining from him . He was rushed to hospital where he died from his wounds nearly a fortnight later.
The following January, the five-judge panel of the Supreme Court delivered what was now a posthumous decision. They ruled in Kasztner’s favour by four to one. They held that it was unjust to judge a man with knowledge that was only available in hindsight. They accepted that Kasztner had in good faith believed that he was engaged in an effort to save the many, rather than just the few, even if that belief proved fatally misguided. The presiding judge said: ‘Judge not thy neighbour until thou art in his place.’
This, then, was the country Rudolf Vrba had entered as a new citizen, a country torn apart by a case in which his own actions had played a critical part. The Supreme Court was keen to smooth over that divide, to soothe the pain. The new Israel wanted the Nazi destruction of the Jews to be in the past, the province of historians. Except for Rudolf Vrba, still in his early thirties, the past was not dead. It was not even past.
He stayed in Israel for little more than eighteen months. Once he learned that his children and his ex-wife were in England, he applied for a visa and work permit and made plans to head there. And so, as the 1960s got under way, Rudi finally achieved the goal that had inspired, but eluded, the teenage Walter Rosenberg nearly two decades earlier: he arrived in London.
He had almost no money, but early on he had a stroke of luck. He met again the woman who had once rewarded him with cake for pretending to be her child with a treacherous lover. Now living in London, she lent him enough money to furnish his flat. All these years later, in England rather than provincial Slovakia, she was still what his mother would have called a ‘kept woman’。
His job was in the neuropsychiatric research unit of the Medical Research Council, based in Carshalton in Surrey. Now he had a chance to build on the work he had been doing in Prague and that had got him noticed in Moscow. For several years, he had been focused on understanding the details contained in the mystery of how cells maintain themselves, how they interact with other cells, how they respond to the demands of neighbouring cells, how they find, absorb and consume energy, how they repair, how they divide and, importantly, how they die. That last question mattered especially. In Rudi’s work, death was inescapable because death was an indispensable part of all biological life. Even the healthy life of a complex animal depended on a process of death by selection. That was the term of art: selection . Later biologists would refer to the phenomenon as apoptosis, or even programmed cell death.