The Opportunity and the Sabotage

By Steve Rodan

Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger saw the writing on the wall and knew that every minute would count.

On March 19, 1944, the Germans had taken over Hungary and the Final Solution was rapidly being prepared. The Jewish leadership in Budapest became a tool of the SS and Gestapo. The Zionist leadership was meeting with Adolf Eichmann and the Jews were soon being herded into ghettos. Resistance had been abandoned by the Zionist leadership on the eve of the German occupation. The only way out was escape from Hungary.

In the weeks following the German arrival, Carmilly-Weinberger prepared an escape route from Transylvania to nearby Romania. The rabbi traveled to Bucharest and recruited several prominent Jews to lobby the government, foreign embassies and church to help move the Jews from Hungary through Romania and to Palestine.

"My request was to intervene with the authorities in Bucharest in favor of the refugees who would arrive there, lest they be sent back," the rabbi recalled. [1]

Routes to safety

In the spring of 1944, Germany was being pushed back from its conquests in Eastern Europe to the point where Hungarian Jews could escape Hitler's planned extermination. Carmilly-Weinberger came from Cluj, with 18,000 Jews in northern Transylvania, only three kilometers from the Romanian border. Nearby Nagyvarad, with 27,000 Jews, was about the same distance to safety.

The rabbi's plan was for the Jews to reach the forest along the Romanian frontier and walk until Turda. From there, the refugees would be taken by train, first to Arad and then Bucharest.

There were other escape routes from Hungary. At the start of the German occupation, Jews could still board a train for Yugoslavia. Jews could don sailor uniforms and sail down the Danube River out of Hungary. Other could cross into the forests of neighboring Slovakia, avoided by the SS because of the partisans.

The escape option was no secret. Everybody from rabbis to diplomats were urging the Jews of Hungary to run. The most dangerous place to be in Hungary was the big cities, where the SS worked closely with Hungarian authorities to round up the Jews.

"It is suggested here with respect to conditions prevailing in Hungary that Jews in that country be advised to seek cover in rural sections bordering on Yugoslavia and Slovakia and not remain in large cities," one leading American rabbi wrote. [2]

90% success rate

Indeed, in the first few weeks of the German occupation, Carmilly-Weinberger sent dozens of Jews from Cluj into Romania. For the first three years of the war, Romania, despite avoiding German occupation, had been one of the cruelest countries toward the Jews, killing nearly 400,000. But by late 1943, Romania concluded that Hitler would be defeated and sought to erase the stain of genocide. Now, Romanian border guards could afford to be lazy, and at one point the rate of success for those who tried to escape Hungary reached 90 percent.

In March 1944, Bucharest relayed assurances that Jewish refugees would not be harmed. [3] Ion Antonesco, the anti-Semitic head of the military dictatorship, allowed the Jews safe passage to the port of Constanza, where ships waited to take them to Turkey and possibly Palestine. The assessment was that 100,000 Jews could be saved.

"By not interfering in the emigration of Jews, by closing his eyes, he helped us," Carmilly-Weinberger recalled.

But by May 1944, the organized Jewish emigration from Romania stopped. The Zionist leadership ordered that nobody be given help to leave Hungary without permission from the German occupation authorities, particularly Eichmann.

At first, the Zionist rank-and-file disobeyed the orders of the leadership, particularly Rudolf Kastner, the Mapai representative who worked with Eichmann. Zionist youth groups supplied false documents and sent their colleagues from Budapest to Nagyvarad. In that town, the Zionists and other Jews were helped by Rabbi Haim Meir Hager, the head of the Viznitz hasidic sect.

Germans were benign

When the SS complained, Kastner warned the Jews that the Germans would avenge any escape attempt. He refused to help arrange the release of a Zionist activist who prepared an escape route to Yugoslavia. Instead, Kastner assured the Jews that the Germans were benign and would take them to a better place.

Josef Fischer, a former parliamentarian and Kastner's father-in-law, supported escape in the first phase of the German occupation. He begged the 35-year-old Carmilly-Weinberger to cross into Romania and expand transit points for the Jewish refugees. But after 10 days, Fischer abandoned the escape option. He was now head of the Judenrat, monitored by his son-in-law, a former Cluj resident, and feared German reprisals.

The Germans responded rapidly. Within weeks, the Jews of Transylvania were rounded up in ghettos and then sent by train to Auschwitz. Still, even in the ghetto, the Jews stood a better than even chance of escaping. Nagyvarad was guarded by no more than 50 Hungarian gendarmerie. At night, a fit and resourceful Jew could simply leave town on foot for the Romanian border.

Kastner's opposition to escape was Zionist policy. The leadership had concluded a deal with the SS to facilitate the extermination of the Jews. The price was that the Nazis would share the loot taken from the doomed and be willing to save some Zionists. In Romania, Zionist leaders fought with other Jews over everything and thus delayed rescue to Turkey.

'Gentleman's agreement'

The Nazi-Zionist deal was revealed by none other than Eichmann himself. More than a decade after World War II, Eichmann, now ensconced in Argentina, recounted his success in Hungary. He could have bragged that he did it all, deporting to Auschwitz more than 500,000 Jews despite the resistance of their leaders.

Instead, Eichmann credited Kastner with the Final Solution. Kastner, Eichmann said, was as cold-blooded as those in the SS. There was a "gentleman's agreement...and we trusted each other perfectly." Sometimes, Kastner would request permission for some of his favorites to escape.

""You can have the others,' he [Kastner] would say, 'but let me have this group here,'" Eichmann recalled. [4]

Both Kastner and Carmilly Weinberger were rewarded by the Zionists after World War II: Kastner -- for doing the dirty work of the SS, and Carmilly-Weinberger, for maintaining his silence. From 1948 to 1950, the rabbi served as cultural attaché in the Israeli legation in Budapest. In Israel, he was hired to head the education division of a major city. Unlike his former Cluj parishioners, the rabbi did not testify in the trial of Kastner's accuser, Malchiel Grunwald, in 1954.

But Carmilly-Weinberger could not stay in the same country as Kastner, whose work with Eichmann resulted in the killing of his parents. In 1957, when Kastner was assassinated by Israel's secret police, concerned that he would expose Zionist connections with Hitler, the rabbi accepted an offer to join the staff of Yeshiva University in New York. [5] Only in the 1990s did he publish his memoirs. Kastner is mentioned in a footnote.

Notes

1. History of the Jews in Transylvania (1623-1944). Moshe Carmilly Weinberger. Pages 166 and 175. Encyclopedic Publishing House, Bucharest, 1994.

2. Rabbi Avraham Kalman[owitz] Vaad Hatzalah, New York. May 25, 1944. Joint Distribution Committee archive. Microfilm 012. Folder 15/172

3. "Between Hungary and Romania: The Case of the Southern Transylvania's Jews During the Holocaust." Victor Neumann. Wilson Center. 236. Between Hungary and Romania: The Case of the Southern Transylvania's Jews During the Holocaust | Wilson Center

4. "Eichmann's Memoirs. Part I, Nov. 1, 1960. CIA Archives. CIA-RDP75-00149R000200520018-7

5. "Rabbi Dr. Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger -- In Memoriam." June 30, 2010. Yeshiva University. Rabbi Dr. Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger - In Memoriam (yu.edu)

Below: Rabbi Moshe Carmilly-Weinberger during World War II.