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Uri Avnery (1923-2018) was an Israeli writer, journalist and peace activist. He was editor-in-chief of the weekly news magazine "HaOlam HaZeh" and founded the Gush Shalom peace movement. [Listener: Anat Saragusti; date recorded: 2017]
TRANSCRIPT: In the early years before the Holocaust, Eichmann came to Vienna and allowed Jews to emigrate, even pushed them to emigrate. At some point they even developed a plan calling for Jews to settle in Madagascar, on one condition: that they would leave all of their possessions behind. And there was a story, not a story, it was a fact. Namely, Eichmann, who was in all probability very gifted as a clerk and a technocrat, arranged that Jews who wanted to leave, rather than go through ten or twenty different offices, arranged everything in one office. The Jews went from room to room to room. A Hungarian Jew entered on one side very wealthy, and emerged on the other side with nothing, but he had a permit to emigrate. Many Jews were saved in this way. At this point Becher, who was not an ardent Nazi and cared about nothing, realized that the Nazis had lost the war, that it was going to end soon. And he thought about how to survive the whole thing. He got hold of Kastner, who was at that stage already the senior Jewish representative in Hungary, and made a deal with him: 'I'll help you to liberate as many Jews as possible, and you will save me after the war'. And so it was. Becher and Kastner went from the concentration camps, the death camps and concentration camps, from place to place, liberating the Jews. And after the war, of course, Becher was arrested, a high-ranking officer in the SS. They arrested him automatically and conducted a trial where Kastner appeared as a defence witness for Becher.
