Garami Erika et al.: Budapest–Bergen-Belsen–Svájc. A Kasztner-vonat fővárosi utasai (Budapest, 2020)
Előszó
FOREWORD On 21 June 2019, an exhibition titled, “Stories Hidden Behind the Wall” was opened in the Budapest City Archives. The title points to the flat data sheets (https://archives.hungaricana.hu/en/ lear/Lakasiv/) from 1944 found behind the wall of a flat in Kossuth Square in 2015, and featured in the part called 'Houses and People, 1944' of the exhibition. The section entitled ‘Budapest- Bergen-Belsen-Switzerland’ was dedicated to the fate of families and persons from the capital city who left Hungary by the Kasztner train in June 1944, just a few days after they had been moved to the Jewish houses marked with the star of David. Rudolf Kasztner and his rescue operation, which allowed 1,684 Hungarian Jews, and Jews who had fled to Hungary from the surrounding countries, to flee Hungary, became the topic of numerous articles, studies, books and films both at home and abroad. Some regarded, and still regard, him as a traitor and a Nazi collaborator, while others saw him as a hero, a saviour of Jewish lives. The mention of Kasztner and the Kasztner train is still stirs the emotions. We ourselves also experienced that, when we saw readers quarrelling about Kasztner's historical role, in the Facebook group of an Internet portal, over a post promoting the exhibition. However, our aim was not to introduce the often-discussed Kasztner case. The exhibition and the volume edited from its material do not focus on Rudolf Kasztner and his colleagues, but on the fugitives: the lives and fates of ten people from the capital city who, with their wealth and connections, and sometimes through their merits, were able to join the group and set off with their families to a then unknown destination. Photographs and documents form a mosaic record of their lives and their careers in Hungary, the disruption of those in 1944, during the Holocaust, and their new beginnings after the war. Like the members of the Kasztner group, sources of their stories have been scattered across the world, preserved by survivors and their descendants, alongside domestic and foreign public and private collections; often they are no longer original documents but only poor quality copies. In preparation for an exhibition organized jointly with the Archiv für Zeitgeschichte of Zurich in 2018, Swiss colleagues drew our attention to the organization for Jewish refugees, Verband Schweizerischer Jüdischer Fürsorgen (VSJF) material, not well known in Hungary, which also contains the personal files of refugees who arrived in Switzerland with the Kasztner group. Those documents present a one-sided picture of the refugees'daily lives, as it was when they had a problem and needed help that they turned to the VSJF. They bear no trace of gratitude, which is emphasized in personal sources, letters, memoirs, but at the same time they vividly illustrate the vulnerability of the refugee existence, the way people who have lost most of their wealth, their livelihoods, their country and, often, their families, tried to live their lives within the framework determined by the Swiss law and authorities. The exhibition and the volume also select from these documents, though without the photos, personal papers and stories collected from the families, the family history charts would be much less interesting, colourful or complete. 9
