Wednesday morning in Canberra the Australian High Court will announce whether
Charles (Karoly) Zentai, who is accused of murdering a Jewish teenager
he caught on a Budapest tram without the requisite yellow star in
November 1944, can be extradited to Hungary. The decision will mark
the culmination of a legal battle which has gone on for almost eight
years, since I first exposed him living in Perth, Australia, in late
2004.
The Zentai case was initially brought to my attention earlier that year, shortly
after the Wiesenthal Center launched its “Operation: Last Chance”
project — which offers financial rewards for information which
will facilitate the prosecution and punishment of Nazi war criminals
— in Hungary on July 13, 2004. Several weeks later, I received
an envelope from Budapest with a letter and some unusual documentation
from an unexpected source. The letter was from Prof. Laszlo Karsai,
a Holocaust historian of Jewish origin, who had harshly criticized
the launch of “Operation: Last Chance” in Hungary (and ever since
has time and again — most recently this past July — attacked me
and the Wiesenthal Center in this regard).
Karsai had been contacted by a survivor living
in Budapest whose brother, Peter Balazs, had allegedly been murdered
by Karoly Zentai. What was unique about the accusation in this
case was that it was supported by extensive witness testimony from
a Hungarian postwar trial of one of Zentai’s accomplices, a very
rare instance in which an allegation reaches our office backed
up by witness testimony from a trial that unequivocally names a
suspect as a murderer.
What was missing from the information was two
key elements. The survivor had no idea whether Zentai was alive
and if so, where he was living. He did know that in 1958 he had
been living in Australia, but that was 46 years earlier and there
was no indication as to his present whereabouts. It did not take
long for me to determine that Karoly, now Charles, Zentai was very
much alive and healthy and living in the Willeton suburb of Perth.
I sent the information to the Australian and Hungarian authorities
and within a very short time, in March 2005, the latter, to their
credit, asked for his extradition to Budapest. That should have
been enough to insure that Zentai would be brought to justice in
the country where his alleged crime took place, but unfortunately,
that has not been the case.
When Zentai was initially exposed in late 2004
on national television, he said he wanted to go to Hungary to clear
his name, but the minute Hungary sought his extradition, the Zentai
family started doing everything in its power to prevent that from
happening. By a variety of legal maneuvers, it has succeeded until
now in hindering the extradition, with every delay only increasing
the chances that medical considerations might ultimately achieve
the result that the family could not attain withiin the framework
of the law.
In this respect, the Zentai case is of unique
importance in Australia, since barring any new developments, it
will be the last case of its kind to be brought to court. Despite
the fact that numerous Nazi war criminals/collaborators were admitted
to Australia in the immediate postwar era (1948-1955), and the
government passed legislation in 1989 enabling their prosecution
and established a Special Investigations Unit to do so, not a single
Holocaust perpetrator was successfully prosecuted in Australia.
The three cases brought to trial were either lost or dismissed
for medical reasons and the effort was basically (although not
officially) abandoned in 1992. However, several important Nazi
war criminals could almost certainly still have been convicted.
The breakup of the Soviet Union created much better potential for
finding documents and witnesses against the suspects in Australia,
almost all of whom were East Europeans.
So the enormous effort to hold the Nazi war criminals
who found refuge in Australia accountable appears to have boiled
down to the Zentai case. It’s not as dramatic as those of the Lithuanian
and Latvian murder squad officers whose victims numbered in the
thousands, but the principle remains exactly the same. The passage
of time in no way diminishes the guilt of these criminals and old
age should not afford protection to murderers. Peter Balazs, moreover,
a fine young Jewish boy of eighteen — who was also a wonderful
brother to his handicapped twin Paul — merits that the person responsible
for his murder not be allowed to live out his life in the peace
and tranquility that he does not deserve.
At this point, I can only hope and pray that the
Australian High Court concurs. timesofisrael.com
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