Killing Kasztner (Unrated)

If you know the name Rezso Kasztner, you won’t need any encouragement to see Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis. If you don’t, that is even more reason to see this documentary on the strange and compelling life and death of one of the most morally complex figures to come out of the Holocaust.

From one point of view, Kasztner sounds like a classic hero. He negotiated face to face with Adolf Eichmann for the freedom of Hungarian Jews, a process that eventually resulted in a rescue train that brought 1,684 Jews to the safety of Switzerland. The film describes this action as the largest single rescue of Jews by Jews in the entire war.

But once Kasztner became a postwar emigre to Israel, things unaccountably changed. Charges surfaced that he had been not a hero but a collaborator, someone who worked a bit too closely with the Nazis and saved some Jews at the expense of others. These accusations resulted first in a libel trial considered one of the most explosive judicial moments in Israeli history and then, shockingly, in the assassination of Kasztner in 1957 by a right-wing Israeli extremist.

Director Gaylen Ross, an unapologetic Kasztner partisan, spent eight years on this project, and that sort of zeal means her film verges on the overemphatic. But there can be no doubt as to the value of this disturbing story. As an examination of what happens when events on the ground collide with national myth and a look at how disinclined complex reality is to fit into tidy boxes, it can’t be beat.

The centerpiece of Killing Kasztner is the film’s exceptional access to Ze’ev Eckstein, the man convicted of shooting Kasztner and long out of prison, who opens the film by taking Ross back to the scene of the crime and re-enacting what happened on that fateful night.

Killing Kasztner also spends considerable time with Kasztner’s daughter, Zsuzi, and his granddaughter, Israeli media figure Merav Michaeli. The continued scorn that Kasztner and the train survivors receive in Israel makes his daughter feel like “he gets murdered over and over again.” In terms of plot line, the film goes back and forth between relating what happened in World War II Europe, describing what went down at the trial, and talking about the here and now.

Ross begins her film with a pair of quotes from Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo. One of Galileo’s students says, “Unhappy the land that has no heroes,” and the scientist responds, “No, unhappy the land that needs heroes.” What Killing Kasztner is at pains to demonstrate is the kinds of damage this passion for heroes can inflict.

Director: Gaylen Ross.

Screenwriters: Andy Cohen, Gaylen Ross.

Running time: 116 minutes. Playing in Miami-Dade only: Cosford.