"When something is not in accordance to their beliefs... feelings... religion they will do anything." "And they did." "And they will keep on doing it." "It's nothing new." "History goes in circles." "It was obvious that, if I shared these beliefs, there will be no question in my mind what should be done about this situation." "Kill the bastard." "Clear the Holy Land from this atrocity." "HORNS BEEP, TRAFFIC PASSES" "You must understand that I was then this Jewish boy." "Not a dark... feverish person with, er... a lust and a need to kill, to get revenge, to be violent towards others." "Not like that at all." "I was a very common, Jewish boy." "Typical of my time." "Only a poisoned one." "Now I feel the adrenalin in my blood mounting." "Yes, the nearer we get to it." "Yes, here we are." "This is the Emanuel Boulevard." "So this is the street?" "This is the street and this, over there, is house number six." "At 11 o'clock, on the night of March 3rd of the year 1957," "I stand hidden in the bushes." "A loaded pistol, its safety catch off." "And a no less loaded stillness in my heart." "And I said, "Israel Kasztner?"" "As if I am delivering something." "And he said," ""Yes."" "Not surprised." "Not moved." "As if he knew." "I raised my hand with the gun and..." "GUN FIRES THREE TIMES" "Israel Kasztner." "It is my agreement, between me and myself, to tell you the truth about the events." "I never said that I shall tell you all the truth." "I came to Israel to find a hero of the Holocaust and found not only his murderer, but a story that has remained a mystery for 60 years." "Who was this man, Kasztner?" "And why did his life end at the barrel of an assassin's gun?" "What was Kasztner's claim to fame, or infamy?" "A Hungarian Jew who negotiated face-to-face with one of the most feared Nazis, Adolf Eichmann, for the last Jews of Europe." "A Jew with a Nazi." "He bargained for a rescue train of 1,600 Jews that went to Switzerland." "And perhaps there were tens of thousands more he saved." "Today, the number of generations rescued by Kasztner would look like this." "And you would know Kasztner's name and call him a hero." "As would I... if it were so simple." "Kasztner was accused of making a secret deal for the train, to save his own family and friends, and not warn the rest of the Jews of Eichmann's plans to murder them." "Was it possible that Kasztner was responsible for not just the lives he saved, but the deaths of a half a million more?" "What I learned is not only who writes history, it's what story they choose to tell." "My journey to understand Kasztner began more than seven years ago, when I saw firsthand the controversy surrounding him and heard the accusations that Kasztner was a collaborator, saving some at the expense of others." "He couldn't have saved everybody." "They had..." "He couldn't have saved everybody!" "He couldn't have!" "How were these people selected for the train?" "Why we didn't know about the goddamned train!" "They didn't tell us!" "No, just a minute..." "No, that's not so!" "Kasztner really acted in a time that nobody acted." "They were sitting there waiting for the end." "So I really consider him not a collaborator." "He at least tried to rescue people and he rescued 1,600 people in the end." "And there was Kasztner's family, who travelled from Israel for the event." "His only daughter, Zsuzsi, and three granddaughters." "But controversy quickly surfaced." "Why present Kasztner as a hero?" "Kasztner was not a hero." "How many?" "How many did what Kasztner did?" "Did your parents?" "He was a hero." "My family escaped." "No, answer me this question." "I want to regain control of this meeting, if I can." "I am Kasztner's granddaughter, Keren." "I'm..." "SOME APPLAUSE" "I am asking you, because I've been hearing that most of my life." "You blame my grandfather for all those things." "I am just asking you - how can you do that?" "The rescue effort by Rezso Kasztner was the single largest successful rescue by Jews during the Holocaust." "We also know the accusations levelled against Kasztner, and the ultimate price that he paid, was levelled against no-one else and the price certainly was paid by no-one else." "And so there is a huge question mark that hangs over this entire story - why?" "Kasztner belonged to a small rescue group in Hungary called the Vaada." "From the early war years, they aided refugees fleeing occupied countries into what was then a free Hungary." "Kasztner, a politician and a lawyer, was one of its leaders." "They were Zionists who believed in Palestine as a homeland." "This maverick band became fluent in bribery, forgery, smuggling Jews to safety and getting aid to others trapped under Nazi rule." "The Jewish leaders in the capital Budapest did little for rescue." "They thought themselves more Hungarian than Jewish and what had been done to Jews of other countries would not be done to them." "And they clung to the hope that, with the Russians at their border, the war would soon be over." "EXPLOSION" "On March 19th, 1944, Germany invaded Hungary and the last Jews of Europe faced their destruction." "With a swiftness not seen before in the war, the Nazis set upon the extermination of Hungarian Jews." "In eight weeks, the Jews of the countryside were rounded up into ghettos and deportations of 12,000 Jews a day began to Auschwitz death camp." "The Jewish community in Budapest alone remained." "This is where Kasztner's negotiations with the Nazis began." "At the outskirts of Jerusalem is Israel's memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust." "Here there were tributes to martyrs, Jews who died resisting, and for the righteous Christians who saved Jews during the war." "But nothing for a negotiator like Kasztner." "Your grandfather, if he is considered a hero...?" "He can't be." "The problem is the Israeli myth of the Shoah, of the Holocaust." "Jews are victims." "Now, if there was a Jew that actually did something, he was not a victim, and he was not a victim." "I mean, our family's heritage of the Shoah, of the Holocaust, is not one of..." "I mean, the victimising was done here, in Israel." "And, in Kasztner's case, it didn't even help when he did die and was murdered." "But what does it mean about the rest of the Jews, if some could actually do something?" "This is a complexity that I don't think the state of Israel, definitely not back then, could handle." "How difficult and how, um, complicated it was to negotiate with the Nazis." "The whole..." "The different faces of it." "I mean..." "So let us see it." "Let us talk about it." "Let us learn from this." "But it's like...it never existed." "TYPEWRITER CLATTERS" "The accusations against Kasztner began immediately at the end of the war." "To answer his critics, he wrote what became known as The Kasztner Report, describing his rescue work in Hungary." ""The special war Hitler is waging against the Jews" ""has already caused the death of five million." ""For Hungary, liberation was only days away." ""Then, on March 19th, 1944, came the German occupation." ""This report is a summary of our work." ""Some things will seem incredible and unbelievable." ""The battle had to be waged by extraordinary means." ""The aim was - save Jewish lives."" "TYPEWRITER BELL RINGS" "The journalist who had a ringside seat to the Kasztner affair in Israel was Uri Avnery." "This was our famous picture." "Malkiel Gruenwald." "This was a picture we were very proud of," "I remember." "Why?" "This is the man as he was." "There was this crazy old man, Malkiel Gruenwald, in Jerusalem and he'd send out sheets of paper - absolute trash and nonsense - and he wrote about Kasztner, saying" "Kasztner co-operated with the Nazis for the destruction of Hungarian Jewry and did this in order to save his closest friends." "Gruenwald, when he wrote this, knew absolutely nothing." "It was gossip." "And he just took it up, like he did everything, he just wrote it down and he distributed it." "No-one took it seriously." "The state of Israel, however, took it seriously." "Kasztner, now a spokesman in the Israeli government, was forced to clear his name and sue Gruenwald for libel in a court of law." "It was unimaginable, the Attorney-General said, that anyone with even a small suspicion of collaboration with Nazis was in the government of this new, pure, idyllic state." "You have got to be very, very sophisticated and very strong and very powerful and very rich in order to be able to cope with such an accusation, which the family and Kasztner weren't, and, evidently, still aren't." "Zsuzsi suffered a lot, being the daughter of Kasztner through all the time of the trial and afterwards." "I was about 9½ years old at the time." "My father couldn't ride a bus or buy a newspaper without being spat at." "Literally, people spat in his face." "Once, they pushed him off the bus." "My school was over there, just across the street there." "You see the building?" "Just behind it." "And that was it." "I went past here every day and the children were hitting me, throwing stones at me, calling me murderess, daughter of a murderer, Nazi, every single day." "They never missed one day." "And how did your parents explain this to you?" "They didn't know." "I never told them." "Never?" "No!" "Never?" "Never." "It's funny, you know, because..." "I remember nights when my father paced at home, half the night." "And I just lay there, listening to him, you know, pace back and forth, back and forth." "I just believed that everything will turn out all right." "The trial - criminal case 124/53 - was the state of Israel versus Malkiel Gruenwald." "The government, representing Kasztner, sued Gruenwald the defendant." "It was supposed to be one of those in-and-out cases, over in a few weeks." "The lawyer for Malkiel Gruenwald was a young, 31-year-old attorney named Shmuel Tamir." "This trial, except of Eichmann's trial, this is the most important trial which took place in Israel." "No-one could enter the court, because it was so full." "Hundreds of people waited outside just to see." "This was the best show in town." "My father believed until his last day that Kasztner was a collaborator." "Sometimes, I thought maybe my father was wrong, maybe it was difficult to judge what this guy did or didn't do during the war." "But as I weighed it again and again and again," "I myself became convinced." "We have to ask ourselves, why were the Nazis ready to give Kasztner the train?" "Why did they do it?" "They had any interest in saving lives?" "They were losing the war and still they were killing Jews, 12,000 Jews a day in Hungary." "Here." "Here we have got him." "There is Kasztner at the beginning of the trial." "Kasztner's role in Budapest was completely unknown to any of us." "He had been dealing with Eichmann, he had been coming and going in and out of the Gestapo headquarters, dealing with as equals in the name of nobody." "Only very slowly, as the trial went on, these puzzles filled in." "The Germans at the end of the war needed supplies and goods." "Adolf Eichmann saw Kasztner's small rescue group as agents to international Jewish wealth and power." "Within weeks of the occupation," "Eichmann made an offer to trade Jewish lives for war goods." "He dispatched Vaada member, Joel Brand, to Istanbul to propose the deal to Jewish leaders and the Allies." "But Brand was imprisoned by the British, suspected of being a Nazi spy." "Kasztner, in Budapest, was left to take over the negotiations for the Jews." ""Eichmann declared himself willing to let all Hungarian Jews live" ""in exchange for war materials." ""One million Jews in exchange for 10,000 trucks." ""On this proposition hung the last hope" ""of a community sentenced to death." ""It was now our job to camouflage" ""the disinterest of the Western world."" "Kasztner, playing for time, told Eichmann that trucks from the Allies would come if Jews could be kept alive." "Eichmann, perhaps in a ruse of his own, agreed to release 1,600 Jews on a train leaving Budapest for a ransom." "Kasztner didn't board the train." "He stayed behind to negotiate its survival." "Ransom for the train was paid from the last cash and valuables of 150 rich passengers and what could be smuggled in from Jewish organisations in Switzerland and Istanbul." "No other person on the train paid." "Kasztner called the train a Noah's Ark." "He didn't compile all the list, only part of it." ""Impossible to put together a list of 600." ""600 names out of 800,000."" "380 were from his home town, Cluj." "19 were his own relatives, including his wife." "And there were students, families and professionals, many rabbis and scholars and orphans." "TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWS" "They were supposed to go to a neutral country, like Spain or Portugal, but the route kept changing." "The train lines were blocked." "The train went east and then it went west." "At one point, they thought they were going to Auschwitz." "But Eichmann decided to keep the Kasztner train as hostages until the trucks from the Allies would come." "On July 9th, 1944, a week after departure, the train arrived in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen." "How far from this world of terror was Kasztner's killer?" "The world Ze'ev Eckstein inhabited was as removed from Kasztner's as if they existed on separate planets." "I looked for him, I looked for answers." "I found myself in Jerusalem where Eckstein lived, a free man in Israel the past 40 years." "You said to yourself, "I have to kill Kasztner, I'm going to kill Kasztner."" "What were the words that you said to yourself?" "It was not the way you put it." "It was a process, a process of ripening." "Of the possibility, and then the intention, and, at last, the doing." "Ze'ev Eckstein would have been a child at the time of the war, living in what was then called Palestine before Israel was even a country, a territory under British rule." "The Jews were represented by a quasi-government called the Jewish Agency, headed by David Ben-Gurion." "I was born in 1933." "Six years after that, the World War, the Second World War broke and, er..." "the world became turmoil." "And the rumours and the echoes from around was, er...accumulating, clouds and fears and nervousness." "And it didn't really touch my life." "And yes, my life was, in a way, even as a youth, quite boring, quite normal." "And I wanted to participate, to grow up soon, to become a soldier." "Because the suffering of my people, the Jewish people, it was not something that happened elsewhere without any bearing on me." "It was..." "a living history for me and this is why I reacted when time came to react." "So what's the name of this museum?" "I'm not sure." "Zsuszi, have you been here before?" "No." "These are nice Hungarian Jews that made a museum here." "As far as I know." "I don't know much about it." "This is, by the way, a corner which is dedicated to all those who were active in the rescue operation of Jews in Hungary." "Here is a picture, a really famous one, part of the members of the Help and Rescue Committee." "Israel Kasztner, Hansi Brand and others." "I was asking my mother, and she said one of the reasons she never came here before is that she's so afraid to be disappointed by not finding her father mentioned in museums, usually." "Yes." "And you have this corner and Rezso Kasztner is here in the photograph with the committee and that's the only mention of him." "No, it's not the only mention." "No, in the exhibition." "Most people will go through the exhibition and go home." "And they will really not get any impression of Kasztner being an important saviour, that's true." "Even here, I can't be objective about it." "But if you talk historically, objectively, he saved the most Jews in the whole Holocaust." "Yes." "So I think, at least here, he should be singled out." "And he's not." "OK." "We're not going into arguments straight away." "And I'm not arguing, I'm just saying it." "One guy who came here, he wanted to tear down this picture." "He said, "Why do you keep this guy's picture on the wall?" "I'm not going to visit this place again."" "I'm angry and I'm hurt." "Why come here and be insulted?" "At least to single him out in the picture." "I'm just..." "I'm hurting for him over and over again." "He worked so hard and he wasn't a modest person." "He wanted the glory too after the Holocaust." "Not while, that wasn't on his mind then." "But afterwards, he was so proud of what he did and he did want...he did want the glory, the fame and glory." "He did." "That's why he consented to go to the trial, because he said," ""Oh, there's a chance, where everybody will see what a great deed they had done."" "But he gets murdered over and over again." "Neither the trial nor the public fully appreciated what Kasztner did." "Kasztner was meeting Eichmann in Budapest at the height of the Nazi terror." "Just the mentioning of the name of Adolf Eichmann frightened us." "We were saying it very quietly." "Then Kasztner went, and conducting with him negotiations." "People say," ""You talked to Eichmann!" Of course you talked to Eichmann." "This was the person you had to talk to." ""Eichmann begins to roar." ""I keep quiet." ""'Your nerves are shot, Kasztner." ""'I will send you to Auschwitz so you can recuperate.'" ""In this moment, Eichmann seemed to be the happiest man in the world." ""Besides that, as most often lately, he was drunk." ""He had to be closely watched."" "Kasztner was a nomad." "He pretended to be able to offer to them something and he hoped that this is going to succeed." "He played the role of someone who is really important." "And he liked it, I think." "Who to take, whom not to take?" "Everybody was demanding, "Take me, my brother, my mother, my father."" "And then you have this historical role, then you come to Israel and, next day, you are nothing." "In a way, the trial was the salvation of Kasztner, because he became again a very important person." "He was again in the centre." "Kasztner arrived in Israel December 1947." "He took three jobs in his new country - with the government of the ruling party of Ben-Gurion, a broadcaster for a radio station and as a newspaper journalist." "Despite Gruenwald's accusations that he stole the money for Jewish ransom," "Kasztner arrived in Israel penniless." "In 52, when I was 21 years old," "I started to work in the Hungarian language daily in Tel Aviv called Uj Kelet." "And the night editor of Uj Kelet was Dr Rezso Kasztner." "He was a very charming, sharp-tongued, intellectual Hungarian Jew and he was a ladies' man." "And all the ladies in our office were in love with him." "He was a charmer." "He was a charmer, yes." "What was the most difficult thing for him during the trial?" "He just couldn't grasp why people don't listen." "Why don't they listen to him?" "This is a picture in court, while Kasztner was giving evidence," "Kasztner on the witness stand, Tamir cross-examining him." "And Gruenwald listening." "It was the Kasztner affair which, for the first time, brought the Holocaust home to us." "We, who had been here in Palestine, practically in complete safety, cannot even imagine." "Who can imagine it?" "At the beginning of the trial, Kasztner basked in the limelight, testifying to his rescue work in Hungary." "The judge even suggested Gruenwald should withdraw the accusations and call it a day." "Then Tamir turned the tables on Kasztner." "The cross examination went into weeks to prove Kasztner's collaboration with the Nazis." "Why didn't Kasztner warn the Hungarian Jews of deportations?" "Why didn't he lead a revolt?" "Did Kasztner promise more than trucks for the special train?" "Did he promise silence about Auschwitz?" "So that Eichmann would have a clear path to murder hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews swiftly and without resistance." "This brings us to what Kasztner did." "Does he have the right to play God and decide" "I saved you on the expense of others or tell them what you know?" ""I told them the situation is dire."" ""When it was clear the trains were going to Auschwitz did you tell anyone?"" ""I didn't know." "I had a fear." ""I could only say there was a danger of deportations." ""And deportation means death."" "Accusing him years after that he could warn Hungarian Jewry, that he was..." "that he had to rescue them is giving him importance and power that he never had." "Kasztner gathered in a wood outside Budapest members of the Zionist youth movement and asked them to go from one ghetto to another and warn that trains mean deportations to a death camp." "Don't board the trains." "What was the reaction?" ""Hey, youngsters, go home and stop this panic." ""Who sent you?" "Who are you?"" "Such reality is so destructive that you don't face it." "I remember very well one sentence he said to me." "He said, "Look at me, I was a product of the circumstances." ""And under the circumstances in Hungary, I was a hero."" "But in the Israel of 1950s, heroes didn't talk to their enemies." "A real hero was one who fought, who took up arms." "Like the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, who put up a last desperate resistance." "750 Jews against German soldiers, tanks and planes." "For the Jews, it meant death, but death with honour." "And the ghetto uprising became the symbol of heroism for the new state of Israel." "The rebel in ghetto Warsaw, which is something that I admire, of course." "They didn't want to just die without giving a fight." "You've got to give them for it." "Yeah." "But it's..." "That's all Yad Vashem can handle." "That's all the state of Israel can handle." "Unfortunately, I mean, it's so bad for us." "Shouldn't you commemorate this kind of courage, this option of living side by side with those who gave up their lives?" "At the heart of the Kasztner trial was the question, whose country was it?" "Those who compromised or those who resisted?" "It came to a bitter head under the British mandate, and the British harsh immigration quotas for Jews fleeing occupied Europe." "Ben-Gurion and the Jewish Agency believed that the British were invaluable allies against the Nazis." "Other Jews, mostly from the right wing, saw the British as the enemy, as the British forces prevented the rescue of the European Jews." "Armed resistance arose." "Weapons were smuggled in." "Foreign ministers assassinated and the King David Hotel in Jerusalem bombed." "Killing more than 80 people." "The Jewish extremists were arrested by the British." "12 of them even hanged, many imprisoned." "It was often the Jewish leadership who turned them in." "Brother against brother." "One of those arrested was lawyer Shmuel Tamir." "Tamir was interested in two things." "One, he was a lawyer, and he wanted to win his case." "And he was out to get Zionist leadership responsible for his being sent to exile and prison in Africa." "My co-operation with Tamir, which started long before Kasztner, was a common fight against Ben-Gurion." "When Israel became a nation and the British mandate lifted, it was Ben-Gurion and his party, called Mapai, that took over the leadership." "Kasztner was a part of that party." "They dominated every sphere of political and economic life." "And essentially excluded everyone else from power." "The right wing felt betrayed." "They had paid with their blood for Israel's independence and earned their right to be players in their country's future." "In Kasztner's trial, they saw the perfect vehicle to bring down, as they saw it, Ben-Gurion's traitorous government." "We saw this as dynamite, and it actually was." "Avnery's magazine was the most vocal opposition to the early government." "It was impossible to ignore." "If I put something on the cover of Haolam Hazeh, it was impossible to ignore." "We were a very powerful combination, Tamir and I." "And it came into full play in the Kasztner affair." "You kept the Kasztner trial in the headlines." "We put it in the headlines." "It was not in the headlines to start with." "We put it in the headlines and we saw to it that it stayed in the headlines." "Tamir and Avnery used the Kasztner trial to fight the government in the court room and in the press." "Others nurtured their anger in the extreme edges of Israeli society, biding their revenge for a future day." "Ze'ev Eckstein stumbled upon one of these groups." "I belonged to the good guys." "My parents, my government, my police, my everyday life." "And when I met others who talk about revolution, we talk about... actual taking weapons and change the situation." "I..." "At the beginning, it was against my conventions." "So I consider them enemy of the state, enemy of the nation." "The Underground?" "The Underground." "The secret wing of it." "The name of this group?" "The name of this group" " Sulam." "The Sulam was a political club of certain right-wing circles." "Sulam, from the Book of Genesis, meaning ladder joining the Earth to Heaven." "The extremists in its shadows envisioned the Kingdom of Israel whose borders would reach the Biblical "Promised Land"." "When you decided to inform..." "Well, I went to the police to tell the police you should know there are troublemakers, underground, whatever." "And there it all started." "Because nobody, nobody was impressed with my naivety and my goodwill and my patriotism." "They realised that a stupid sucker young person come to them and they can use him, and they did." "The Shin Bet, Israel's secret service, recruited Eckstein as an informer and sent him back to the Sulam, to report on its extremist fringe." "And the bastards, mind you, called the Shin Bet, they sent me there like a lamb into a lion's cage." "No preparation." "No vetting." "No antidote." "It would have been a miracle if I was not poisoned." "So this is from Ze'ev Eckstein." "You never got a letter from him before?" "Never." "Never got a phone call from him?" "Of course not." "Since he murdered your father, nothing?" "Nothing." "He was going to agree to meet you on your terms." "I went to his place in Jerusalem, instead he said," ""This is what I have for her."" "So I have no idea what's in this letter, it's stapled." "Signed and sealed?" "Signed and sealed, this is yours." "Do you want to read it?" "Yes, of course." "I'd still like to meet him." "Really?" "Yes." "What would it serve?" "Because I desperately want to know who was responsible..." "for the death of my father." "If we meet face-to-face and we talk, maybe I can understand it better." "It's an issue that needs to be cleared." "I'd like to know who sent him." "Who's responsible for the assassination?" "Somebody sent him." "The extremists, calling themselves the Kingdom of Israel, exploded a 40-kilo bomb in the Soviet Embassy to protest Russia's treatment of Jews." "This was the group that the Shin Bet had sent Eckstein to spy on." "These people, they had their charm." "HE LAUGHS" "They, er..." "They cared about me." "A sensation which was not so common in my life." "They talked to me." "They explained things to me." "And they were bright." "And a novice like me, little education, meeting somebody like that it was a meeting of a dwarf with a giant." "And slowly, slowly, there was a real inner change in me." "My opinions turned." "My convictions changed." "And at one point, I realised that what was the good guys are the bad guys and the bad guys" " Wow!" " they are the creme de la creme of this nation." "RINGING TONE" "No answer." "'Hello?" "' Hello." "'Shalom.' Shalom. 'Shalom.'" "'Bye.' Bye." "I really wanted to ask him many questions." "Some of them, you know," "I really know nothing about him." "I would have wanted to know where he grew up and what happened to him." "I'd have wanted to hear how could he have killed in such cold blood?" "The Kasztner trial had gone from weeks into months and Kasztner from plaintiff to defendant." "Both Kasztner and the government of Ben-Gurion were painted with the same brush of collaboration." "Kasztner's silence with the Nazis bought him a train and Ben-Gurion's co-operation with the British won him a country." "With all the finger-pointing, nobody seemed to be blaming the Nazis." "Here the regime of corroboration." "This is the trial cutting the tail of Kasztner." "And it says, "Perhaps we should start from the head."" "It's not a trial of Kasztner." "It is a whole regime which is being accused." "Ben-Gurion judged realities." "And he said, quite rightly, that the Germans and the Allies and the World War, there isn't much to do about rescue." "Because this Eichmann offer was no offer." "What kind of an offer was that?" "Merchandise and trucks for Jews?" "There's a World War going on." "But we have to try, even if there is only a chance of one to a million." "And they tried." "Ben-Gurion, essential talk to London, where Weizmann stayed." "And together they went to Anthony Eden." "They went to him so many times that Anthony Eden said that if he sees these two wailing Jews again, he will fire those who let them in." "They were trying their best, but they were helpless." "The Jewish Leadership under the British did make a heroic act to save." "Jewish parachutists were dropped behind enemy lines." "Three of them made their way to Hungary." "But by then, the Jews were already being deported to Auschwitz." "The parachutists were caught almost immediately." "During the trial, Kasztner was blamed for not saving them." "Especially the young poet, Hannah Senesh, who was tortured and killed by the Gestapo." "She died bravely, but Senesh didn't rescue anyone." "And like the rebels of the Warsaw ghetto, hers was the story that captivated a country." "As Kasztner's fate was on trial, the country made a choice." "Once again, what kind of hero they wanted." "As Senesh's stock rose, Kasztner's declined." "A class at Tel-Aviv University was debating the subject." "I was invited to learn what this generation thought now." "So how did the survivors act during the trial?" "They were afraid to speak up." "To open their mouths." "It was so frightening, those days." "In the mentioning of the name Kasztner, it was frightening." "CHOIR SINGS IN HEBREW" "Today in Israel, survivors and those who perished are honoured." "But it wasn't always like that." "Not for the survivors who came after the war." "And not during the time of the Kasztner trial." "When they felt guilty for having survived and for not having fought." "In Palestine during the '40s, there grew a new sense of power, of capabilities." "We are fighting." "We are the new Jews." "And they went like sheep to slaughter." "Even in the death camp, they couldn't do something." "There were millions of Jews." "Why didn't they rise as we would have done?" "As we THOUGHT we would have done?" "When the first survivors came, after the state of Israel was created, they were met with this attitude." "Yes." "Yes." "Tell me." "Three times I got this yellow star." "One time by the Germans." "Second time, when we came to Israel and the Israeli youngsters - the Haganah, the Palmach and others, the Jewish came from the concentration camps," ""You are frightened Jews." "You are weak." "You are nothing." "You're not proud, nothing."" "Only after..." "Only after we have the third time a yellow star, when we understand that we are guilty, that we are here, and because of us, the other 600,000 Jews from Hungary went to the crematorium." "Till now, after 60 years, we don't feel..." "Hungarian survivors, not just Kasztner survivors, came to Yad Vashem for the 60th anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust." "There was no mention of Kasztner or his committee." "I arranged a meeting for the Kasztner survivors with the head of Yad Vashem." "They had some things to say." "Not all survivors failed to come to Kasztner's defence because of fear." "There were other reasons." "Some were safe in America, like the Satmar Jews." "Their rabbi was saved by Kasztner." "While the trial was going on and Kasztner asked for him to testify on his behalf." "He said, "You saved my life?" ""God saved my life, not you."" "And that was it." "It was very disappointing to see there are people, other survivors, that can do so much for the cause, and they wouldn't." "Kasztner survivors are very, very, very, very wealthy people." "Pardon?" "Were you grateful to Kasztner for saving your life?" "I'm not thinking of Kasztner at all." "I'm not grateful." "No." "I could have saved my life if I couldn't go there." "I think it was terrible how we were taken away." "Why?" "Because we were taken away like animals." "But you did go to Switzerland." "After being in a place they could have put you to die, to burn you." "In Bergen-Belsen." "But you didn't die." "You didn't die, but we were never supposed to be in a place like that." "To see the misery, to see the people going to the..." "We saw them going, covered with a sheet there." "Why should I think of him?" "What he did?" "Why you making hero about the dead?" "He's a dead man." "318 from the Kasztner train, many children, were released from Bergen-Belsen in August, a month after they arrived." "The remaining Jews were held four more months until December." "No trucks ever came from the Allies." "But Kasztner negotiated more money to free the hostages." "A train took them to the border of Switzerland." "We come to the border and we got down from the German train and we see a beautiful train with light." "This was the first time that we see Kasztner and they are counting us." "You remember it?" "THEY SING" "SINGLE VOICE SINGS "HATIKVAH"" "# Ulfa'atey mizrach kadimah" "# Ayin I'Tzion tzofiyah" "# Od lo avdah tikvateinu" "# Hatikvah bat shnot alpayim" "# L'hiyot am chofshi b'artzenu" "# Eretz Tzion v'Yerushalayim. #" "Then Kasztner managed to get 18,000 people, including women, children, elderly to a labour camp into Austria, not Auschwitz, by negotiating not just with Eichmann, but with a fellow by the name of Kurt Andreas Becher." "Becher's job was to extort Jewish money and property for the Nazis." "Kasztner bribed Becher to put the 18,000 Jews in occupied Austria until the war was over." "And they were saved." "All of them survived." "And at the very end, Kasztner and Kurt Becher travelled from a concentration camp to a concentration camp in Germany, which prevented the execution of the inmates." "They travelled, of course, in an SS Mercedes car." "Having the two lightnings of the SS on the plate." "But people started to believe that Kasztner was very much taken by his proximity to the Germans, that he had adopted the Nazi-style." "The worst of these accusations came from Eichmann himself." "Life published in two consecutive issues, in one of the most widely read magazines in the world, unvarnished Adolf Eichmann." "After football." "After Hollywood news." "Part two of Eichmann's own story - "I regret nothing."" "Eichmann was an inveterate liar." "Eichmann characterises Kasztner as an equal, which is completely absurd." "But it was all part of the strategy to blame the Jews for your own destruction." "The only hope of saving any lives was to do what they ended up doing, which was to negotiate, stall for time." "Bribe Nazis wherever they could." "That had worked elsewhere." "And it was the ONLY thing that had worked elsewhere." "Resistance had not worked." "Kasztner rejoined his family in Switzerland in April 1945." "Zsuzsi Kasztner found old wire recordings her father had made over 50 years ago." "They're listening to it for the first time tonight." "CHILD SINGS ON RECORDING" "Now, for us, it's the first time we ever hear them." "Ever." "It was so sweet!" "I mean, we always talk about Kasztner in terms of tragedy and what happened with the trial and after the trial." "You understand that there was a good life before all of that happened." "After the war, Kasztner wrote an affidavit in defence of Kurt Becher, saving him from prosecution as a war criminal." "Kasztner wrote the letter in the name of the Jewish Agency." "The Jewish Agency denied that they knew anything about this letter." "There was a turning point in the trial." "The turning point was when my father found the affidavit in favour of Kurt Becher." "Kasztner didn't know my father had it." "And it went quiet in that court room and Kasztner said," ""Yes, it's my report."" "And you saw that something happened to this judge." "In a moment, he changed completely." "To this Israeli public, Kasztner was supposed to explain why he testified in favour of a Nazi general, who was directly responsible for stealing the property of all the Jews in Hungary." "Whatever the explanation was, he could not explain this at that time." "He can hardly explain it today, I think." "17 months from the trial's beginning, Judge Halevi delivered his opinion." "It was over 300 pages and took nearly 14 hours to read in the courtroom." "Concluding that Kasztner, in dealing with Nazis, the judge wrote, he had sold his soul to the devil." "It was, we took our..." "It was unbelievable." "It was suddenly a darkness fall on us." "This was the feeling." "A judgment by a judge, which was in a way a death sentence, because if you sell your soul to the Nazis, you should've been killed." "When the Judge Halevi's verdict was announced, my father was..." "I wouldn't say happy." "He felt satisfaction." "He used that expression, that Kasztner's soul was burnt in Auschwitz." "Like the bodies of the Jews were burnt in Auschwitz, his soul was burnt in Auschwitz." "The government immediately appealed the verdict." "Kasztner thought he would still have his day in court but he was more alone than ever now." "My father, Kasztner's brother, wrote a letter to Ben-Gurion, asking him to intervene, to do something about the case, but Ben-Gurion didn't want to intervene." "He was not only a leader, he was a politician." "He didn't want to burn his fingers in such a messy problem." "And in a few months, another crisis took precedent." "Egypt had closed the Suez Canal." "Israel, Britain and France retaliated." "The war lasted only days before the entire Egyptian peninsula of Sinai was conquered." "How did the Sinai change you, the Sinai war?" "The Sinai changed..." "It was as if... bringing the burning cord to the barrel of powder." "I didn't witness a war before that." "I was witness there." "I participate in it." "And I regret to say the killings." "There was much of these killings." "I lost balance." "Blood is the commodity of war." "And everything in wartime is expendable." "Also life." "Also rights." "Law." "You can easily imagine what an impression and disorder and turning upside down of the values of... somebody like me." "Israel was forced by the United States and the UN to give up the Sinai peninsula only months after its capture." "For the extremists of the right-wing, it was another betrayal by Ben-Gurion." "Giving up land and the promise of the Kingdom of Israel." "The go-ahead was given to kill Kasztner." "His murder would be a warning to all the traitors in the government." "Their turn would come." "Weren't you worried about him?" "Wasn't the family worried about him?" "Of course." "Of course we were worried." "We were afraid for his life." "So they sent you to Menkes?" "Yes." "I was sent to Menkes for operating instructions." "And he said to you?" ""Let's do away with the bastards and start with Kasztner." ""The people of Israel will make a revolution." ""Tanks will go in the streets and bomb and shelling," ""after which, everything will be different." ""History will be different."" "The weapon provided by Menkes but all the rest was up to me, which I did." "I found accomplice, Dan Shemer, and we discussed how we should have a car to do it." "Shall we start when you first met Eckstein?" "I met Eckstein in the army, we were in the same platoon." "Our views were the same." "We were extremely on the right wing, so when he told me, "Listen, we're going to kill Kasztner"," "I said, "Of course, why not?"" "I was very excited." "I said, "Really?" "We are going to do this?" ""Take me in consideration, of course"." "How old were you?" "21, 22." "Eager to do something and sick of doing nothing." "Last I saw Kasztner, the night before he was assassinated." "Because we were that night together in the office of Uj Kelet and he said, "Let's take a walk"." "He wanted some fresh air." "And I didn't think he had something specific to tell me." "He just wanted to breathe some air in every sense of the word." "And then a cat overturned something at close quarters and we heard some noise." "And I saw that Kasztner is frightened and then I understood that he is fearing for his life." "The cat." "And the next day, he was murdered." "I picked up the Jeep." "I picked up Ze'ev." "Do you remember being nervous?" "No." "No, not at all." "I was just a driver." "Then I sat there and waited, waited, waited." "Where?" "In the Jeep." "And we waited there and finally he said, "That's it, he's here." "He's coming"." "And he went out of the Jeep." "Did you see anything?" "No, nothing." "And I heard shouts or I didn't..." "I can't remember did I hear or not and then he came back and said, "Drive"." "And I drove." "That's it." "My mother started knitting me this sweater." "She was knitting it on the night that my father was murdered and then when she heard the shots, she stopped knitting and she never picked it up again." "Of course, at the funeral I was there with my father." "I went along." "It was on Purim." "On Purim Day, yes." "The funeral was on Purim Day." "One side of Tel-Aviv there was the funeral." "The other side, there was the Purim Shpiel." "The festival." "The festival." "It was the only time in my whole life I remember my father crying." "He never cried before or after." "It was very, very intense." "He was crying and the atmosphere..." "There were many, many people there." "I don't know how many." "Thousands maybe." "There were thousands." "Thousands." "It was very sad." "Eckstein and Shemer were picked up for questioning within 24 hours and Menkes arrested soon after." "They were turned in by two other Shin Bet double agents." "One day I heard that Kasztner was shot, and two young men, the age of 20 years, they have shot him." "From the court they brought them straight to me." "Eckstein came into the room as if he was a hero." "He felt that he will be mentioned in the history as a hero who saved the face of Israel, of the Jewish people in the world, as if God had sent him to save Israel and to kill Dr Kasztner." "Show me the house." "HE LAUGHS" "I show you the bottom of my soul." "Why do you need to see the bricks?" "It's over there." "The flag?" "I was quite an ardent believer in this flag." "And I believed that I act in its name." "'And the father came into the room and the father started to cry." "Eckstein stood very cold-blooded." "He just look at his father and said," ""Daddy, you don't have to cry"." ""I know what I did and I am ready to pay the price." ""And I think somebody had to do justice"." "The father left and the moment the father shut the door," "Ze'ev Eckstein started to cry." "It was not the same hero." "And he only wanted one thing " ""Please let me stay here until I've finished to cry"." "I said, "You stay here until you finished to cry"." "Why did you pardon the assassins?" "I didn't pardon them." "We were put on the spot, both my mother and I." "What kind of a stupid idea to ask whether we'd agree to free the killers?" "It's preposterous!" "But we were asked by the Prime Minister, Mr Ben-Gurion in person." "I knew it was going to be done anyway and I didn't want it done against my will." "There were many people who wrote letters to the President for Eckstein to release him." "Because they thought after we heard all the truth about Dr Kasztner, maybe Eckstein was right." "This was not the way to solve the problem but maybe he was right." "I think many people thought so." "This is my father's grave and this is my mother's." "She wanted it just the name and date of birth and date of death." "She didn't want all the inscriptions." "Only Israel Kasztner." "When he was buried, then for the whole public in Israel, the whole affair was finished." "He was killed, he got what he..." "Deserved." "And that's it." "So when the verdict of the Supreme Court was published, no-one noticed because it had no meaning any more." "Israel's Supreme Court, in a 4-1 decision, overturned Halevi's verdict." "It was read on January 15th 1958, almost a year after Kasztner was murdered, at the age of 51." "He was acquitted of any collaboration, or taking any of the ransom money for the release of Hungarian Jews." "But the charge of lying about the testimony of the Becher affidavit stands until this day, and so do the questions." "After the trial, it was discovered that Kasztner wrote statements in defence of not just SS Colonel Becher, but for other Nazi officers." "Hermann Krumey," "Hans Juettner, and Wisliceny, who he had contact with during the war." "Was Kasztner being blackmailed, or was it a gentleman's agreement of honour for their help in saving Jews?" "There was an historian who came to different conclusions about Kasztner's testimonies and in Israel's own archive uncovered documents that surprisingly hadn't come to light during the trial." "In the trial, the Jewish leadership claimed ignorance in the affidavit for Becher, but Barri found that this was no secret at all, and everyone knew about it." "Barri believed Kasztner was sent to give affidavits at the bidding of the Jewish Agency, and this is what they traded the affidavits for." "The stolen property and ransom money of the Hungarian Jews that had been in Becher's control." "Arms and machinery to build a new Israel." "Correspondence, not just from Kasztner, but directly with the Jewish Agency." "And to discover the whereabouts of Eichmann, during the time when the Americans had already turned their attention to Russia and the Cold War." "Did Kasztner deal with Nazis during the war to rescue Jews, and afterwards with ex-Nazis to help a new Israel, when it was scandalous to do so?" "And did Kasztner decide in his trial not to betray the Jewish leadership, hoping they would come forward and confess he acted on their behalf?" "If that's what he thought, he would be disappointed." "And there was still the rumours surrounding the murder." "That the Jewish leadership thought Kasztner knew too much, and perhaps it would be better for all if he were to be eliminated." "Did the Shin Bet have a hand in the murder?" "Did they know what Eckstein and the underground were planning?" "Ze'ev Eckstein had one more thing to tell me." "The joke is that three-quarters of this underground was composed of agents, Shin Bet agents." "There were so many Shin Bet agents, nobody knew that this assassination was being planned?" "I was told later that Kasztner had a bodyguard, and it was removed, a day or so before the assassination." "You think that it was concocted by one party, and it was not." "And I came from here." "I looked at him and I said," ""Israel Kasztner"..." "And shot him straight in the face, from..." "Straight." "You know what happened?" "You won't believe it." "It didn't fire." "The gun?" "The gun didn't fire." "It was an old Russian rusted gun and it didn't fire, so it was a blank bullet." "I made a shot." "He turned, and made around me because I was in front of the door." "Rounded me and galloped to the darkness, here, to the entrance, so, aimlessly I shot." "You shot him?" "I shot in the direction." "I didn't see him." "It was dark." "I didn't see him." "He disappeared in the direction." "And then I shot again." "Three shots?" "Two." "One blank, two live." "In the direction." "And a... second after I had a third shot, I shot a third time." "There was a report of another shot." "Another gun?" "Another gun." "Bang." "And then, immediately, screaming." "You heard screaming?" "Yes." "I never told anybody." "I never came forward to imply that beside the three of us - me, Menkes and Shemer - there was another party, and more than one party that was in the plot." "So, was there a conspiracy?" "Was this another grassy knoll?" "Could I prove there was another gun?" "No." "But I couldn't disprove it either." "The ballistics tests proved that the bullet from him was from the gun the police said they found in the Jeep." "Was it the same gun that Ze'ev Eckstein left?" "Was it switched?" "Unlikely, but he never veered from his story of another gunman." "At his trial, Eckstein never testified, nor confessed to the number of bullets he shot." "Perhaps he was delusional." "His psychiatric report mentioned his imbalance during the Sinai War, but they also said he wasn't a liar." "I say, in very simple terms, it was not my bullet that killed him." "But that does not diminish my responsibility." "So, Mama?" "Mmm." "So, are you anxious?" "Yes." "Very." "Can't you tell?" "Remind me, why did you want to meet him?" "'At the end of our filming, Eckstein finally agreed to meet with the Kasztner family.'" "Are you ready?" "Is he here?" "He's here." "Shalom." "Shalom." "Well, I am emotional, so every now and then I shall have to keep quiet, to overcome." "I'm trying to understand what brought you, at the age of how old were you, then, when you killed my father?" "22." "22." "Just as I thought." "What brought you, at the age of 22, a young Israeli who had nothing to do with the Holocaust, to decide to kill my father?" "Zsuzsi, when I took part in what I took part, it was not against Dr Kasztner." "Kasztner was the name." "Kasztner." "It was a against what he symbolised for me, at the time." "What did he symbolise for you?" "Evil." "Are you sure you want to get into it?" "Yes, quite sure." "I'm absolutely certain that you don't share my views of the time." "You were fanatic?" "Yes." "I was absolutely sure and certain that I'm the extension of God's hand." "And I admit, I was a pawn on a big board." "And who was, erm..." "Was pulling the strings?" "Who was pulling your strings?" "Who pulled the string and what was his name and what happened there answer..." "I have to disappoint you." "Let me ask you, please, please, please, because I believe you." "You were 22 and you were young and very enthusiastic, and I believe you completely, OK." "I mean, still, you did it." "Isn't the least you can do for my mother, after having taken away her father from her, at least answering her questions?" "What did your family think about it?" "What did they think about what you did?" "My father, he felt responsibility." "By witnessing his humanity, his greatness of heart..." "I remembered such things exist." "I owe your mother, and I'm here because I owe her." "The fact that I can sit here, with your mother..." "She won't absolve me... but this means a great deal to me." "Can we leave, you and I, can we leave this crowd and have a silent coffee?" "All right." "We can go out on the balcony." "It's beautiful there." "Lead the way." "We'll go outside." "I never knew what was said on that balcony, but it was another part of this story that will remain unknowable." "As for Kasztner, there may always be a mystery, but perhaps the world has shifted to understand this other kind of hero." "Now, on a wall at Yad Vashem, there is finally a description of Kasztner." "And, in an historic ceremony after 50 years," "Yad Vashem and the state of Israel had agreed to accept Kasztner's archives." "SINGS SOMBRE SONG" "...where ordinary people are put in hell." "They start to tell each other a story and the hell is that they keep on telling the story." "They cannot stop telling the story." "They cannot escape and there is no liberation." "This is hell." "For me."