If you don’t know who Reszo Kasztner or Rudolf Kasztner or Rudolf Kastner was, the title of HaNefesh Ve’Hasatan about sums it up. Reszo Kasztner was one of the more prominent Jewish Nazi collaborators. Like many leading collaborators he started out trying to save Jewish lives, and like a lot of them ended up identifying more with the Nazis than with the Jews.
After the War Reszo Kasztner became a political football because he was appointed to a position in the Labor government in Israel. This led to attacks from Nationalist Zionists charging Kasztner with Nazi collaboration which instead of firing Kasztner, the Labor government tried to silence with a libel trail, that the government lost, when Kasztner began fondly remembering all his favorite Nazis while in the dock. A second government controlled trial exonerated him, but by then he had already been assassinated.
The Haredi Anti-Zionists meanwhile hypocritically tried to smear all of Israel as Nazi collaborators using Rudolf Kastner. This is the usual way that Haredi anti-Zionist smears ignore any distinctions between different Zionist groups. The only problem was that Kastner’s big payoff from the Nazis was the Kastner Train, which included the author of Vayoel Moshe. Yes, the irony is that the one Zionist Nazi collaborator actually rescued the Satmar Rebbe.
Meanwhile the left has been trying to exonerate Reszo Kasztner as a misunderstood guy. The big problem with that approach is that Reszo Kasztner didn’t just collaborate with the Nazis before the war, but after the war. Reszo Kasztner testified and worked on behalf of a bunch of top Nazis after the war, including Dieter Wisliceny who introduced the Yellow Star and Ghettos for Jews.
But the Pro Kasztner documentaries keep on coming. The latest Killing Kasztner is from an unimpeachable source, Gaylen Ross, a former model who appeared in Dawn of the Dead, and a bunch of episodes of Walker, Texas Ranger. Yeah seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. Killing Kasztner and uses the usual lame modern documentary formats. There’s already a trailer with lots of heroic music, chanting monks in the background, WWII footage and interviews with his daughter and the guy who supposedly shot him.
Even the trailer contains plenty of lies. Kasztner’s daughter claims that her father saved more Jews than anyone else. That honor would probably go to Frank Foley, certainly not Kasztner who saved important people, many of whom had paid off his Nazi buddies. But in the bigger picture, Kasztner helped kill a lot more Jews than he saved. Kasztner and some of his associates lied to Hungarian Jews telling them there was no danger and nothing to worry about, that everything was gonna be fight. Just sit back and relax. We got this one. A 1000 or so people, most of them rich and influential got an express train out of Nazi territory, the rest got Auschwitz.
I know the Jewish left has a way of not being able to let go of trying to rewrite history, but they might want to let Kasztner go. Especially when your latest argument comes from a guest star on two episodes of Walker Texas Ranger.
Samurai Mohel 