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Israel Kasztner
Photo: David Rubinger
Newspaper headline announcing Kasztner's murder

Redeeming Kasztner

The man who 'sold his soul to the devil' is given a second chance at redemption

Dr. Israel Kasztner was a Hungarian Jew who courageously negotiated face to face with Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann in an attempt to save the lives of a group of Jews during the Holocaust. By trading money, gold, diamonds, and other unknown commodities Kasztner was able to release 1,700 Jews to Switzerland who would otherwise have been led to their deaths at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp.

 

After the Holocaust, Kasztner moved to Israel in 1952 to start a new life as the spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry. However, peace for Kasztner in the Jewish homeland was not to be, as once he arrived the Israeli people ostracized him for collaborating with Nazis. Condemned a traitor after a damaging battle in court in which a judge ruled that Kasztner had sacrificed mass Jewry for a chosen few, Kasztner was shot to death in 1957 by Jewish right-wing extremist Ze’ev Eckstein.

 

Though the Supreme Court of Israel overturned the ruling in 1958, much of Kasztner’s story was left in a historic grey area, leaving him not yet a hero and not quite a villain. After the Holocaust Israel made heroes out of the people who fought the Nazis and resisted, not those who sat down and tried to negotiate with the enemy. Two years ago Yad Vashem received Kasztner’s archives and it is only now that light is being shed on the story of this controversial man.

 

Film about his life and death 

With her new film "Killing Kasztner", award winning documentary filmmaker Gaylen Ross explores all the aspects of Kasztner’s legacy and seeks to find the truth among the falsehoods and inaccuracies that characterized him, as well as the political climate that informed his legacy.

 

Ross asks: "Who is a hero? The one who picks up arms or who sits down with his enemies? Who determines how we choose heroes? Historians? Popular culture? Myth? And why do we need heroes and argue to the death their right to be so?"

 

The film follows Kasztner’s story to the present day, and confronts specifically the people who believe in his redemption and those who hold beliefs against him. Ross takes us on an amazing journey through Israel and time introducing us to both his family and the survivors he saved, but ultimately the killer who took his life.

 

“The film also examines the controversial affidavits that Kasztner gave after the war for SS officers Kurt Becher and former Nazis. Through the research of historian Shoshana Barri, the documentary startlingly poses that Kasztner gave the affidavits with the full knowledge of the Jewish Agency,and at their request to recover Jewish stolen ransom and goods to assist a new Israel and even to locate Eichmann.”

  "The story of Kasztner is also the story of Israel, a young nation coming to terms with the unimaginable, the early years after the Holocaust," explains Ross. "Kasztner was comprehended by the country’s own struggle to define itself under that horrendous shadow. He has yet to be rehabilitated in Israel and in the Diaspora. And, like all history each generation has to peel back its own layers of revelation and truth."

 

This film is one more piece of an amazing tale that is one of the last untold stories of the Holocaust.

 


פרסום ראשון: 05.13.09, 15:43
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