Kaszter's Train: The True Story of Rezs Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust.

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Anna Porter is a well-known Canadian publisher and author, and Kasztner’s Train is her first effort at writing history. Her subject is Rezso Kasztner, a Hungarian-Jewish lawyer, politician, and fixer who tried to save Jewish lives as Adolf Eichmann and his minions organized the transport of Jews from Hungary to the death camps. His efforts ought to have made him a hero on a par with Raoul Wallenberg, but instead Kasztner became known as the man who bargained with the Nazis, trying to enrich himself in the process, and selling places on a protected train that made its way to Switzerland.

Porter goes into enormous detail as she seeks out the truth, and by the end of her long book Kasztner has become a hero—perhaps a flawed hero, but a hero nonetheless. Some of the Nazis could be bribed—and were. Some recognized that they would be tried by the victors at the end of the war, and Kasztner used this fear to get their help to save Jews. But dealing with the devil earned him widespread enmity, and Kasztner, who lived in Israel after the war, was notorious and eventually assassinated in 1957. The Israeli courts eventually exonerated him after his death, but until Porter’s book, he had not received his due.

Well researched, well written, but lacking a conclusion that sums up a complex story, this is an important study.