By
Amiram Barkat
On Thursday, three weeks ago, S?ndor K?p?r? returned to his Budapest apartment
after a routine visit to his doctor. When he reached the building, the 92-year-old
man was astonished to find a group of journalists waiting for him at the entrance.
They surrounded K?p?r? and bombarded him with questions about his activities
during the Holocaust.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the
Simon Wiesenthal Center, stood off to the side, watching.
At the press conference he had organized a short time before
he led the journalists to K?p?r?'s house, Zuroff called on
the Hungarian government to arrest K?p?r? at once for his
part in the murder of 1,000 people, most of them Jews, in
Novi Sad in January, 1942. After World War II, K?p?r? was
twice convicted by Hungarian courts, but managed to escape
to Argentina, where he lived for 50 years.
K?p?r? recently returned to his homeland without thinking
twice. But the cloak of anonymity that had protected him
for 60 years was swept away in an instant. In the course
of the spontaneous conversation that ensued with the journalists,
the elderly Hungarian admitted that he had participated in
rounding up the refugees before the massacre, but insisted
that he himself had never killed anyone.
The Israeli public heard almost nothing about this rare
and fascinating encounter between journalists and a suspected
war criminal. Zuroff had arranged with one of the two mass-circulation
Hebrew dailies for a journalist to accompany him to Hungary,
but the paper's editors changed their mind at the last minute
and the journalist stayed home. Zuroff contends that the
cancellation was no accident.
"When I come to the Israeli media with stories about
hunting down Nazi criminals, and especially to the ratings-oriented
media, I run into a brick wall every time," he says.
In the international media, on the other hand, Zuroff has
no such difficulty. The day after the scene in Budapest,
readers of The New York Times and other important papers
got a detailed description of the incident. However, in the
international media, Zuroff runs into a different kind of
problem: Time and again he gets asked why he insists on hunting
down old men, aged 90 and more, who are at the end of their
lives anyway. His automatic answer is: "Would you act
differently if the same old man had murdered your grandmother?"
In the Israeli box-office hit, "Walk on Water," a
Mossad agent comes to the bedside of an old Nazi criminal,
whom he has been sent to kill by lethal injection. The Israeli
discovers he is unable to murder the bedridden old man. Zuroff
is convinced that he would act differently in similar circumstances,
but declines to go into details. In this instance, the very
fact of the discussion of "What would you have done" is
far more important than coming up with all possible answers.
Hunting Nazi war criminals is the lowest-budgeted part of
all Holocaust-related activities - memorials, documentation,
rehabilitation of survivors and restoration of stolen property.
Zuroff claims that "if the victims could ask one thing
of us, they would first of all want to see justice meted
out to those who persecuted them." But bringing a dozen
90-year-olds to justice has importance beyond satisfying
their victims: It is an educational act of enormous importance,
especially in Eastern European countries which to this day
have not dealt with what was done on their soil during the
Holocaust.
Zuroff and "Walk on Water" tread in the footsteps
of the Eichmann trial, insofar as they provoke a genuine,
value-oriented discussion about the most shocking murder
in history. The money and the effort invested there is a
tiny fraction of what Jewish organizations spent in negotiations
with Swiss banks. The different arrangements for restoring
property yielded billions of dollars, but only exacerbated
differences and hatred between Gentiles and Jews, and among
the Jews themselves. The moral contribution to society at
large of the business of hunting Nazi war criminals is greater
than all the restored property arrangements together.
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