Two months after his 11th birthday, on July 9, 1944, the gates of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp closed behind Ladislaus Löb. Five months later, with World War II still raging, he crossed the border into Switzerland, cold and hungry, but alive and safe. He was not alone, but part of a group of some 1,670 Jewish men, women, and children from Hungary, who had been rescued from the Nazis as a result of a deal made by a man called Rezso Kasztner—himself a Hungarian Jew—with Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the Holocaust. Twelve years and a miscarriage of justice later Kasztner was murdered by an extremist Jewish gang in Israel. To this day he remains a highly controversial figure, regarded by some as a traitor and by many others as a hero. The story of the man who saved hundreds—indeed probably thousands—from the Holocaust, this is also the story of a child who lived to grow up after the Holocaust thanks to that man. Including original material from Kasztner’s own 1946 report on the rescue of Jews from the concentration camp, this is a remarkably honest analysis of the profound moral issues raised by his dealings with some of the most evil men ever known.
