TODAY, THE FUNDAMENTAL problem of justice concerning the
Holocaust is one of memory, and memory’s ubiquitous
twin, forgetting. Primo Levi understood the intrinsic relationship
between memory and justice. In The Drowned and the Saved,
he described “the memory of the offence,” by
which he meant the memory of extreme trauma inflicted or
suffered during the Holocaust, as one of choice for the perpetrators,
who can “fabricate for themselves a convenient reality.” Paradoxically,
for the victims, the memories never cease, no matter how
much they wish them to. Levi quotes Jean Améry: “Anyone
who has been tortured remains tortured.” We might also
say the same of nations. Acknowledging their own guilt for
past crimes is rare, even as their victims are unable to
forget. Yet, as Levi cautioned, the burial of memory leads
to the withering of justice. Without a clear view of the
past, there is no possibility of a just future.
Sixty years on, the centrality of the Holocaust in Western
European memory seems assured. It is impossible to imagine
a history of the past century without the place names that
have come to describe its most cataclysmic event – Auschwitz,
Treblinka, Sobibor, Dachau, Buchenwald. Yet for most Europeans,
this is only a relatively recent awareness; the fact is,
during the war and in the years immediately following, the
suffering of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis was
of little interest or significance. And at the beginning
of the twenty-first century, some have begun to argue that
Holocaust memorialisations have become dangerously routine,
with people showing signs of Holocaust-fatigue. In Hollywood
the preoccupation with the Holocaust has not flagged; but
in this case the Holocaust has become a trope for things
that often have nothing to do with it, and “Auschwitz” a
stylised, ahistorical space in which to enact generic stories
of pathos, drama and even comedy. Recently, too, there has
been a shift away from the experience of the oppressed towards
a focus on the oppressors. We have lately become more interested
in the human stories of Nazis than those of their victims.
In Eastern Europe, however, where the Nazi-engineered extermination
of the Jewish and Roma populations took place, largely with
the eager assistance of the local authorities, public recognition
of the Holocaust is still lacking. The problem of memory
is acute; after decades of historical amnesia, there seems
little incentive to revisit this uncomfortable chapter of
the past. The crimes of communism are a far more immediate
preoccupation.
In the face of this, the question has become less about
whether justice is possible – which, given the distance
of time is a valid one – and more about whether justice
is even relevant. Here history, rather than memory, might
hold the answer. History, unlike memory, needs to be learned,
and continually relearned. History’s purpose is to
give meaning to the present even as it seeks knowledge of
the past; justice, or the attempt at it, however flawed and
incomplete, belongs squarely within the historical project
of understanding. A 1987 cartoon by Ben Sargent about the
Klaus Barbie trial in France remains pertinent: “It’s
been more than forty years,” a younger man remarks. “Why
are we hunting down a bunch of pathetic old men just to prosecute
them for… er… uh… well, you know… uh… whatever
that stuff was they did…?” The older man replies: “That’s
precisely why.”
AUSTRALIA HAS ALWAYS seemed very far away from this history.
It carries its own burdens when it comes to remembering
the second world war, in which the theatre of battle and
its war crimes is fixed firmly in the Asia–Pacific.
Yet from the moment the first shiploads of displaced persons,
or DPs, began arriving in 1947, Australia became complicit
in enabling those who had committed war crimes during the
Holocaust to escape retribution. In order to do so, Australian
authorities participated in their own version of historical
amnesia, and for the next sixty years, deliberately ignored
or downplayed the evidence of war criminals living in refuge
in Australia.
Since 2005, Perth man Charles (Károly) Zentai has
been wanted for war crimes committed in his country of origin,
Hungary, in 1944. This month, Zentai’s lawyers and
his family are continuing their fight in Australia’s
Federal Court to overturn the order for his extradition to
Hungary. Zentai’s case resembles others in the way
it has been represented by the mainstream media: as the story
of an old man who has led a largely blameless life in Australia
being pursued for something that may or may not have happened
a long time ago. The only exceptions to this simplistic packaging
of what is a far more complex story have been a couple of
articles published recently in the Monthly in which Hungarian
writer György Vámos reviews some of the evidence
and Mark Aarons gives a brief account of Australia’s
tradition of apathy when it comes to punishing those who
commit war crimes overseas but make their homes here. Jane
Cadzow’s piece published last year in the Sydney Morning
Herald was a comprehensive account, although the rather sleepy
title “Another time, another place” captured
Australia’s sense of remove from this history, and
the idea that it has nothing much to do with here and now.
Zentai’s case raises more than the question of a war
crime committed in a distant past. It is about the story
of indifference, ignorance and denial that has plagued the
memory of the Holocaust in both Australia and Hungary. An
investigation of this case reveals much that has remained
hidden by more sanitised versions of Australia’s multicultural
beginnings. The links that were forged in the postwar era
between Australia and Eastern Europe via its mass migration
schemes were also bonds of complicity in the project of forgetting
and denial that has governed the politics of retribution
and the uneven practice of justice.
For over sixty years, Zentai has been wanted for the crime
of beating a Jewish boy, Péter Balázs, to death.
The Budapest People’s Court issued the warrant for
his arrest in 1948, and his whereabouts were always known.
Neither the Allies, under whose protection Zentai lived in
Germany after the war, nor the Hungarian authorities who
issued the arrest warrant made any effort to bring Zentai
back to Hungary to face trial, when it would have been far
simpler to do so. When he applied for passage to Australia
while in the care of the International Refugee Organisation,
or IRO, as a DP, the Australian migration selection team
was most probably ignorant of the warrant, and characteristically
uninterested in details. The Wiesenthal Centre, whose request
to the Hungarian authorities initiated this recent case for
extradition, knew of Zentai’s case, and his Perth address,
for over twenty years before it decided to act.
Last year I travelled to Hungary where I was able to review
the original evidence that has initiated the request for
Zentai’s extradition. The brief excerpts published
in the March issue of the Monthly have put some of this on
the public record. What is not on the public record is where
this case fits within the wider historical context of both
Hungary’s and Australia’s collective treatment
of the past. I also travelled to Germany, where I uncovered
documents relating to Zentai’s journey through Allied-occupied
Germany, and his application for migration as a DP. These
reveal other aspects of the case hitherto untold, and shed
light on Australia’s own contribution to the European
process of forgetting, whereby the crimes of the Holocaust
were revised as purely German crimes, and anti-communists
regarded far more positively than anti-fascists, or even
Jews.
ZENTAI WAS A CONSCRIPTED Hungarian Royal Army officer stationed
at the Aréna Road military barracks in Budapest
in 1944. In October of that year, The Arrow Cross, the
Hungarian equivalent of the Nazis, had assumed power under
the leadership of Ferenc Szálasi, giving free rein
to the persecution of Jews. Zentai’s commanding officer
was Bela Máder and his fellow officer was Lajos
Nagy; both were tried for the murder of Péter Balázs
after the war and found guilty, Máder in 1946, Nagy
in 1947. Máder was sentenced to forced labour for
life; Nagy was given the death sentence, later commuted
to life imprisonment. Evidence given at these trials prompted
the Hungarian authorities to charge Zentai with the same
crime; by that time, he was already in Germany. Máder’s
and Nagy’s trials were part of the wave of war crimes
trials held in Hungary in the immediate postwar period;
approximately 27,000 people were sentenced by the Hungarian “people’s
courts” for war crimes, crimes against the state
or crimes against humanity, among them a number of senior
government ministers.
At his trial, Nagy told of how, under the orders of their
commanding officer Bela Máder, Zentai regularly went
out on patrols to perform identity checks and round up Jews
for interrogation. According to Nagy, Zentai already knew
Péter Balázs. In his statement after his arrest,
Nagy told the police, “Zentai told me that the boy
and his family were old acquaintances of his.” The
Zentai and Balázs families were both from Budafok,
a small town on the outskirts of Budapest. The Balázs
family were well known in the town as Jews and for their
leftist sympathies; Deszö Balázs, Péter’s
father, had his legal practice there until 1942 when the
family moved into Budapest. Zentai, only a few years older
than Péter, was apparently Péter’s Levente
instructor for a time in Budafok. (The Levente movement was
a paramilitary version of the Boy Scouts, for young men.
It was banned in Hungary in 1945.) Péter was surviving
on false identity papers, and had refused to show when called
up for Jewish forced labour in April 1944. On 8 November,
Zentai recognised the boy on a Budapest tram and arrested
him for not wearing the yellow star.
What happened afterwards, according to the evidence presented
at Nagy’s trial, is that between for five hours beginning
at 3pm, Zentai and Nagy beat Balázs so badly that
by 8pm he was dying. According to Nagy’s evidence,
they (Zentai, Máder and himself) saw that the boy
was dying, and then went to an adjoining room and began drinking.
In a macabre twist, Captain Máder decided to show
off their handiwork to a number of other prisoners detained
that night at Arena Road. As a number of them testified at
Nagy’s trial, eight of them (some say six) were taken
to Captain Máder’s rooms where, one by one,
they were shown a man lying on the floor covered in his own
overcoat. His breath rattled, and it was clear that he was
dying. According to Sándor Révner, Máder
asked, “Can you hear that music?” when it came
his turn to view the dying man. “That’s the way
you will go too.” Each of the witnesses said they were
told the same thing. The prisoners were then brought back
into the room and forced to say the Hebrew prayer for the
dead, “and we said that prayer according to his instructions.” The
next day, all but one of them escaped. Each confirmed, as
did other officers present that day, that the man lying on
the floor, according to his photograph, was Peter Balázs.
I have before me the original court transcripts, in which
witness after witness describes the brutalities they endured
while they were detained at the barracks. There are various
references to Zentai’s regular participation in these
beatings. Imre Zoltan testified that in 1944, while in Budapest
as a forced labourer, he was arrested and taken to the barracks “where
at Béla Máder’s orders, Cadet Károly
Zentai and Cadet Ferenc Érsek beat me up for hours
with boxing gloves until I lost consciousness.” Ervin
Barinkai, another soldier at the barracks, remembered seeing
Zoltan “gravely assaulted several times, especially
by Cadet Sergeant Károly Zentai.” Another cadet,
György Varsányi, stated that “it was Cadet
Sergeant Zentai who did the beatings, I saw that myself several
times.”
On the night in question, József Monori, another
officer assigned to the barracks under Máder’s
command, reported that he heard, but did not see the beating
going on behind closed doors. He “definitely” remembered
Zentai, Nagy and Mader being present. He went to bed, but
was woken up at around 11pm and told to harness a horse and
carriage: “Nagy and Zentai brought down a corpse from
the office, put it on the cart, and covered it with straw… Nagy
sat on the driver’s seat, Zentai beside him, and I
sat on the side of the cart. Nagy was driving the cart. We
drove along Aréna Road… down to the Danube… There
Nagy and Zentai took the corpse and dumped it in the Danube.
They waited a while to see if the corpse would come up but
it sank.” During the journey, according to Monori, “Nagy
and Zentai were talking about how they should not have beaten
the boy so hard.”
These testimonies were taken before the warrant for Zentai’s
arrest, which was issued on 29 April 1948. After the warrant
was issued, Máder, already a condemned man, stated
that Zentai “took part in patrols as well as in beating
and maltreating Jews… He and 1st Lieutenant (Nagy)
were always ready to volunteer to do the atrocities.” Imre
Parázsló, another cadet, stated that the identity
checks on Jews were “mostly carried out by 1st Lieutenant
Lajos Nagy and Ensign Károly Zentai accompanied by
the worst imaginable beatings… Zentai hit hardest but
Nagy was not far behind. They hit the Jews with fists, boxing
gloves or sticks, kicked them, and I often saw these Jews
beaten to a bloody pulp coming out of the office moaning
and crying. Bela Máder knew about these tortures,
indeed, he gave orders to them.”
Hungarian journalist György Vámos, referring
to the “unusual circumstances” of judicial practices
in postwar Hungary, recently cautioned that witness testimonies
relating to this case should be treated with care. He did
not go into detail, beyond remarking that social justice,
as opposed to merely criminal justice, was an important objective
of the government at the time. This is largely true. The
people’s courts were driven less by legal concerns
than by the desire for retribution and, in many cases, revenge.
Confusion, insufficient preparation and political bias were
rife during the major political trials, of which there were
fourteen between 1945 and 1946. “The historical responsibility
of the Hungarian principal war criminals is beyond question,” writes
historian Laszlo Karsai. “What is questionable, however,
is whether the people’s courts were sufficiently equipped
to establish their criminal responsibility.”
Yet we must tread carefully in assessing minor trials such
as Máder’s and Nagy’s. It is common in
the West to dismiss all postwar trials in Hungary as communist
propaganda, but it was a little more complex than that. In
the first place, the Communist Party did not lead the fight
against war criminals in the Hungarian courts in the immediate
postwar years. The people’s courts in Hungary were
party courts, in which representatives from across the anti-fascist
political spectrum were chosen to take part. Delegates from
the Bourgeois Democratic Party, the Social Democratic Party,
the Communist Party and the National Peasants Party, as well
as representatives from the right wing Independent Smallholders
Party, were appointed people’s judges. Later, delegates
from the National Trade Union Association were also included.
A professionally trained judge headed each of the courts,
and a majority of votes determined a verdict. What determined
the outcome of a particular trial or conviction usually had
more to do with the background and convictions of the judge
than with the political sway of the parties involved in the
process. Moreover, the influence of the Communist Party really
only increased after 1947 in the courts, and with this the
number of trials dealing with war crimes or crimes against
humanity significantly decreased. Karsai reminds us that
in 1947, the ratio of the total number of trials to war crimes
trials was 3958 to 268; in 1948, it was 4971 to 205 and in
1949, the year of the Communist Party takeover of power in
Hungary, it was 2690 to forty-four.
That generalisation about the postwar trials may also diminish
the contributions of the many Jewish survivors who participated
in what they saw as a means for achieving some kind of justice.
Jews were heavily involved in the judicial process in Hungary
after the war, a fact that is often overlooked. To give testimony
and stand witness was an act of bravery for many Jewish victims
of wartime atrocities. This is not to say that these trials
were neutral or devoid of ideological bias; but they were
often the only forum in which survivors could bear witness,
and this should be taken into account when evaluating their
testimonies. In trials specifically concerned with deportations
or murder of Jews, the spectators also tended to be Jewish.
Journalist Geza Losonczy, commenting on the audience at the
joint trial of László Endre, László Baky
and Andor Jaross, the three men most directly responsible
for the Hungarian Holocaust, remarked on the “complete
uninterestedness and indifference that the majority of the
non-Jewish public manifests towards the case,” despite
the fact that this was “not a trial on behalf of the
Jews” but “a trial of the Hungarian nation against
its executioners.”
By 1948, however, official memory was writing the Jewish
experience out of the war altogether, as the communist re-reading
of history began to take shape. Fascists became, before all
things, anti-communists, their enemies communists, even if
their victims appeared otherwise. Forty years later, the
end of communism in Hungary did not lead to a reappraisal
of the Holocaust in Hungary, and to some extent the silence
has deepened rather than thawed. For Tony Judt, Hungary is
the prime illustration of the difficulty of incorporating
the destruction of the Jews into historical memory in post-communist
Eastern Europe. He uses the example of the immensely popular
Terrorháza (“House of Terror”), the museum
set up in Budapest after the fall of communism to document
the history of state violence and repression from 1944 to
1989:
[T]he Terrorháza’s version of Hungarian history
draws no distinction between the thugs of Ferenc Szalasi’s
Arrow Cross party, who held power there from October 1944
to April 1945, and the communist regime that was installed
after the war. However the Arrow Cross men – and the
extermination of 600,000 Hungarian Jews to which they actively
contributed – are represented by just three rooms… The
not particularly subliminal message here is that Communism
and Fascism are equivalent. Except that they are not: the
presentation and content of the Budapest Terrorháza
makes it quite clear that, in the eyes of the museum’s
curators, Communism not only lasted longer but did far more
harm than its neo-Nazi predecessor.
The crimes of the communist regime command the sphere of
public debate over retribution and justice. The question
of Hungarian complicity in the crimes against a significant
number of its own people during the second world war has
yet to be asked. Istvan Hargittai is a professor of chemistry
at Budapest Technical University and one of a few to have
published in Hungarian about his own Holocaust experiences
and the wall of silence that surrounds this history. He recalls
that he and his generation grew up thinking “it was
the Germans” who were responsible for the Hungarian
Holocaust. Members of the Arrow Cross were outsiders, so
the theory went, unrepresentative of the Hungarian people.
This myth prevails. Most Hungarians, he says, have lived
since the second world war as if Auschwitz never happened.
The reaction to the Zentai case in Hungary has mostly been
mute. Even those who might be expected to be supportive of
seeing Zentai go to trial believe that the effect is likely
to be more detrimental to the historical cause than redemptive.
Hargittai predicts that the overwhelming image of Zentai
will be that of a “poor old man” who, if sentenced,
will in all likelihood become a martyr of Jewish vengeance.
Nevertheless, this does not mean, in Hargittai’s view,
that Zentai shouldn’t be tried. But there are others
who feel that the negative impact of such a trial outweighs
the argument for historical justice.
To be openly Jewish in Hungary today is still a test of courage.
Many intellectuals fear that a case such as this will strengthen
anti-Semitism, at a time when the rise of the extreme right
is already threatening its resurgence. The fact that the
Hungarian state has never acknowledged its own role in the
destruction of Hungarian Jewry further complicates the issue.
Without this acknowledgment, a trial such as this could become
a tool for reinforcing the idea of a “few bad apples” and
the wider mythology of ordinary Hungarians’ innocence
and victimhood.
HUNGARY’S DEMAND for Zentai’s extradition has
its own history. In 2004, Efraim Zuroff, the director of
the Jerusalem-based Wiesenthal Centre, visited Hungary to
launch Operation Last Chance, which offered a reward of 10,000
Euros to anyone with information leading to the arrest of
war criminals. Operation Last Chance was not welcomed by
a significant number of Jewish intellectuals in Hungary.
A heated exchange erupted in the pages of Hungarian journal Élet és
Irodalom (Literature and Life) between Zuroff and the leading
Holocaust historian László Karsai, in which
Karsai attacked the operation as a “blood money operation,” labelling
it unnecessary, unhelpful and “without a chance.” According
to Karsai the operation had no merit in the cause of historical
justice:
For 10,000 Euros, it occurs to someone that their dear old
neighbour is possibly, very probably, an Arrow Cross (mass)
murderer… Now try to imagine our 80–90 year old
relative one day who is taken away by policemen, interrogated
for hours, kept in remand in crowded, filthy cells perhaps
for weeks or months only to be told before the court that
his ninety-five year old accuser is not so absolutely certain
that he had seen him on the bank of the Danube in Pest, or
in the brickyard at Békásmegyer in October
or December 1944… I still insist that there is not
much chance of finding real war criminals… and even
less of having them convicted in Hungary today. On the other
hand, the odds are very good for hundreds of innocent octogenarians
being denounced in this country in the hope of 10,000 euro
blood money.
Karsai challenged Zuroff to look not in Hungary but in places
like Canada, the United States or Australia where most war
criminals, he said, had ended up after the war. In his parting
shot, he used the Peter Balázs case to illustrate
his point:
On July 15, a Holocaust survivor gave me a ring. He told
me that he had informed the Jerusalem Centre of the name
and (Australian) address of the murderer of his brother.
In the last seventeen years the Centre has not even found
him worthy of letting him know that the case has been shelved… (this)
man…made it clear that he was not interested in the
10,000 Euros, but wanted to see the murderer brought to court.
Although Karsai did not mention the Balázs case by
name, Zentai’s extradition request was expedited soon
after this exchange took place.
Presumably Zentai was never a big enough fish when Simon
Wiesenthal was alive and his organisation was engaged in
tracking down Nazis who had committed murder and brutality
on a massive scale. That the Balázs family had long
tried to interest the Wiesenthal Centre in the case of Péter
is evidenced by the numerous documents now held in the Holocaust
Memorial Centre in Budapest. They tell a story of tenacity
and despair, beginning with the small advertisement Péter’s
father, Deszö, placed in a Budapest paper the day after
Péter’s disappearance, and subsequent advertisements
looking for information about his son’s whereabouts. “My
son, Péter Balázs, disappeared on November
8. High reward for anyone bringing news of him” reads
one, from 1 April 1945. Deszö Balázs devoted
the remaining twenty-five years of his life, until his death
in 1970, to obtaining justice for his son’s murder
by bringing Zentai to trial. His other son, Adam, inherited
his father’s cause. I have one letter, dated 20 November
1987, from Adam Balázs to a representative of the
Simon Wiesenthal Centre visiting in Budapest at the time,
in which he includes a 1958 address for Zentai in Perth.
THE STORY OF HOW Zentai came to be in Australia is part of
the story of postwar immigration, in which tens of thousands
of DPs were brought out on ships from camps in Germany
and Italy to Australia. For many genuine refugees, Australia
was “the farthest place,” far removed from
the Europe of old race hatreds that had led to the wartime
concentration camps; for others, its distance was attractive
for different reasons. Many used the DP camps as a cover
to slip out of Europe and avoid retribution, and Australia’s
screening procedures were notoriously lax when it came
to ex-Nazis or war criminals. Over one million people arrived
in Australia under various immigration schemes by the end
of the 1950s, yet, as Michael Blakeney writes, “war
criminality was never articulated as a criterion of rejection.”
Instead, what counted towards acceptance for migration to
Australia were, above all else, physical attributes: one
needed to be fit, preferably young and, more preferably still,
fair-skinned. Until 1960, humanitarian principles did not
underlie assisted refugee migration, pragmatism did. Australia
needed to expand its labour force and its population, and
the only way that the government could sell its scheme of
mass migration was by assuring the public that it remained
committed to the principles of a White Australia on which
the Commonwealth was founded. Jews were especially unwelcome;
in 1947, Australia’s immigration minister Arthur Calwell
announced that only 25 per cent of each ship carrying migrants
could comprise Jews, who would be admitted only on the grounds
of their potential contribution to Australia’s economy.
As Klaus Neumann has written: “Suitable non-British
settlers were young, educated and healthy and, ideally, possessed
certain racial features. Australian selection teams preferred
vigorous, flaxen-haired, fair-skinned and blue eyed young
men and women from the Baltic countries who did not or could
not return to the Soviet Union.” They were to resemble
Australia’s “own kind” as closely as possible.
The Zentais ticked the right boxes: “fit worker” is
handwritten across both Károly and Rozsa’s migration
selection forms. In March 1949, Zentai, his wife Rozsa, their
two sons born since the war, and Zentai’s older sister,
Julia, were at Tuttlingen in southern Germany’s French
zone, where they were interviewed and accepted by the Australian
Migration Team for resettlement in Australia. Zentai’s
screening card twice states that he arrived in Germany on
9 March 1949, having “fled from the Communist Party.” His
wife’s card indicates the same. The accompanying resettlement
card from the IRO, which establishes their status as DPs,
also states that Zentai and his wife were in Budafok between
1945 and 1949, and that their son Gabor was born in Budafok,
Hungary, in 1946.
Except that he wasn’t, and they weren’t. Documents
held by the International Tracing Service tell a different
story. Located in Bad Arolsen in Germany, the Service is
a massive storage house of SS records of the death camps,
yet it also holds the records created by the Allies in the
displaced persons camps. Zentai’s file includes his
application for refugee assistance to the IRO, and lists
his places of residence from 1938 onwards: in March 1945
he was already on his way to Dietersburg, Bavaria, where
he arrived, according to the information he provided, on
19 April 1945 and remained until March 1948. A document dated
14 August 1946 confirms that he, his wife, his sister and
his son, Gabor, born 26 February of that year, were in Dietersburg.
His son Gabor is twice recorded as having been born in Arnstorf,
Bavaria. Another, dated 15 July 1947, indicates that Zentai
was temporarily in Kösslarn, in the district of Griesbach.
In his application for IRO assistance, a statutory declaration
states that Karl Zentai was “never a member of the
Arrow Cross or any political party and never committed any
atrocities.” It is signed by Zentai and three witnesses,
dated 12 March 1948, at the Hungarian office (Ungarisches
Büro) in Pfarrkirchen. Under “Country of first
preference” the officer has typed “Canada, Argentina”:
there is no mention of Australia. A handwritten statement
by an IRO officer concludes: “On account of credibility
of the statement of the Hungarian office and the witnesses
he should be found eligible for refugee status with IRO assistance.
Refuses to return home for the present regime there – no
political freedoms.”
None of these official records hint at the warrant for his
arrest issued by the Budapest People’s Court in April
1948, despite the fact that his whereabouts were well known
to the Hungarian authorities. The warrant even lists an address: “the
American occupation zone in Germany, where his address at
present is… Furth in Pfarrkirchen district with farmer
Jakob Schneiderbauer.” It appears that Zentai was able
to make his way safely to Tuttlingen almost one year after
the warrant was issued. Was the warrant ever communicated
to the Allied Occupation Forces in Germany, and, if so, why
was it ignored? Did Zentai know about his warrant? The answers
to these questions, of course, can only be speculative. Yet
the inconsistencies in the records as to his whereabouts
for the four years between 1945 and 1949 seem to indicate
some kind of attempt to cover his tracks. In his recent interviews
with the media Zentai has never tried to deny that he was
already living under the protection of the Allied Occupation
Forces in Germany from 1945. Why then, did he lie about his
whereabouts in 1949?
One answer is that rewriting those four years in this way
put extra years between his decision to leave Hungary and
the end of the war, making it easier to argue that he was “fleeing
the Communists,” as so many other Hungarians were doing
in 1948 and 1949. I would argue that this decision to lie
about his whereabouts, clearly with the complicity of his
wife, was strategic, though the exact nature of the strategy
is difficult to discern. The timing of Zentai’s move
to Tuttlingen and his application to go to Australia might
indicate a desire to migrate sooner rather than wait longer
to be accepted to Canada or Argentina. Whether this was prompted
by a knowledge of his arrest warrant it is impossible to
know, but the desire to hide the fact that he had fled Hungary
much earlier than he told the selection officers certainly
seems to indicate this.
As Zentai’s case makes clear, however, for those under
suspicion of criminal activities during the war, Australia
could provide an avenue of escape. Australia’s pragmatism – and
its flipside, moral lethargy – should also be viewed
in the wider context of the Allied retreat from the issue
of denazification and punishment of wartime activities. Zentai
was in Germany at the very moment that Europe’s postwar
memory was being moulded, by all sides, around the notion
of German guilt, in which all responsibility for the war
was made to lie squarely at the feet of the Germans. This
focus on Germany meant the postwar status of other countries
could more easily be resolved. Thus Austria was retrospectively
declared the “first victim” of Nazi aggression.
With Austria’s innocence assured, the responsibilities
of other non-German nationals in Europe were similarly eradicated.
As the Cold War deepened, the Allies were determined to avoid
alienating Austria and Germany, and this meant drawing attention
away from the past. “In a process that would have been
unthinkable in 1945,” Tony Judt writes, “the
identification and punishment of active Nazis in German-speaking
Europe had affectively ended by 1948 and was a forgotten
issue by the early fifties.”
Thus Zentai was among thousands, if not millions, whose
wartime pasts were being reframed by a strategic process
of forgetting and denial, and whose identities were recast
as refugees of an oppressive communist regime. Australia
became a willing participant in the European project of forgetting
and denial and over the next few decades actively ignored
the presence of war criminals, even when the evidence was
strong enough for extradition or prosecution. This changed
briefly in the late 1980s when the Hawke government created
the Special Investigation Unit to investigate suspected war
criminals living in Australia: in its five short years of
operation it conducted 841 investigations; three individuals
were charged but there were no convictions. Since then, no
war crimes prosecutions have been launched.
Australia has still not developed the legal framework or
the investigatory resources needed to find and prosecute
people who have committed war crimes overseas. The Wiesenthal
Centre recently listed Australia as the “only major
country of refuge” and former diplomat Fergus Hansen,
in a recent report compiled for the Lowy Institute, writes
that Australia “has inadvertently become a safe haven
for war criminals.” This is certainly the impression
Australia has been giving the world, and presumably its war
criminals, for some time. Hansen notes that there are indications
war criminals have come to Australia from Afghanistan, Palestine,
Sri Lanka, Nepal, Sierra Leone, India, Cambodia, Iran, Iraq,
Chile, Lebanon, Nigeria, Bangladesh the former Yugoslavia,
and possibly from Rwanda, East Timor and other countries.
IN APRIL 2009 Zentai’s appeal against his extradition
failed, with Federal Court judge John Gilmour finding that
there was no reason why Zentai should not be extradited to
face trial. The court has since agreed to a suspension of
proceedings while his lawyers arrange a new medical report
to be presented on 11 May. If all else fails, his lawyers
can take the case to the home affairs minister, Bob Debus,
where ministerial discretion will have the final say. Debus
may decide that Zentai is too old or too sick, as has been
the case with others in the past. If he is eventually extradited,
however, the case would be historic. No one has ever been
extradited from this country in a war crimes case, although
not for want of war criminals or evidence.
This time Zentai’s lawyers based the justification
for their appeal on the argument that the offence for which
Zentai is convicted did not constitute a war crime when it
was committed. The implications of an argument such as this,
although not new, are momentous. It would legitimise what
was effectively a fascist regime and promote the quite extraordinary
idea that for Jews like Balázs, the rule of law existed
and being beaten to death was lawful. A similar argument
was made during the Nuremberg Trials, in which the argument
was put forward that the twenty-two German leaders should
not have to answer for actions rendered illegal only after
the fact. The prosecuting lawyers never conceded this point,
arguing that the charges were grounded in international law
and what they called a common law of nations. The defence
argument suggested that the accused had no idea they were
acting illegally, an argument without merit in the minds
of contemporary observers. The legality of the charge of
war crimes was upheld at Nuremberg, and it is commendable
that Judge Gilmour resisted such logic in the Federal Court.
Zentai has clearly led an exemplary life in Australia. He
is the embodiment of the multicultural ideal, a man who worked,
brought up a family here and settled quietly into the suburban
landscape. It is not easy to watch a frail elderly man being
hauled in front of the courts to face trial. He might be
innocent. There are powerful incentives for simply turning
our collective back on this story and letting the old man
be. But are we prepared to accept, then, a statute of limitations
on war crimes or crimes against humanity? Is there a time
when it is too late for justice? The law, however flawed,
is still the only mechanism we have for upholding human rights.
In the end, it is the evidence that should determine the
outcome of this case, and it is history that should inform
the practice of justice.
inside.org.au
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