Film Blog: Killing Kasztner

In her latest film, the actress-turned-documentary filmmaker Gaylen Ross depicts the trial and assassination of Israel Kasztner, a Hungarian Jew who was assassinated in Tel Aviv on March 3, 1957 for his alleged collaboration during World War II with the Nazis. Kasztner had negotiated for the release of Hungarian Jews bound for Auschwitz. With footage from present day Tel Aviv-Jaffa, the United States, prewar Hungary, Nazi-occupied Hungary, along with some taken in Israel during the trial, the film follows Kasztner’s daughter Zsuzsi and her three daughters Merav, Michal and Keren Michaeli in their efforts to restore his place in history—not as a villain but rather a victim, and even a hero.

During the spring of 1944, Hungary’s Jews were being deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz at the rate of 12,000 people a day. Kasztner parleyed with SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, the chief orchestrator of Nazi exterminations camps, to allow 1,685 Jews to leave for Switzerland on what became known as the Kasztner train, in exchange for money, gold, and diamonds. In 1953, now the government spokesperson for the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Kasztner was accused of having been a Nazi collaborator, in a pamphlet self-published by Malchiel Gruenwald, a writer. The allegation stemmed in part from Kasztner’s relationship with Eichmann, and in part from his having given positive character references to three other SS officers after the war. The Israeli government sued Gruenwald for libel on Kasztner’s behalf, resulting in a trial that lasted two years in which the defendant became the prosecutor.

Writing on the trial, Leora Bilsky of the Faculty of Law at the Tel Aviv University, claimed that the ambiguity, coincidences and half knowledge that are entailed in the chronological narration of the events, were turned by the defense attorney, Shmuel Tamir, into a series of analogies that telescoped the past and the present—a Nazi-ruled Hungary to the state of Israel of the 1950s. Tamir thus convinced the court that Kasztner was guilty of collaborating with the Nazis. In 1955 the court ruled that Kasztner had indeed, in the words of the judge, “sold his soul to the devil.” By saving some of the Jews on the Kasztner train, but failing to warn others of their fate—their imminent deportation to the gas chambers—Kasztner had sacrificed the mass of Jewry for a chosen few, the judge said.

An outcast in his new homeland, Kasztner became a virtual recluse, with his wife falling into a depression. Gaylen lets the daughter describe how she and her parents and were constantly harassed on the street and in school. His assassin Ze’ev Eckstein, a former member of the Zionist pre-state right-wing terrorist organization Lehi, gunned him down in front of his doorstep, to avenge Kasztner’s perceived treachery. Now an old man, Eckstein reenacts the gruesome events for Gaylen’s camera. In January 1958 the Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgment against Kasztner, stating that the lower court had “erred seriously.” The Kasztner affair saw the convergence of history and trauma, politics and freedom of speech into the juridical discourse. The courtroom transformed into a venue for a historiographical symposium as attorneys debated over contending versions of events leading to Kasztner’s death: the victorious of these was declared the truth, by law.

As Killing Kasztner follows its cast of characters—the Kasztner’s family, the assassin, the son of the attorney Shmuel Tamir, historians, journalists, experts from the Yad VaShem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem and Kasztner survivors—the film seems to join their numbers to self-reflexively reaffirm the documentary film as a relentless seeker of the truth.