Eszter Garai-Edler hurries through the narrow alleyways of Budapest. Only when she reaches a broad boulevard does the Hungarian woman feel a little safer. There are security cameras in the area, but the 49-year-old dare not drop her guard. Right-wing extremists have been on the lookout for her since she demonstrated against suspected Nazi criminal Laszlo Csatary in July. 

Ever since, the editor at the Cartographic Institute of the Hungarian Academy, has been bombarded with threatening emails and telephone calls. The right-wing extremist internet portal kuruc.info recently published Garai-Edler's contact details. It put a price on her head - as well as those of other activists - and even published the name of her daughter, who lives abroad under another family name. 

Garai-Edler has complained about the threats to police. They advised her to quit driving, saying there was a risk that she might become involved in fake road accidents designed to ensnare her. But she does not have a right to police protection on the grounds that the threats are not "substantial" enough. 

Csatary, now aged 97, is probably the country's most notorious war crime suspect. It is alleged that he served as a police chief in the Hungarian-occupied town of Kosice in Slovakia, organising the deportation of nearly 16,000 Jews to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in 1944. Hungary's state prosecutor had him arrested on those charges this summer after the Jerusalem-based Simon Wiesenthal Centre exerted pressure. 

There are also accusations against Csatary stemming from 1941, when he allegedly dispatched 300 Jews from Kosice to Kamenec-Podolsk in the Ukraine, where most of them were murdered by the Nazis. The Hungarian state prosecutor's office opted not to pursue those charges. The move upset Efraim Zuroff, director of the Wiesenthal Centre. "They did not even listen to our witness," Zuroff told dpa. 

The witness is 84-year-old Marika Weinberger, who hails from Kosice and lives in Australia. She told dpa that nine members of her family were deported in 1941 from Kosice to Kamenec-Podolsk. They were taken away "in the middle of the night, on a hot August night. After that we did not know anything. We were first told they are going to be taken somewhere and they would be working. The information that came to all of us after the war was that they were all shot, including my uncles, aunts, little cousins, children." 

"The 12,000 Jews in Kosice and all around the little villages and towns were brought to Kosice and this was done under (Csatary)," Weinberger said. In 1948, Csatary was sentenced to death in what was then Czechoslovakia. The sentence was issued in his absence, since he had fled to Canada. 

He returned to Hungary in 1997 after the Canadian authorities spotted errors in his papers and threatened him with deportation. Csatary led an uneventful life in Budapest until July, when state prosecution officials summoned him for questioning. He denied all the accusations and has since been placed under house arrest. Slovak archive documents and statements by witnesses have brought new details to light about the atrocities Csatary was allegedly involved in. They indicate that the man was not just obeying orders, but went much further. He allegedly sent people to their deaths even though they had not been singled out for liquidation by German Nazis. Csatary is also said to have personally mistreated prisoners. People who have revealed these alleged crimes include Arthur Gorog, a member of the then Jewish Council at Kosice, whose memoirs were published in Israel in 1991. 

The Czech case was not Csatary's sole brush with the law for his wartime activities. In 1945, he was sentenced in the southern Hungarian town of Pecs to 20 years in prison for his alleged activities as a Nazi thug. However, he fled shortly before he was due to answer charges, Gorog wrote. That account is corroborated by reports from the former Czechoslovakian news agency, said historian Zoltan Balassa, who lives in Kosice. 

Attempts to get closer to the truth are hampered in Hungary by the conservative government, which is "legalising anti-Semitism," says Garai-Edler. The situation is only exacerbated by popularity of right-wing nationalist parliamentary party Jobbik - the third political force in Hungary. It reported Zuroff to the authorities for "false accusations" in the Csatary case. 

Recently, however, Jobbik found itself in an embarrassing situation, when its representative and EU deputy Csanad Szegedi was forced to confess that he has Jewish ancestors. His party accused him of having bribed someone in order to prevent knowledge of his Jewish roots from becoming public. Szegedi resigned from Jobbik and sought solace with a rabbi. 

brecorder.com