The Devil’s Advocate;Refuting the defense of Rudolf Kastner
By Prof Francisco Gil-White
Author Anna Porter has just released a book, Kastner’s Train, in which she defends that Rudolf Kastner, who was found to be a Nazi collaborator in a Jerusalem trial in the early 1950s, was instead a great Jewish hero. To accept Anna Porter’s argument is to render the defense of the Jewish people impossible. This piece will explain why Anna Porter is wrong, and it will show the connection between the betrayals of certain Jewish leaders during the Holocaust, and the current policies of the Israeli government, which are endangering the survival of the Jewish state. CONTINUE
In this compelling book review, Gil-White articulates the defining issue. According to one Justice of the Supreme Court of Israel “Kastner, in order to carry out the rescue plan for the few prominents, fulfilled knowingly and without good faith the said desire of the Nazis, thus expediting the work of exterminating the masses.(800,000)”
By a split decision 3 against 2, the Court held in essence there was no point in warning them because they were doomed anyway and found him innocent.
What do you think?
Saving himself and some of members of his social class at the price of many others is not an act of altruism. Allowing those with pecuniary possibilities to buy their way out from sharing the fate of those to whom these possibilities were unavailable is not glorious. Keeping the doomed from knowing their fate is not praiseworthy. To testify on behalf of perpetrators of the Holocaust AFTER the scope of the calamity was known to all is an act of incomrehensible villainy.
I don’t know whether Kaszner was a traitor, for the events of that tragic period tend to erase the distinction between those scrambling about to save their lives, but Porter’s attempt to “rehabilitate” him is obviously historical revisionism which as Gil-Whyte correctly points out should be met with contempt.