Word: kastner
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Young Rudolf Kastner had been a fixer in a small Hungarian town. When Admiral Horthy capitulated to Hitler in 1944, Kastner was head of Budapest's Jewish Rescue Committee. Soon after the Nazis took over, Kastner and some of his colleagues were called before Karl Eichmann, a top Nazi official, to listen to a proposition. "I want to do business," Eichmann told them. "Blood for goods, goods for blood. I am willing to sell one million Jews for ten thousand trucks, a thousand cans of coffee and tea and some soap. Go to Switzerland, Turkey, Spain-go where...
...Kastner and his friends pondered this dreadful bargain, the hostages in the case-Hungary's million-odd Jews-were rounded up at the rate of 12,000 a day and herded off to "labor camps" to wait their fate. The bargain was never consummated. Kastner's contacts overseas (one of them, Moshe Sharett, is now Israel's Prime Minister) told him to make a noncommittal answer and keep bargaining. Day after day as the bargainers waited through the spring and summer of 1944, packjammed trainloads of Jews chugged through the pleasant green Hungarian countryside to the camp...
...fate that had befallen his relatives in Hungary. A bent, grief-stricken man in his 70s, he set himself the task of finding out who had betrayed them. Last year, after poring through mountains of yellowed records, he pointed the finger of blame at Rudolf (now Israel) Kastner, by then a citizen of Israel himself, a promising politico in the Mapai Party and an assistant to Cabinet Minister Dov Joseph...
...fact that Kastner was an intimate of the Nazis makes him worthy of the profoundest pity." said the government's lawyer, "since it shows to what limits he was prepared to go to prostrate himself for his people. Kastner could not have called himself a man if he had not favored his friends and relatives on the rescue train. Everyone acts to save his loved ones first. He who denies this is a hypocrite." Defense Attorney Tamir saw it differently. "You began as an ambitious leader," he shouted at Kastner, "and ended up as a Nazi agent...
...Hermann Kastner decided to take sick leave for a few days. In the Communist high command they began to mutter that he might have to be replaced: he did not quite "measure up to his responsibilities...