Efraim Zuroff

At a dramatic Budapest press conference on September 28, Efraim Zuroff, chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, announced that he had tracked down a wanted war criminal who had been involved in one of the most infamous acts of mass murder committed in Hungary during World War II. Zuroff, who also heads the Center's Jerusalem office, said that Sandor Kepiro, 92, had been a gendarmerie officer who was twice found guilty but heretofore never punished for participating in the 1942 Novi Sad massacre, in which over 1,000 Jews, Serbs and Gypsies were murdered. Here, Zuroff tells us how he was located.

The hunt began when information reached us in February 2005 about Istvan Bujdoso, an elderly Hungarian living in Scotland who had bragged about his role as a master-sergeant of the Hungarian gendarmerie in the deportation of Jews from Miskolc to Auschwitz. As it turned out, it was Bujdoso’s apparently irrepressible urge to talk about that “heroic” period of his life that ultimately paved the way for the discovery of a far senior colleague.
The breakthrough came early this past summer, when Bujdoso told a Scottish journalist, whom we sent to attempt to elicit vital biographical information from him, that he was in contact with a much higher-ranked gendarmerie officer named Sandor Kepiro. In fact, Kepiro had visited him in Scotland two years earlier and the two comrades were still in phone contact on a regular basis.
As part of its "Operation: Last Chance" project, launched in cooperation with the Targum Shlishi Foundation of Miami in 2002, the Wiesenthal Center has spent the last few years in an effort to maximize the prosecution of Nazi war criminals while it is still possible. So, even if at the time, the name Kepiro did not ring any bells, it certainly appeared worthy of investigation.
My first stop was Yad Vashem, whose expert on Hungarian Jewry, Dr. Gavriel Bar-Shaked, left no room for doubt: “You mean that bastard is still alive? I don’t believe it.” He briefed me on Kepiro’s war record, which clearly qualified him as a prime target for our efforts and explained the unique aspects of his case.
Kepiro was one of several Hungarian army and gendarmerie officers who were prosecuted in fascist Hungary for their role in one of the two major atrocities carried out by the Hungarians prior to the Nazi occupation — the mass murder in January 1942 of approximately 1,000 men, women and children (80 percent of whom were Jews, the others, Serbs and Gypsies) in Novi Sad (Ujvidek in Hungarian), which had been annexed from Yugoslavia in 1941. This atrocity climaxed a wave of violence directed by the Hungarians against Serbs and Jews in the Voivodina area (Delvidek in Hungarian) that month following the annexation, which altogether claimed the lives of over 3,000 civilian victims.
Kepiro had been convicted and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment for his role in the murders, but the Nazis, who occupied Hungary shortly thereafter, cancelled his conviction and returned him to service. During the deportations to Auschwitz in the spring of 1944, he was the highest-ranking gendarmerie officer in Novi Sad. After the war, in 1946, he was again prosecuted for war crimes by the "People's Courts," but by this time he had disappeared and his second conviction and sentencing to 14 years’ imprisonment took place with him in absentia.
Kepiro was a big fish, a doctor of law, and obviously someone who should have known better than to carry out such blatantly illegal orders. And, in fact, his 1944 verdict tells how he asked for orders in writing when he learned that his men were to round up and murder innocent civilians, but even though his request was turned down — "orders such as these are only transmitted orally" was the response of his superiors — he carried them out faithfully anyway.

What I feared would be a complicated and costly investigation turned out to be fairly simple. First, I asked Szilvia Dittel and Tibor Pecsi, my trusted helpers in Hungary, both of whom teach and guide at the new Holocaust museum in Budapest, to check the local phone book for traces of Kepiro. Sure enough, there were two Sandor Kepiros listed, as well as one Mrs. Sandor Kepiro. Mrs. Kepiro’s husband, it transpired, had indeed been in the gendarmerie in the area of Novi Sad, but he had long been deceased. Bujdoso and our Kepiro had spoken only recently.
At first there was no answer at the other numbers, but Szilvia e-mailed four hours later that “the real Kepiro” had been found at home in Budapest. Tibor got our suspect on the phone and, posing as a student at the local Catholic university who was writing a paper on the gendarmerie, found him very willing to share his life history (excluding his crimes), including his escape to Austria, flight to Argentina and return in 1996 to Hungary. He presented his duties in an innocuous manner — “90 percent teaching and training” — but we knew better.
Unfortunately, Kepiro, who is 92, refused Tibor’s offer to visit, which would have enabled us to assess his health firsthand, an extremely important point if we were going to demand that he be imprisoned, but it was clear that he was extremely lucid and in relatively good shape. “Operation Ujvidek” could now begin in earnest.
All such operations are nerve-wracking races against time. Lacking the funds to pay for round-the-clock surveillance, we had to hope that Kepiro would not realize we were on to him and escape. We also hoped he would not suddenly die on us. Too many murderers had managed to evade punishment by slipping away, either into hiding or into their graves.
Making the case against Kepiro was in a sense the easy part, since the crimes committed at Novi Sad had been well-documented and he had already been convicted twice. We also received a document from the Museum of Genocide Victims in Belgrade, indicating that he had been a wanted criminal in that country. Under these circumstances, the only question was whether the Hungarian authorities would be willing to implement either or both of his sentences, which was obviously preferable to a retrial. What remains a mystery to this day, is how he was able to return to Hungary a decade ago without facing punishment.
Having, with the help of contacts in Serbia and colleagues at Yad Vashem, collected quite a bit of documentation on Kepiro's crimes, I asked to meet with the officials of the Prosecutor General’s office, telling them only that I needed to discuss a new suspect currently living in Hungary. A meeting was set for August 1, and I have to admit that I cannot remember ever being so nervous.

The day before the meeting, Szilvia and Tibor took me on a tram across the Danube from Pest to Buda, and after alighting we began walking down a pleasant, if nondescript, street, Frankel Leo utca. This was the street where Kepiro lived. At his building, No. 78, we saw the name listed openly at the entrance, as if he was just another regular law-abiding resident of Budapest and not an escaped Nazi war criminal with the blood of hundreds on his hands.
As we stood there, many thoughts rushed through my mind, including thoughts of a particularly ominous nature. What could have been easier than to get into his apartment and execute the bastard? In this case, he was not a suspect, but a convicted war criminal, with a thousand dead Jews and Serbs to prove it. But thoughts of this nature did not linger, since I had long ago been convinced, primarily by Simon Wiesenthal himself, that physical revenge was neither a moral nor practical option. Killing such people at this late date would be counterproductive and ruin our efforts in other cases, and besides, the headlines would not say that a mass murderer had finally received his just reward, but rather that vengeful Jews had murdered a lonely nonagenarian.
A large building across the street caught our attention. Directly opposite Kepiro's house was a synagogue! What could it be like for a Nazi war criminal to face that every day? We crossed the avenue to take a closer look, when I saw a youngish woman emerge from Kepiro’s apartment building.
I urged Szilvia to speak to her, in the hope that she was a neighbor, and might be able to provide some information on his health, family, and the like. Szilvia was all smiles when she rejoined us, having learned that Sandor Kepiro led an active life and was even the organizer of social events for residents of his building. What better proof could we ask for that he was healthy enough to be brought to justice at long last?
The following day, in my meeting with the Hungarian judicial authorities, I was informed that the prosecutors had to review the two verdicts to determine whether Kepiro's sentence could be immediately implemented or whether they would be required, because of a statute of limitations, to initiate a new investigation against him. Nearly two months later, however, Hungarian officials said they still had not found the original verdicts, and informed me that it was unlikely that Kepiro's punishment would be implemented. It was then that I decided the case had to be made public. This was the only hope that justice might finally be achieved.
So on September 28, I called a press conference at the synagogue opposite his house, where I informed approximately two dozen journalists that twice-convicted war criminal Dr. Sandor Kepiro had been living unpunished in Budapest ("take a look out the window to see where he currently resides") for the past decade. We then crossed the street, where I showed them his name on the bell and they waited for him to arrive.
When asked about the charges, Kepiro delivered an impromptu speech of about an hour in the street. In it, he initially admitted that terrible things had happened in Novi Sad but claimed that he bore no responsibility and had "not seen a single corpse." Later on, he tried to suggest that perhaps the stories of the murders were exaggerated.
A military court in Budapest will now decide Kepiro's fate. It will determine whether he will be jailed immediately or made the subject of a new investigation for war crimes and murder.
Upon my return home, I found a message that made the whole agonizing effort worthwhile. In response to the story of Kepiro's exposure, a woman named Chava Schick, of Kibbutz Lehavot Haviva, had posted the following on the Ynet website: "As someone who was there at age 5 with my twin sister and my family.... Kol hakavod to those who tried for all these years and finally succeeded in exposing this terrible murderer...especially during the period of the Days of Awe.”