His mother waited for years to tell him the details of that fateful journey. From as far back as he could remember she had mentioned bits and pieces in order to impress on him above all that he was lucky to be alive, that they all were. People had been ravished by the war, the scars were clear on their faces and everywhere in Budapest, as they still are. Nevertheless, his mother was a cheerful person and taught him to be thankful for every breath he took. But it was the story of Rezso Kasztner that defined his mother’s view of the world. Her life, as well as his own, began to make sense to him only after she shared the story of the train and the man who arranged for it. The paradox of Kasztner was a symbol of the capricious nature of people and their lives, the veil through which his mother saw the workings of the universe.
On June 30th, 1944, his mother boarded a train in Budapest that was to take her and almost seventeen-hundred other Jews to safety in Switzerland. Over the past few months Rezso Kasztner, a journalist and lawyer, had used his influence and savvy to negotiate the ransom of these passengers with the Nazi authorities. He had met with these Nazis and discussed numbers, bargained for the lives of people who otherwise would have perished. Some of these people knew Reszo personally, others did not. How he came up with the list of names Egon’s mother could not say. At that point she still thought, along with most Jews in Hungary, that she was being relocated to a concentration camp and did not yet know the massacre that awaited once under captivity. Reszo Kasztner knew. He kept it to himself but decided to save 1,685 or so fellow Jews from death in Auschwitz.
Several months pregnant by the time she boarded the train, she was terrified of the possibilities that awaited her first child. Should the journey be delayed her son might be born in the train and not survive. The thought of attaining freedom at the cost of her unborn churned her stomach with guilt. She described the fear etched on people’s faces as they settled in their seats. Most were solemnly quiet except for the children who were too young to understand the situation but old enough to be scared. Tears streamed down people’s faces with thoughts of those left behind. Years later they would know that almost half a million of their countrymen fell victim to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. In the train with these lucky few were three suitcases filled with cash, jewels, gold, and shares of stock, amounting to about one thousand dollars per person, which Kasztner collected to be paid to SS officer Kurt Becher as their ransom. When she uttered that number, Egon felt his skin crawl. The mathematics of such a transaction bewildered him and left him short of breath.
His mother then described to him in detail the days spent in limbo at the concentration camp. A pregnant woman she had noticed when boarding the train gave birth during that time and other prisoners helped look after her and the newborn. She realized then that she was less alone than it seemed, witnessing the power of people’s goodness in the midst of such evil. In August she was picked to join the first group that was allowed to continue on the train to freedom. Recalling the day she reached Switzerland, his mother smiled and shed tears of joy.
Egon asked simple questions. He wanted to know what they ate on the train. How they went to the bathroom. What the temperature was. As he listened to his mother he tried to imagine himself on that train, outside of his mother’s womb. He stumbled down the crowded aisles and looked into people’s eyes. Amidst the faces of complete strangers he recognized those of his loved ones. He sensed their fear and felt his stomach turn. His mother stopped talking and stared into her son’s eyes. For a long while they sat in silence studying each other and the story unfolded before them, its memories and repercussions bridging the gap between mother and son, the train making a connection with his birth in Switzerland and his childhood in Budapest, so that when his mother broke the silence she skipped ahead more than ten years and recounted Reszo Kasztner’s assassination on a quiet Tel Aviv street. At that time the story of the train had been retold, now from the perspective of those left behind. He had withheld information which cost the lives of the masses, had made a list of those to be saved, had negotiated with Nazis, had vouched for them in court, had sold his soul to the devil. He was called a traitor. His daughters were taunted in school, he was spat upon in the streets and finally gunned down by three fellow Jews in 1957. One year after his death the courts cleared Kasztner of all charges. His killers were pardoned some years later.
The figure of Reszo Kasztner flickered in Egon’s mind. He tried hard to imagine what the man looked like. He could picture nothing but a tall, faceless body. He was a hero, a traitor, a hero again. From this story alone he could not understand Reszo Kasztner, much less imagine what he looked like. He searched for his features in the placid eyes of his mother, who once again sat in silence, smiling tenderly. But in her eyes he found only the enigma of life.
