June 11-12, 2005
THE AUSTRALIAN
  Ellison must send Zentai to Hungary
 
 

THE Holocaust is the defining atrocity of the 20th century. But rather than being simply one crime, it is composed of millions of individual acts of cruelty and murder by Nazis and their supporters against Jews, gypsies, gays and other minorities. Typical was the wanton murder of Peter Balazs, a blameless 19-year-old Jewish man who was dragged from a tram in Budapest in November, 1944, taken to an army barracks by three military officers, and beaten to death over five hours. This week, on a visit to Canberra , Hungary 's State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Andras Hajdu, will press the case for the extradition of Perth pensioner Charles Zentai, who is accused of being one of the three officers who killed Mr Balazs, and who allegedly took part in other patrols to round up Jews.

Last month we urged Justice Minister Chris Ellison to give the most serious consideration to Hungary 's request. But now that The Weekend Australian has revealed more incriminating evidence against Mr Zentai, we are prepared to go further and call for his immediate extradition. As we reported, six witness statements that have remained archived in Hungary for more than half a century describe in horrific detail the alleged role in the killing of Mr Balazs by Mr Zentai, whose two fellow alleged murderers were tried and convicted after the war. One witness, Corporal Jozsef Monori, even testified that he helped Mr Zentai and his alleged accomplices dispose of Mr Balazs's body. This comes on top of earlier revelations that Mr Zentai concealed his military past in order to gain entry to Australia under a refugee program in 1950.

There is no reason to think Mr Zentai will get less than a fair hearing in Hungary , a democratic and civilised country that was welcomed into the EU in 2004. But the longer Senator Ellison sits on the case, the less likely there will be surviving witnesses to the alleged crime. In recent days, after the release of a horrifying and incriminating video showing war crimes by Serbian soldiers in 1995, we have witnessed cathartic events in Serbia, where President Boris Tadic has said he will visit the Bosnian town of Srebrenica to bow before his country's victims. There is no video of the murder of Mr Balazs, but the words of the witnesses are no less vivid than a film or a recording. Mr Balazs's memory, and the process of Hungary 's reckoning with the truth of its past, demand that we do what the Hungarian authorities have asked of us.