Rudolf Kasztner
THE
KASTNER TRIAL - shown at the Jewish Film Festival in
1997
Czech
film about Rabbi Weissmandel: Among Blind
Fools
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A scene
from Perdition at The Gate Theatre, London, UK,
1999
Press
comment and opinion, 1987
Between January and May 1987 some
120 editorials, articles and letters to the editor appeared
in the mainstream British press about the play Perdition
before and after it was withdrawn by the Royal Court
Theatre. - Seán
Mac Mathúna
A new play about the
Jewish Holocaust which opens in London later this month
claims that Jews, and specifically Zionist Jews
collaborated with the Nazis ... Perdition which is being
put on at the Royal Court is the first stage play by Jim
Allen, a former miner whose previous television work ...
has made him no stranger to controversy ... The play,
directed by Ken
Loach was
first presented to the Royal Court two years ago
...[T]he present opening date of January 27 is
almost a year later than originally planned.
David
Rose (The
Guardian, 14th January 1987).
Judging by David Rose's
exposition of the case, Jim Allen's interpretation of
Zionist-Nazi collaboration is basically correct ... I
very much welcome the Royal Court decision (to stage the
play) and the public debate/controversy that it is likely
to generate. Public discussion of this aspect of Zionist
history has been evaded or suppressed in many significant
quarters. It is important that an open discussion of the
subject take place. I and many others hope that this
discussion will contribute to a critical reassessment of
the role of the Zionist movement, the World Zionist
Organization and the state of Israel in the determination
of Jewish history at the time of and after the Holocaust
as well as today - Uri
Davis (The
Guardian, 21st January 1987)
I am pulling the play. Not
because it contains any inaccuracies, or is in any way
anti-Semitic, but because it might cause distress among
some members of the Jewish community - Max
Stafford-Clark, Artistric director of the Royal Court
Theatre in a phone call to Jim Allen just 36 hours before
the first screening of the play (From
Ken
Loach and
Andrew
Homung,
"Censorship & Perdition", New Statesman, 20th
February 1987).
British historian
Martin
Gilbert condemned
Perdition's court-room drama as 'a kangaroo court' and
quoted David Cesarani's analysis of the play as 'a travesty
of historical fact' (Daily Telegraph, 22nd January 1987).
According to Uri Davis, Cesarani also claimed to have
identified 'more than 60 historical errors' in the text
(Ibid). To the best of his knowledge he never made the list
public. Lord Goodman said that 'Mr Jim Allen's description
of the Holocaust can claim a high place in the table of
classic anti-Semitism' (Evening Standard, 23rd January
1987). Arnold Wesker and others damned Perdition as 'a
poisonous and reactionary work' (The Guardian Letters, 27th
January 1987). And Victoria Radin villied it as 'a nasty
play' (New Statesman, 6th February 1987). Below is a summary
of the views of Uri Davis and others:
It was a beautiful play.
I found the text very powerful. There was nothing in the
text, the context, the presentation, or the nuance that
could support allegations of anti-Jewish racism
(anti-Semitism). At bottom the play had two important
messages to convey. First, every political and religious
organization in Europe under Nazi occupation had produced
the praiseworthy phenomenon of resistance and the
shameful phenomenon of collaboration. The Zionist
political organizations and Jewish religious
organizations, like all others in Europe, responded in
the same way. The Zionist contented that because under
Nazi occupation and the Holocaust, Jews were victimized
as Jews, they could not by definition collaborate with
the Nazi occupation authorities (even had they wanted
to). But this was nonsense. The play was based on the
story of Rudolf Kasztner who, in 1954, appeared as
witness in a libel action before the Jerusalem District
Court presided by Dr Benjamin Halevi. A Hungarian Jew,
Malkiel Greenwald accused Kasztner of collaborating with
the Nazis in Hungary in 1944-45. Kasztner failed to clear
his name of the charge of collaboration with the Nazis,
of preparing the ground for the murder of Hungarian Jewry
and of saving a Nazi war criminal after the war. One
charge was not fully proven - that of sharing plunder
with a Nazi war criminal).
The play's second message was
that Zionist ideology and practice led important sections
of the leadership of the world Zionist
Organization/Jewish agency to put the priority of Jewish
state building in Palestine before the priority of
rescue.
To illustrate this the text
quotes Rabbi
Michael Dov Weissmandl's
account of a letter in Hebrew (although, according to
Weissmandl, in Roman script) sent by Nathan Schwalb. At
that time Schwalb was representative of the Zionist
He-Halutz (The Pioneer) organization in Geneva. The
letter was addressed to the Jewish rescue Working Group,
of which Weissmandl was a member, in Bratislava,
Czechoslovakia in about the autumn of 1942 as
follows:
Since a messenger has
been found he [Schwalb] writes to the Group
that they must always remember that the most urgent
issue, the main issue which must always be in front of
us, is that in the end the Allies will win. After the
victory they will divide the world again amongst the
nations as they did at the end of the First World War.
Then they paved the way for us to take the first
step.
Now at the end of the war
we must do everything so that Palestine will become
the State of Israel. There have already been important
steps made in this direction. And as for the outcry
coming from our country, we should know that all the
Allied nations are spilling much blood. If we shall
not make sacrifices, with what shall we buy the right
to sit at the table when the division of the nations
and countries takes place after the
war?
And therefore it is
nonsense and even impudent on our part to ask from the
nations who are spilling their blood that they permit
their money to be brought into the land of their enemy
to defend our blood - because only in blood shall we
have the land.
This is as far as the
community as a whole is concerned. As for your members
of the Group, you take a walk [namely,
escape], and for this purpose I provide you with
money illegally by means of this messenger. (Quoted
from Michael Dov Weissmandl, Min ha-Meitzar (From the
Depth of Distress), Emunah Press, 194 Division Avenue,
Brooklyn, New York, 1960).
I was also struck by a
personal affinity. Perdition is a powerful court-room
drama. Ruth Kaplan, the researcher who raises the charge
of Zionist collaboration with the Nazi occupation
authorities, is portrayed in the play as having studied
Philosophy and Arabic at the Hebrew University in
Jerusalem; worked for a time with the Encyclopaedia
Judaica; and became a pacifist and was active in the
civil rights movement in Israel. I had never met Jim
Allen and I found the coincidence amazing. The portrayal
of Ruth Kaplan in Perdition reflected main features of my
personal history. Only later did I learn that among the
books Jim had researched for the play was Dissent &
Ideology in Israel: Resistance to the Draft 1948-1973
(Ithaca Press, London, 1975). The book included my
personal and political history among 13 other profiles of
leading dissidents in Israel. - From
Uri
Davis.
Crossing
the Border.
But there is a further
complicating factor. It is that the Holocaust has come to
play an important ideological role. It has been in this
sense appropriated by the state of Israel and the Zionist
movement. It has thus become a shield against criticism
of the policies and actions of that state and of Zionism
itself. The innocent dead are turned into accomplices of
policies of expansion and aggression -
Stuart
Wood
(The Guardian, 10 thJuly 1987)
'Perdition' has not been
suppressed and the Jewish community will have to learn to
live with it. Yet, are we so unsure of our place in
Britain and Israel's place in the world that a tough
piece of anti-Zionist propaganda sends us into a frenzy
of insecurity? ... We need to master the art of exposing
and debunking, instead of instantly branding antagonists
as anti-Semites. There is a distinction between those who
oppose Zionism and their motives. Anti-Semitism may be a
reason for some people not liking Israel, but there are
many other reasons for such hostility ... -
David
Cesarani (Jewish
Chronicle, 3rdJuly 1987)
In 1987, after months of false
accusations that Perdition was anti-Semitic, the first
public readings in the Edinburgh Festival in August made
possible the first critical reviews of the play as a piece
of theatre. In his review of the reading Michael Billington
commented:
Firstly, that the
reading of the play demystified it and robbed it of the
spurious excitement that is attached to a work
theatrically outlawed. It strikes me as nonsensical that
one should be able to walk into any bookshop and buy a
copy of the text, but that the play should be considered
too 'offensive' to put on a public stage. Secondly, that
Perdition is vehemently anti-Zionist without being
anti-Semitic. (The Guardian, 19th August
1987).
Jim
Allen: A lifetime's commitment to historical truth by
Barbara Slaughter (11th August
1999). From the World
Socialist Web Site
Like A Choice of Evil (1971),
Allen's play Perdition is also based on historical events in
the closing months of the Second World War. Despite the fact
that Germany was losing the war, half a million Hungarian
Jews were transported to the concentration camps and
murdered because of the collaboration of leading members of
the Jewish community in Budapest. The Zionist leaders in
Hungary did a deal with the Nazis that allowed certain
selected people to leave the country, provided that
instructions were given to the vast majority of Jews to
board the trains going to the camps. The truth came out in a
trial held in Israel after the war.
Every national newspaper attacked
Allen and Loach. In the Evening Standard Lord Goodman
accused them of peddling anti-Semitic lies and suggested
that they were trying to deny the Holocaust ever happened.
Bernard Levin of the Times attacked the play, whilst
admitting he had never read it. Most critics argued that if
you attacked Zionism you were attacking the Jews as a
people. Under pressure from the Zionists, the play was
called off by the board of the Royal Court the day before it
was due to open.
In an interview with myself and
Vicky Short three years ago, Allen explained what happened:
"It was a very bad
experience. We never got it on the stage except a
shortened version at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where
it appeared for one night. It is just impossible to
explain the pressure. The bloke who put it on said, 'I've
never known such pressure, I'm a nervous wreck. The phone
never stopped ringing from all over the world.' "After it
was blackballed, one Zionist leader in London said to Ken
Loach, 'I've got six friends who are very powerful, and
we'll stop it going out.'
"One man - a big producer in
the West End - did agree to put it on. Within 24 hours he
phoned back to Ken and said to Ken, 'I'm sorry, forget
it. I've had phone calls telling me if I put Perdition on
I will never open on Broadway again. And I am responsible
to directors and so on. I'm sorry.' "And so it went on.
They followed us to Ireland. Wherever we went they
followed us. The campaign they orchestrated with the
press was incredible - the Times, the Guardian, the
Telegraph ... and it reached so far out. It was attacked
in America.... And I was getting calls from Germany. It
was an orchestrated campaign and it terrorised people.
And arising out of that came the libel action. For two
years I think my earnings were about £10 a week.
Plus I was going through a bad time personally because of
my wife's illness - phone calls, abuse.
You've no idea what it was
like.... "
Then we, a group of us, put it
on for a week in London, in some secular society, I
forget its name. We showed the shortened version and it
appeared for a week. It was packed, mainly with Jewish
people, because this was a chapter of their history they
didn't know, like Land and Freedom for the Spanish
people.
"I'm not exaggerating, there
were some people there crying - old people - because of
some of the facts that came out in the play about the
Zionists doing everything they could to disorganise the
Jews in Hungary."
After Perdition had been shown at
The
Gate Theatre, Allen
commented: In his interview, he told me that he once said to
Loach:
"Well, if ever I win the
lottery, the first thing I'll do is hire a theatre and
put Perdition on. Apart from that there's no chance."
Allen didn't win the lottery, but he
lived to see his play staged in London under the direction
of Elliot Leavey, a young man whom he felt confident had
done his research and would be able to defend the ideas
behind the play. He was too ill to travel to London to see
the production. It was staged in the tiny Gate Theatre,
which seats no more than a hundred people, by actors working
for expenses only. He derived great satisfaction from the
fact that it was a co-production with the Royal Court, who
had originally banned the play. He told his daughters, "It's
about time. It shows that the truth will win out." He
received letters from members of the audience who told him
that they had opposed the play 11 years before, but now
understood what had gone on in Israel. Some had broken down
in tears and told the director of the play how wrong they
had been.
The play Perdition was about the
deal done by some Zionists in Hungary in 1944 with the
Nazis, in which a certain number of Jews would be allowed to
escape to Palestine in return for silence about the
destination of those bound for the concentration camps.
Previous attacks were as nothing compared with the Zionist
fury unleashed when the play was being rehearsed. To Allen's
disgust, and to the shame of the Royal Court, the play was
withdrawn. Crude charges of anti-Semitism were discounted by
critics when the play was heard in public at the Edinburgh
Festival.
Haim
Bresheeth, in RETURN, March 1989
In the case of the Kastner episode,
around which Jim Allen's play PERDITION is based, even the
normal excuse of lack of knowledge of the real nature of
events does not exist. It occurred near the end of the war.
The USSR had advanced almost up to Germany. Italy and the
African bases had been lost. The Nazis were on the run, with
a number of key countries, such as Rumania, leaving the
Axis. A second front was a matter of months away, as the
western Allies prepared their forces. In the midst of all
this we find Eichmann, the master bureaucrat of industrial
murder, setting up is HQ in occupied Budapest, after the
German takeover of the country in April 1944.
His first act was to have a
conference with the Jewish leadership, and to appoint
Zionist Federation members, headed by Kastner, as the agent
and clearing house for all Jews in their relationship with
the SS and Nazi authorities. Why they did this is not
difficult to see. As opposed to Poland, where its three and
half million Jews lived in ghettoes and were visible
different from the rest of the Polish population, the
Hungarian Jews were in integrated part of the community. The
middle class was mainly Jewish, the Jews were mainly middle
class. They enjoyed freedom of travel, served in the
Hungarian (fascist) army in frontline units, as officers and
soldiers, their names were Hungarian - how was Eichmann to
find them if they were to be exterminated ?
The task was not easy, there were a
million Jews in Hungary, most of them resident, the rest
being refugees from other countries. Many had heard about
the fate of Jews elsewhere, and were unlikely to believe any
statements by Nazi officials. Like elsewhere, the only
people who had the information and the ear of the frightened
Jewish population were the Judenrat. In this case the
Judenrat comprised mainly the Zionist Federation members.
Without their help the SS, with 19 officers and less than 90
men, plus a few hundred Hungarian police, could not have
collected and controlled a million Jews, when they did not
even know their whereabouts.
Kastner and the others were left
under no illusions. Eichmann told Joel Brand, one of the
members of Kastner's committee, that he intended to send all
Hungary's Jews to Auschwitz, before he even started the
expulsions! He told them clearly that all these Jews will
die, 12,000 a day, unless certain conditions were met. The
Committee faced a simple choice - to tell the Jews of
Hungary about their fate, (with neutral Rumania, where many
could escape, being in most cases a few hours away) or to
collaborate with the Nazis by assisting in the concentration
process. What would not have been believed when coming from
the SS, sounded quite plausible when coming from the mouths
of the Zionist leadership. Thus it is, that most of the
Hungarian Jews went quietly to their death, assured by their
leadership that they were sent to work camps.
To be sure, there are thirty pieces
of silver in this narrative of destruction: the trains of
'prominents' which Eichmann promised to Kastner - a promise
he kept to the last detail. For Eichmann it was a bargain:
allowing 1,680 Jews to survive, as the price paid for the
silent collaboration over the death of almost a million
Jews.
There was no way in which the Jews
of Hungary could even be located, not to say murdered,
without the full collaboration of Kastner and his few
friends. No doubt the SS would hunt a few Jews here and
there, but the scale of the operation would have been
minuscule compared to the half million who died in
Auschwitz. It is important to realise that Kastner was not
an aberration, like say Rumkovky in Lodz. Kastner acted as a
result of his strongly held Zionist convictions. His actions
were a logical outcome of earlier positions. This is
instanced when he exposed to the Gestapo the existence of a
British cell of saboteurs, Palgi and Senesh, and persuaded
them to give themselves up, so as not to disrupt his
operations. At no point during his trial or elsewhere, did
Kastner deny that he knew exactly what was to happen to
those Jews.
Controversial
play resurfaces - Michael Barnett wrting in Hot
Gossip UK, May 1999
One of the most controversial plays
of the 1980s is due to be revived by the Gate Theatre in
Notting Hill in June. In 1987 Perdition was due to be
produced at the Royal Court but was pulled hours before its
preview because of accusations that it was anti-semitic.
It's based on the true story of Dr Rudolph Kastner, the head
of the Zionist Rescue Committee in Budapest during the war.
He sued a pamphleteer who claimed he'd helped the Nazis
exterminate 500,000 of his own people. Kastner lost the case
after admitting to negotiating a deal for the safe passage
of 2,000 people out of Hungary in exchange for goods with
Adolf Eichmann. A higher court overturned the verdict a year
later - but by that time Kastner had already been shot dead
by rightwing Jewish extremists. Perdition was written by Jim
Allen (whose script-writing credits include Land and
Freedom, and whose long-term creative parner, Ken Loach, had
been due to have directed the play at the Royal Court. The
Gate feel it deserves a chance to be seen - and the Jewish
actor, Elliott Levey, who is directing it, says it's
historically accurate and pro-Jewish. But art historian
David Cesarani, who fought hard against the play a decade
ago said it contained distortions and lies
Letter
from Lenni Brenner in Commentary
Magazine, May 1997
Saving Jews
TO THE EDITOR: Hillel Halkin's
favorable review of Shabtai Teveth's Ben-Gurion and the
Holocaust [January] is a defense of the
indefensible. Among many sinners against Labor Zionism Mr.
Halkin lists Jim Allen. Allen's maleficium was to quote in
his play, Perdition, a letter written to Labor Zionist
rescue workers in Slovakia by Nathan Schwalb, the movement's
agent in Switzerland. After the war, Schwalb's letter was
published by Rabbi Michael Dov-Ber Weissmandel in his
memoir, Min HaMaitzer ("From the Depths"). Allen had found
the letter in my book, Zionism
in the Age of Dictators.
Under Zionist pressure, the play was
canceled before production, generating massive publicity.
Allen then determined to have it published, together with a
commentary by me. Suddenly Schwalb (going under his Hebrew
name, Dror) sued Allen for libel. Though the suit was
eventually dismissed for lack of evidence, under Britain's
archaic libel laws, Schwalb was able to get an interlocutory
injunction blocking publication of the letter. When the book
appeared, I had the strange experience for an American of
seeing a blank in my essay where I had quoted the letter.
Mr. Halkin discusses but never
quotes a syllable of this letter that he says "never
existed." So that readers may determine the truth for
themselves, here is Weissmandel's reconstruction of it,
preceded by his introductory comments:
There was another letter
in the envelope, written in a strange foreign language
and at first I could not decipher at all which language
it was until I realized that this was Hebrew written in
Roman letters, and written to Schwalb's friends in
Pressburg. It took up a page and a half. It is still
before my eyes, as if I had reviewed it 101 times.
This was the content of the letter:
Since we have the
opportunity of this courier, we are writing to the group
that they must constantly have before them that in the
end the Allies will win. After their victory they will
divide the world again between the nations, as they did
at the end of World War I. Then they unveiled the plan
for the first step and now, at the war's end, we must do
everything so that Eretz Israel will become the state of
Israel, and important steps have already been taken in
this direction.
About the cries coming from
your country, we should know that all the Allied nations
are spilling much of their blood, and if we do not
sacrifice any blood, by what right shall we merit coming
before the bargaining table when they divide nations and
lands at the war's end? Therefore it is silly, even
impudent, on our part to ask these nations who are
spilling their blood to permit their money into enemy
countries in order to protect our blood--for rak b'dam
["only with blood"] shall we get the land.
This is in respect to
everybody--but in respect to you, my friends, atem taylu,
and for this purpose I am sending you money illegally
with this messenger.
Rabbi Weissmandel pondered over the
note:
After I had accustomed
myself to this strange writing, I trembled, understanding
the meaning of the first words which were "only with
blood shall we attain land." But days and weeks went by,
and I did not know the meaning of the last two words
until I saw from something that happened that the words
atem taylu were from tiyul ["to walk"], which was
their special term for "rescue." In other words: you my
fellow members, my nineteen or twenty close friends, get
out of Slovakia and save your lives and with the blood of
the remainder--the blood of all the men, women, old and
young, and the sucklings--the land will belong to us.
Therefore, in order to save their lives it is a crime to
allow money into enemy territory, but to save you,
beloved friends, here is money obtained illegally.
It is understood that I do not have
these letters - for they remained there and were destroyed
with everything else that was lost. In Mr. Halkin's words,
Teveth believes Weissmandel made this up "in order to cope
with a haunting guilt" because he escaped from a death train
while his family perished. If true, the rabbi should be
awarded a posthumous Nobel Prize for literature. Because
only another Isaac Bashevis Singer could concoct a political
libel involving such singular Jewish details - a letter in
Hebrew in Latin script, and agonizing over the conjugation
of a Hebrew verb - which give the story its distinctive
credibility. In fact, the note was in keeping with Labor
Zionist thinking. After Kristallnacht, London, hoping to
ease pressure for increased immigration to Palestine,
proposed admitting thousands of Jewish children into
Britain. David Ben-Gurion, speaking on December 7, 1938, put
Zionism above the lives of Jews: If I knew that it would be
possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing
them over to England, and only half of them by transporting
them to Eretz Israel, then I would opt for the second
alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these
children but also the history of the people of Israel.
Weissmandel deceived no one. The ugly truth is that the
movement that produced Ben-Gurion after Kristallnacht
produced Schwalb during the Holocaust.
LENNI
BRENNER, New York,
USA
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