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In
his response to my previous article (Those without Chance),
Efraim Zuroff (director of the Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem)
not only concealed many significant facts, but also distorted
my own standpoint in his interpretation (Not without Chance, ÉS,
2004/30.) In order of importance:
| 1. |
I have never
stated that crime against humanity can become obsolete
(lapse). Moreover, the process is strictly regulated
by international agreements, and, contrary to Mr. Zuroff’s
point, this principle is not the exclusive policy of
the Wiesenthal Center. Even I, myself agree with the
idea that if a real war criminal is found in Hungary,
he should be put to trial, regardless his age |
2.
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I did not insist that
no legal action has been started since the operation
was launched. On the contrary, I quoted the relevant
data given by Mr. Zuroff himself at his press conference
in Budapest, 13. July. What I wrote was exactly the same
as what Mr. Zuroff is compelled to admit: Since 2002,
when the latest Nazi hunting campaign was started, no
person has been brought to justice. The data now brought
to light by Mr. Zuroff, concerning some recently opened
inquiry in some intentionally unnamed countries have
nothing to do with the data released by him at the press
conference, aimed to convince Hungarian journalists.
Then my question is: who am I to believe now? The author
of the article Not hopeless, or the Zuroff speaking up
on 13. July? |
My partner in the debate also resented that it was me, and
only me who has been asked by the different reporters to
form opinion on the Nazi hunting operation. However, it
was not only me who judged this initiative triggered by
blood money. Historian Krisztian Ungváry, editor
Sándor Révész and other columnists
also share my point of view. Historians working for the
Holocaust Documentation Center in Páva Street, or
those in the Hungarian research group at the Yad Vashem
Archives are also on my side. I just silently remark that
the person heard more often than me in the different press
organs was the Budapest coordinator of the campaign, Ivan
Beer. Unfortunately, with his aggressive, maliciously naive
and professionally less than amateur statements (in Hungarian:
hozzá nem érto) he did more help to the Hungarian
anti-Semitic groups. In the meantime Mr. Zuroff, though
he does not mention it in his article, dismissed Ivan Beer
from his post.
As Attila Péterfalvi, the commissioner for data protection
made it clear in a TV broadcast on 23 July, workers of the
Wiesenthal Center are legally allowed to collect personal,
even sensitive data about different people in Hungary, but
they can not forward the results to Israel without the preceding
agreement of the people involved, that is, in this case,
the charged ones. Ivan Beer seems not to have been familiar
with all this. This is can be the only explanation to why/how
he dared to pass on two (out of the received seven) reports
to Jerusalem. Mr. Zuroff, when informed that their operation
is against the current data protection laws (by the way,
the law has been criticized by myself, too), he called Attila
Péterfalvi the protector of Nazi war criminals! He
dismissed his coordinator when he found out that Beer suspended
sending the data. He also threatened to find somebody else
to Beer’s position and continue the work. In other
words, they are looking for people to take part in an illegal
operation!
Mr. Zuroff does not remember right, he definitely has stated,
that there has been no legal justice done to war criminals
in Hungary following the Second World War. He is mistaken.
His information is not accurate: the people’s tribunals
sentenced not only war criminals, but also people who had
committed crime against humanity. However, besides them (those
charged with war crimes or crimes against the people,) the
27 000 condemned include others with different accusation,
such as spreading anti-Communist or anti-Soviet propaganda,
scaremongering, or simply calling Jews by names in the streets
or in taverns/drinkeries (a special notion in Hungary called
kocsma,) in accordance with the 1946. VII. article. The different
councils of the people’s tribunal in Budapest had passed
verdicts in 21 854 cases up to 1949. On behalf of the Yad
Vashem Archives with my colleagues we worked for long years
examining the documents of all these trials. We found all
together 3704 cases in which the word Jew or gipsy occurred.
Mr. Zuroff is also mistaken when he infers that these people’s
tribunals were “ politically motivated committees,
seriously influenced by the communist power”. Back
on 13. July Mr. Zuroff had not the faintest intention to
call the tribunals communists! He is probably not aware of
the fact that the Hungarian people’s tribunals were
party courts. In the tribunals worked delegates from the
various parties of the time: those in the anti-Fascist coalition,
the ones united in the Hungarian National Independence Front,
the absolute winner of the 1945 autumn election, i.e. the
Independent Smallholders’ Party from the right wing,
as well as the Socialist Democrats, the Communist Party,
the Civic Democratic Party, and the National Peasants’ Party.
They were later joined by representatives of the National
Trade Union Association as well. It was not the tribunals
of the people where the communist influence could be realized
in 1945-46, but rather the AVO (State Security Office) and
the peoples’ prosecutor office. In 1945-46 the Communist
Party did not take a leading role in calling criminals of
war and crimes against humanity to account. For example Peter
Veres, who turned into a communist collaborator from a veritable
popular-nationalistic anti-Semitic character and proclaimed
reconciliation for young Arrow Cross Party activists, was
a mouthpiece of Mátyás Rákosi in the
Peasants’Party. We have records of 1786 court cases
in Budapest from the year 1945, and 1401 cases from the year
1946 which involve the term Jew or Gipsy. On the whole it
means, during the above mentioned two years every third trial
at the peoples’ tribunal was dealing with and calling
to account people who were showing brutality to Jews, robbing
Jews, deporting Jews or murdering Jews. In 1947, when the
influence of the Communist Party became stronger in the tribunal,
the rate of similar charges began to decrease in Budapest.
In numbers: 1947: 268 cases out of 3958, 1948: 205 cases
out of 4971, 1949: year of the beginning of the total communist
takeover: only 44 cases out of the 2690 contained the above
mentioned crime.
If one goes into further study of the peoples’ tribunal
trials something will become clear: it was not the party
background of the delegated representatives that was likely
to determine the outcome of a particular trial, but rather
the personal fate, origin and conviction of the tribunal
members. The Socialist Democratic or the Civic Democratic
Party, for instance, delegated more representatives with
Jewish origin to the committees, than e.g. the Smallholders’ Party
did. It is not hard to find out, who might have voted for
and against the capital punishment of, let us say, a skeleton
staff member of a forced labor unit. We also know from the
contemporary press that there were several demonstrations
against the peoples’ tribunal in many cities of the
country. The demonstrators were scolding not communist, but “Jewish
tribunals”.
Mr. Zuroff, instead of trying to refute my statement that
even the youngest perpetrator must be 76 by now, he simply
calls my argument “misleading”. He supports his
case with not a single piece of data, witness or document
capable of proving that yes, it is still possible today,
in 2004 to bring an ex- Arrow Cross Party war criminal to
trial and to justice. I was not convinced by his example
taken from Croatia. It happened about half a decade ago that
as an entrusted expert I, along with my historian and jurist
colleagues (on behalf on the Persecutor’s Office,)
were trying to trace down the people responsible for the
deportations from Korösmezo in July-August 1941. and
the massacre at Kamenyec-Podolszkij. Following several months
of demanding research work we came to the conclusion that
all the people involved (beginning with premier Miklós
Horthy and prime minister László Bárdossy
to the inspectors in KEOKH (Office for Controlling People
from Abroad)) can be put into three different categories:
| 1. |
those brought
to trial by the peoples’ tribunals and sentenced
to death or to jail for different periods of time |
2.
|
those managed to escape
abroad, to countries (e.g. Canada, Australia, etc.) where
they can leave peacefully and where the Wiesenthal Center,
for some unknown reasons, does not even try to find them
(???? – Szilvia) |
| 3. |
passed away in the meantime.
We have carefully examined enormous amounts of documents
from the different archives, peoples’ tribunals
and public prosecutor’s offices, and we even
found living witnesses and survivors. The results,
however, were more than discouraging, at least from
Mr. Zuroff’s standpoint: not single one of them
could be brought to trial. Ex- Arrow Cross Party criminals
could be searched for today in Hungary, too, but there
are too few contemporary documents at our disposal,
suitable for proving their guilt at the trial. So,
what remains is the report (denunciation) read out
at the 13. July press conference, whose author has
been peacefully living his everyday life for decades
at the feet of the Bakony. In his garden, where he
regularly does some gardening, allegedly lie the corpse
of three labor unit servants’ victims murdered
in 1944, whose murderer (or at least one of them) is
reported to be living in the neighboring village. I
have not the faintest clue to why, if he has known
it for 60 years, it is just now that the denunciator
has informed the Embassy of Israel in Budapest! And
also, why did he send his report to the Embassy of
Israel, and not the Hungarian authorities? Why has
not been his garden dug up since the 13. July? Why
has not the murderer been arrested yet? Ivan Beer has
made a remark concerning the seven reports received
by him, and most of them he classified as mere “assumptions” or “conjectures”.
One of the two reports sent to Jerusalem by him even
Mr. Zuroff’s staff found unreliable. Compared
to the efforts of their PR work, one seemingly profound
report does not seem to be too much!
Mr. Zuroff has, in front of his eyes, war criminals
today in Hungary, who are marrymaking wandering around,
go swimming daily, take their dogs for walks, etc.
I, however, can more easily imagine people living on
very law pensions downtown of Pest, who have no dogs,
neither gardens, and who are not able to go swimming
because they are ill and can not even afford their
medicine. Then suddenly, for 10 000 Euros, it occurs
to somebody that his/her beloved neighbor might (or
surely!) has once been an Arrow Cross Party mass murderer.
If not, the jury will acquit them, anyway, as happened
to write a supporter of the Wiesenthal operation in
a public weekly. Just try to imagine your 80-90 year
old relative who, one morning, is taken by some policemen,
is interrogated for long hours, and kept in overcrowded,
dirty cells for weeks of custody. Then, when the time
of the trial comes, it all turns out that his 95-year
old accuser is not quite sure whether he saw this person
in October or December, 1944, or whether it was the
Pest bank of the Danube River or the brickwork’s
in Békásmegyer where they met. What is
more, he might have been wearing a uniform, but what
kind? Was it that of a policeman, a gendarme or a soldier?
Evidences like this can be found by the dozen in the
peoples’ tribunal cases, though they were recorded
in 1945-48! I still insist that there is not much chance
for finding real war criminals and Arrow Cross Party
murderers today, and there is even less chance of bringing
them to justice. Yet on the other hand, I can see a
great chance of suing innocent patriarchs by hundreds,
in hope of the 10 000 Euro blood money. It is just
a popular watchword that to develop anti-Semitism you
do not even need to have Jews around. It can be proved
only partially and under very special circumstances.
One single case of any elderly person, no matter how
healthy he is, who has been innocently slandered and
defamed in hope of the 10 000 Euro blood money will
be enough for journalist of the extreme right to have
something to chew for weeks. Given one single person
dies during the course of the investigations or the
trials, the indignation of a whole nation will sweep
away Operation: Last Chance.
I was criticized by András Szego (Szentendre)
in ÉS, and even personally by a number of other
people whose opinion is very important to me, for making
it public in my writing that Ivan Beer, my distant
relative, has some small shops. I would like to make
it clear once more that, in my opinion, nobody without
academic qualifications in either history or law should
take part by any means in a Nazi hunter operation with
blood money. Had Ivan Beer’s original profession
been a doctor, computing engineer or iron turner, I
would have written about that as well. If Ivan Beer
had announced at the press conference on 13. July that
although he was officially the founder and president
of a Holocaust Memorial Foundation which had not been
active by any way for years, yet, as an enterpreneur,
he feels obliged to financially support Mr. Zuroff’s
operation, I wold not have had a word. But what he
did was behaving like a credited president of an acknowledged
Holocaust Memorial Foundation, and not as private shop
owner enterpreneur. Not even one journalist dared to
ask him, on what basis he took part in this operation.
But how would have they dared, really, from the president
of an organization with the word Holocaust in its name… Ivan
Beer said in a weekly that the whole Nazi hunter operation
was passed on to him by the MAZSIHISZ (Association
of Hungarian Jewish Communities). As András
Heisler, president of the MAZSIHISZ has personally
informed me, they have never even talked to Ivan Beer,
and added that the MAZSIHISZ has intentionally kept
and is keeping itself away from the blood money operation.
Just to illustrate how ridiculously the Jerusalem
office is destroying the once (in the 50s and 60s)
rightly deserved fame of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal
Center, let me reveal one story here. On 15. July a
certain holocaust survivor called me. He told me that
in 1987 he (or she) shared the name and the Australian
address of his brother’s murderer with the staff
of the Jerusalem office. In he following 17 years the
office did not do about his case as much as inform
him that his report had been documented or put on a
file. On the very same day I sent the name and phone
number to Ivan Beer. Even up to this day, when I am
writing these lines (7. August), nobody from the Center
has got in contact with this person, although he stated
that he was not interested in the 10 000 Euros at al,
all he waned was to have the murderer put on trial.
(Name and phone number still in the editor’s
office…)
Mr. Zuroff, according to his own writing, is motivated
by the sense of responsibility he feels for the victims
of the holocaust. Consequently, the state of Israel,
the authorities of which have ceased to persecute old
Nazis, is neglecting, ignoring the holocaust victims.
Mr. Zuroff should feel, indeed, some responsibility
for the survivors of the holocaust as well. In my experience,
there are many among them who, today, would rather
forgive those, who sinned (committed crime) against
them. Mr. Zuroff should also feel responsible for the
members of the generations born after the holocaust.
Our deeds are not simply led by the quest for revenge.
It is most strange that Mr. Zuroff does not even try
to answer the question that most of his critics have
raised: If his issue is such a noble one indeed, why
on earth does he need to offer 10 000 Euro to encourage
people to make their reports?
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László Karsai
Élet és Irodalom
Vol. 48. Issue 33.
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