Justice or vengeance? The question was at the heart of a
national debate last week after Australia’s Minister for
Home Affairs, Brendan O’Connor, agreed to surrender to
Hungary an 88-year-old man accused of helping murder an
18-year-old Jew in Budapest in 1944.
Charles (Karoly) Zentai, who arrived in Australia in 1950, was discovered living
in Perth in 2005 after the Simon Wiesenthal Centre mounted
a last-gasp campaign to flush out alleged Nazis in the twilight
of their lives.
He vehemently denies the accusation,
saying he left Budapest the day before Peter Balasz was murdered
for not wearing the mandatory yellow Star of David.
The Wiesenthal Centre’s Dr Efraim
Zuroff said this week he felt “a tremendous sense of vindication”
and praised the “courage” and “wisdom” of Mr O’Connor, whose
decision paves the way for the first-ever extradition from
Australia of an alleged Nazi war criminal. Should he stand
trial, he will be the first Australian to be tried for Nazi
war crimes.
“The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of killers,” Mr Zuroff said
time and again as the wheels of justice slowly turned over
the past four years, with Mr Zentai’s defence team mounting
legal appeals. His lawyers confirmed this week they will
lodge one final appeal against the decision.
“Although he is accused of only one murder, Zentai’s alleged crime should not
be ignored,” Mr Zuroff wrote in the Los Angeles Times on
Sunday.
“Nor should he be spared prosecution
due to his advanced age. While today he is frail, we should
always remember that when he was in his physical prime, he
is alleged to have murdered an innocent teenager simply because
he was Jewish.”
Dr Colin Rubenstein, of the Australia/Israel & Jewish
Affairs Council, agreed. “There is no statute of limitations
on murder, and especially for participation in genocide,
and our sympathies should be with the victims and their families.”
But Mr Zentai’s lawyer, Denis Barich,
described the decision to extradite his client as “quite
extraordinary”.
“Here we have an 88-year-old man with
a heart condition … being held in custody just because a
foreign country from half-way around the world wants to question
him.”
Mr Zuroff, who has been scathing about
the “lack of political will” shown by successive Australian
governments, dismisses out of hand such arguments, just as
he has dismissed other sceptics over the years.
In his new book, Operation Last Chance,
he recalls that when he visited England in 1987 to urge its
government to look into alleged Nazis living there, The Times
opined that Britain’s laws “enshrine principles of justice
tempered with mercy not vengeance” while the Telegraph argued
that “Nazi hunting has become a new and frankly distasteful
blood sport”.
Now, however, Mr Zuroff is hoping
Mr Zentai will not suffer the same fate as Konrads Kalejs,
the last alleged Nazi living in Australia.
He died in 2001 while he was awaiting
extradition to his native Latvia on charges of war crimes.
No one in the Jewish community here
has publicly questioned the wisdom of hunting down wheelchair-bound
octogenarians more than five years after Sir Simon Wiesenthal
himself declared that “my work is done” and that “if there
were any [Nazis] left, they’d be too old and weak to stand
trial today”.
But there are some rumblings about
Mr Zuroff’s hot pursuit of this cold case.
As one former senior Jewish official,
who declined to be named, said: “It’s a fait accomplis for
the Jewish community to support.
“For better or for worse, we were
locked into absolute support once the ball had been set rolling.”
thejc.com
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