Setting the Past Free - Part Two

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For some Rudolf Kastner is a hero, for others a traitor. Mark Lawson explores the cultural retellings of a story that began in Nazi occupied Hungary in 1944. At the time Kastner, a lawyer and a journalist, was deputy chairman of the Relief and Rescue Committee. He negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to save Jewish lives but did he pay for them with other Jewish lives? In this programme, Mark Lawson talks to those within Israel - including the playwright Motti Lerner, the Chief Historian of Yad Vashem Professor Dina Porat, and the literary critic Professor Dan Laor - who have all wrestled with Kastner's story and the issues it raises.

Image: A Hungarian woman looks for her relatives names on the Hungarian Jewish holocaust victims memorial wall in Budapest, Credit AFP/Getty Images

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for downloading from the BBC.
0:04.0	The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. Street here in Tel Aviv, there's a metal plaque with a Hebrew inscription.
0:25.0	It describes how a former resident, Dr Rudolf Israel Kastner, lived here but was murdered
0:30.9	in 1957 by Jewish
0:33.6	Assassins.
0:34.5	In the first program I explored how Dr. Kastner,
0:38.5	a Jewish community leader who negotiated with the Nazis in Hungary was accused of collaboration and
0:44.9	defended his reputation in a famous trial in Israel.
0:49.5	Subsequently, Kastner's actions have been put in the dock by numerous writers in England and America, as we heard last time,
0:57.0	and also in Israel, where I've come to discuss versions of the Caster's story in the Holocaust Museum on screen and on stage.
1:06.0	During the course of my negotiations with Eichmann, I cooperated with him in the extermination of Hungarian
1:10.8	jury, so claimed the prosecution. And everybody who had been looking for of
1:14.9	the termination so claim the prosecution and everybody who had been looking for explanations for the Holocaust held on to that accusation of course
1:18.8	Kastner's collaboration made the destruction possible
1:21.3	Kastner is the explanation for the Holocaust.
1:24.4	An extract from Kastner, a play by Motil learner that was first staged in Israel in 1985.
1:30.7	And as opposed to Kastner, there arose a number of people who are the sole rights to
1:35.7	heroism.
1:36.7	Without a shadow of doubt during the war, the Jewish people produced great heroes.
1:40.7	Their names have been inscribed in our national honor rolls in golden letters.
1:44.0	But how many Jews did these heroes save?
1:48.0	What was the purpose of their heroism?
	...

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