Kasztner's List: Zionist collaboration in Hungary Seán Mac Mathúna   From the front page of the British newspaper, The People, 17th October 1943. Proof of a systematic campaign to wipe out the Jews of Europe had reached the Zionists some ten months earlier:     Brothers - the remaining Jews in Poland live with the awareness that in the most terrible days of our history you did not come to our aid. Respond, at least in the last days of our life - message via the Polish Underground from the Jewish National Committee in Warsaw, January 1943. Jim Allens play Perdition was described as the most controversial play of the 1980s , as it accused the Zionist movement of collaborating with the Nazis in the extermination of over 500,000 Hungarian Jews (The Guardian, 23rd April 1999). The play deals with the collaboration of some of the Zionist leaders of Hungary's Jews, notably Rudolf Kasztner. It would be unfair to label the whole Zionist movement as mere quislings of the Nazi regime: many Zionists fought heroically as partisans, participating in uprisings such as the one in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, whilst others in occupied Europe actively resisted fascism and did what they could to help people escape the SS extermination squads that roamed the countryside of Eastern Europe, and the death camps and gas chambers of Auschwitz. However, in Hungary in 1944, a different picture emerges of the activities of the Zionists, and the source of the allegations made against Kasztner comes from Jews who survived the Nazi Holocaust, such as Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel, Rudolf Vrba and post-war writers such as Lenni Brenner. They have claimed that the leadership of the Zionist movement engaged in a shocking failure to support pleas for rescue, the suppression of news of the holocaust and for regarding the establishment of a Zionist state in Palestine of having greater priority than saving the majority of Europe's Jews from the Nazi death camps. They are alleged to have ignored messages such as the following which came from the 'Jewish National Committee' in Warsaw, via the Polish underground, on 21st January 1943, and simply read as follows:   We notify you of the greatest crime of all times, about the murder of millions of Jews in Poland. Poised at the brink of the annihilation of the still surviving Jews, we ask you:     a.. Revenge against the Germans     b.. Force the Hitlerites to halt the murders     c.. Fight for our lives and our honor     d.. Contact the neutral countries     e.. Rescue 10,000 children through exchange     f.. 500,000 dollars for purposes of aid   Brothers - the remaining Jews in Poland live with the awareness that in the most terrible days of our history you did not come to our aid. Respond, at least in the last days of our life. (Quoted by Lucy Dawidowicz in The War Against the Jews 1933-45. (Penguin Books, Middlesex, 1977, p.403) The Hungarian Jewish refugee Arthur Koestler, was another person attempting to alert people to the fate of Europe's Jews. According to Martin Gilbert, writing in his book Auschwitz and the Allies (Michael Joseph, London, England, 1981), even during the period at the end of 1943 and the beginning of 1944, the stories of German atrocities were still not fully believed. One of those concerned by this fact was Koestler, then working as a journalist and lecturer in Britain. At present , he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in January 1944:   We have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial, of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. Gilbert notes that Koestler's own emotion and bitterness arose because he had on his desk in front of him photographs of the killing of Jews - photographs, which Koestler noted, people had died to smuggle out of Poland. Koestler's article continued:   I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland ; they have never heard of Lidice. Tre_b_link__a or Belzac you can convince them for in hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.   Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas you others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a fantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about ill a screened fantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Unlike the socialist Bund, the founders of the Zionism movement at the turn of the 20th century argued that the Jewish question in Europe could only be solved by the Jewwish people leaving the continent and creating a homeland in Palestine. It would be the rise of fascism across Europe in the 1930's and the Holocaust that would see the Bund destroyed as a political movement and its place as a representative of the Jewish people of Eastern and Central Europe taken by the Zionists. It is clear that there is much evdience that the Zionists took this opportunity not to help the Jewish people as they were being slowly led to the death camps, or alert the world about the plans of the Nazis, but to collaborate with them and use their position to save their own, and not the bulk of Jewry who being exterminated towards the end of the war. During the Second World War, the main non-Zionist organization in Europe was the Socialist Bund. Although equipped with few resources, it did the most to publicize the Holocaust and seek support for Jewish resistance in Europe. On the other hand, the World Zionist Organization (WZO) was an international organization with a large intelligence network. Specifically, it was the only Jewish international organization which had liaison offices inside Nazi Europe. It had direct organizational _link_s with Zionist groups throughout Europe and direct access to and political influence with the Allied powers. It was also involved in arms smuggling and financial operations, but this vast apparatus, which then had illegal armed forces in Palestine, was not used to publicize the Holocaust or support beleaguered ghetto fighters or aiding rescue activities. It was accused of covering up the crimes of the Nazi regime until the Allied powers decided to publicize it, not assisting Jewish resistance groups, and not making attempt to rescue the bulk of European Jewry. The Zionists did not lead the resistance in the ghetto, these activities were generally led by Bundists and Communists. Jews organized resistance movements and took part in partisan warfare throughout occupied Europe - usually under Communist leadership, often under direct command of the Soviet Red Army. These groups made a substantial contribution to the Allied war effort. It should be said as well, that many Zionists had no choice but to fight back against the Nazis, and some fought bravely in ghetto rebellions and partisan warfare. But in the Warsaw ghetto, where their contribution was greatest, the majority of fighters were either Communist, Bundist or unaffiliated. Furthermore, although many left-wing Zionists and Revisionists made a substantial contribution to the Warsaw ghetto rebellion in 1943, the first target of the resistance fighters was often other Zionists, who were leaders of the Nazi sponsored Judenrat, the hated ghetto police and the Jewish Gestapo. This included Dr. Alfred Nossig, who was shot by the Warsaw ghetto fighters as a Gestapo agent. Generally, it has been argued that whatever the role some Zionists played in the resistance activities, the plain fact is that they got little or no support from the WZO, whose leadership was too busy demanding unrestricted immigration to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish Army in the country. Furthermore, the Zionists were engaged in an armed struggle against the British mandate in Palestine, where they maintained a very efficient clandestine armed force throughout the war. They carried out the assassination of the British Minister Lord Moyne in Cairo in November 1944. They had extensive arms smuggling operations which substantially depleted British armories and forced the diversion of British troops away from the battlefront to guard duty in Palestine. The arms stolen by the Zionists were not for use against the Nazis, but were to be used against the British army and the Arab population. One advocate of not helping the Jews of Europe was the Zionist leader Yitzhak Greenbaum, whose son was described in Nazi-Zionist Collaboration once as a exceptionally notorious Kapo (Jewish policeman) at Auschwitz. Greenbaum was Rudolf Kasztner's immediate superior in the Jewish Agency, as head of the Rescue Committee for European Jewry, and later became a cabinet minister in Israel's first Government in 1948. In a speech given in Palestine in 1943, he indicated that buying land from the Arab population of Palestine was more important than rescuing Jews in Europe, and, as he admitted after the war, he had even called for less to be said about the extermination of the Jews, so as not to distract attention from buying land in Palestine. It is a shocking indictment of Zionism and its wartime leaders. Thus, the Zionist policy during the Holocaust is best summed up in the words of Greenbaum speaking on 'The Diaspora
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