It would be hard to imagine a more tranquil site for such
a dramatic meeting. In a lovely wooden coffeehouse on a
dock jutting out into the placid Swan River in Perth, Australia
(“the most isolated city in the world”), I awaited an encounter
that I did not relish. It’s not every day that one meets
the children of a man I had exposed as a Holocaust perpetrator,
but upon hearing of my impending visit to Perth, they had
requested a meeting and I had agreed because I thought
that it was important to give them an opportunity to present
their arguments but also to explain to them the genesis
of the case and the nature of the evidence against their
father. It was also clear to me that they would attempt
to present a refusal to meet them as a sign that I lacked
confidence in the case or had something to hide.
While waiting for the arrival of the perpetrator's children, I tried to set aside
my natural anxieties about such a meeting (I half-jokingly
asked a friend from the Perth Jewish community about the
local regulations regarding the possession of guns) and focused
on the objective of explaining what was probably the most
difficult message that they would ever hear, and thought
back about how this story had evolved to this point.
When the Wiesenthal Center launched
its “Operation: Last Chance” project in Hungary on July 13,
2004, thee were quite a few sceptics who wondered why it
was necessary?? Thus, for example, local Holocaust scholar
Laszlo Karsai noted that Hungary had prosecuted many of those
responsible for the crimes of the Holocaust shortly after
the end of the war and in any event the prosecution of elderly
Hungarian defendants was an exercise in futility and would
not serve any useful educational purpose.
While Karsai’s initial argument had
validity, it did not preclude the prosecution of those who
had hereto eluded justice, a fact which became clear, shortly
after the launch of “Operation: Last Chance”. Ironically
it was Karsai himself, our greatest critic, who sent me a
letter that launched the case which brought me to Perth.
The letter was from Adam Balazs, an
elderly Holocaust survivor living in Budapest, and it arrived
with about two dozen yellowing pages that clearly were copies
of witness statements from 1948. According to Karsai’s cover
letter, Adam Balazs had “a lot of first-hand documents proving
that his brother Peter Balazs was killed by Karoly Zentai
who lived in 1958 in Australia… now he has asked me to bring
to you this documentation (he does not want to get money
for this!).
Please try to find Karoly Zentai,
in case he is still alive, or at least inform Mr. Balazs
what happened to him.”
Even thought I do not read Hungarian,
it was clear to me from the outset that the information was
credible and the allegation very serious. What emerged from
the testimonies, once translated into Hebrew, was that in
the fall of 1944, Karoly Zentai, an officer in the Hungarian
Army serving in Budapest, would frequently go on manhunts
for Jews who were taken to his army barracks where they were
severely beaten. On November 8, 1944 Zentai, while riding
in a streetcar, identified 18-year-old Peter Balazs as a
Jew who was not wearing the requisite yellow star. He forced
Peter Balazs off the streetcar and took him to his barracks
at Arena Street 51. There, together with two fellow-officers
accomplices, Bela Mader and Lajos Nagy, he beat the Jewish
teenager to death. Later, together with he latter, he weighted
the body down with rocks and threw it into the Danube River.
After the war, Mader was sentenced to life imprisonment and
Nagy to death for war crimes, and in the course of the latter’s
trial, Zentai's role in the murder of Peter Balazs was revealed.
This information prompted the Hungarian
authorities to take legal action against Zentai whom they
sought to arrest, but by this time (1948), he had already
fled Hungary and was living in the American zone of occupied
Germany. The Hungarians asked for his extradition to stand
trial in Budapest, but for reasons unclear to this day, Zentai
was not sent back to his homeland to be held accountable
for his crimes. Throughout this period, the person leading
the efforts to bring Zentai to justice was Peter and Adam’s
father, Dezso Balazs, a well-known Jewish lawyer who had
survived the Holocaust in Hungary. And it was those documents
and witness statements collected by his father, and saved
by Adam after his father's death, which he had sent to our
office in Jerusalem, in the wake of the launch of Operation
Last Chance in Hungary.
Since the documents clearly appeared
to be reliable, the question then became whether Zentai was
still alive and healthy enough to stand trial, and if so,
where was he living? According to Adam Balazs' letter, he
had escaped to Australia and was living in Perth in 1958,
but it was not clear whether that fact was indeed accurate
and even if it were true, that was 46 years ago and a lot
could have changed since then. My first step was, therefore,
to go to Yad Vashem to check whether Zentai's name and immigration
data could be found in the files of the International Tracing
Service established after World War II by the Red Cross to
help relatives and friends locate individuals who had been
alive during the war. Sure enough, Karoly Zentai, a Hungarian
born on October 8, 1921, was listed.
Even more important, his emigration
to Australia on February 7, 1950 aboard the "SS Fair Sea" was also confirmed, thereby greatly increasing the likelihood that Zentai, if
still alive, was still living in Australia. (Our experience
indicated that escaped East European Nazi war criminals rarely,
if ever, permanently left their inital immigration destination.)
Now the question was whether Zentai
was still alive and healthy enough to stand trial. I enlisted
the help of a sympathetic Australian investigative journalist
for the task and before long we learned that a Charles Zentai
was ostensibly alive and living in Willeton, a suburb of
Perth. Not at the address that Adam Balasz had sent me but
not too far from there. Shortly thereafter, we were able
to confirm that he had sailed to Australia on the "SS Fair Sea," so that it was clear that Charles and Karoly Zentai were one and the same person.
In a phone conversation with the journalist Zentai sounded "lucid and younger than 83," but his health still had to be verified.
For this task, we teamed up with Channel
Nine News in Australia which sent a team to film Zentai without
his knowledge. In the meantime, being certain that we had
found our suspect, I sent both the Hungarian and Australian
ambassadors to Israel a set of the pertinent documents with
the request that a full investigation of the case be launched
as quickly as possible. It took the Channel Nine crew several
days to capture Zentai on film, but the wait was well worth
their while. They filmed him driving his car, a clear sign
that he was healthy enough to stand trial and were also able
to interview him regarding the allegations against him. Zentai
denied murdering Peter Balazs, which was hardly surprising
(rare is the Holocaust perpetrator who confesses his guilt),
but what was particularly of interest were two comments he
made. The first was that he claimed to be "prepared to go back to Hungary to defend himself." The second was that he requested that no one tell his family about the allegations.
Considering that he was being interviewed for a major story
on the evening news, that was a bit naive if not silly, but
it did underscore the close ties between Zentai and his family,
something that I have often thought about since.
Shortly thereafter, in early March
2005, a Hungarian military tribunal issued an international
warrant for the arrest of Karoly (Charles) Zentai, the first
step in the process which would lead to a request for his
extradition from Australia. When Australian Justice Minister
Chris Ellison signed the request, it appeared that Zentai's
date with the law would be imminent and it was at that point
that I met with three of Zentai's children-his sons Ernie
and Gabe and a daughter Eva-in Perth.
In retrospect, this was clearly a
meeting doomed to failure, since neither side could possibly
provide what the other side wanted. I certainly was not convinced
by the kids' protestations of their father's innocence based
on self-serving accounts of the events, hearsay testimony
and wishful thinking. And I never seriously contemplated "dropping" the case. The kids, on the other hand, were totally unwilling to even consider
the possibility that their beloved parent might actually
have murdered Peter Balazs, and that there dark spots in
their father's past was for them simply unfathomable. I tried
to display a degree of empathy for them, cognizant of the
shock caused by my exposure of the evidence against their
father. They acknowledged that the Holocaust had indeed occurred
but refused to believe that their dad, whom they claimed
had never uttered even a mildly anti-Semitic comment of any
sort, was capable of committing an anti-Semitic murder. And
thus while they left our encounter empty-handed and frustrated,
I walked away with a sense of the depth of the impact of
the events of the Shoa, not only on the victims and their
families but even on the children of the perpetrators.
By the time this article appears,
Karoly (Charles) Zentai should have been extradited to Hungary
to stand trial for the murder of Peter Balasz on November
8, 1944 in his army barracks at Arena utca 51 in Budapest. shalom-magazine.com
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