Israel's history includes several central Holocaust trials. The first, from 1954 to 1958, was that of the victim: the trial of Israel Kasztner, a senior Zionist activist in Hungary during the Holocaust. The second one was the murderer's trial: that of Adolf Eichmann in 1961–1962. The last one, from 1987 to 1993, was also a murderer's trial: that of John Demjanjuk, a guard at the Treblinka death camp. Additionally, Israel held about fifty or sixty minor Holocaust trials in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily of the kapos who collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. The trials took place within the framework of the Law for Punishment of the Nazis and Their Collaborators, legislated in 1950 by the first Knesset.
Research about the attitude of Israeli society toward the Holocaust began in the 1980s, with Dina Porat's An Entangled Leadership: The Yishuv and the Holocaust, 1942–1945 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: ʿAm ʿOved, 1986) and followed by many studies of the Kasztner trial and Eichmann trial, including my book The Man Who Was Murdered Twice: The Life, Trial, and Death of Israel Kasztner (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2011) and Hanna Yablonka's The State of Israel vs. Adolf Eichmann (New York: Schocken, 2004). By contrast, the trials of the collaborators were seen as marginal—a private matter for survivors.
However, in recent years, scholars such as Itamar Levin and Rivka Brut have moved this issue from the margins to the heart of Israeli research on Holocaust-related trials. Dan Porat's new book joins this expanding literature on the trials of the collaborators. He examines the trials of fifty or sixty kapos that took place in the district courts of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa in the 1950s and 1960s.
Porat divides his book into three main periods. During the first period, from August 1950 to January 1952, collaborators were subjected to uncompromising treatment. Israeli judges and prosecutors zealously sought retribution against Jews whom they viewed as partners with Nazis in the crimes against Jews in the ghettos and the concentration camps. In the trials, the prosecutors charged almost every defendant—even those who had allegedly beaten only a single camp inmate—with “crimes against humanity,” the same charge leveled against members of the Nazi leadership in the Nuremberg trial. When judges in the collaborator trials noted that the charge of crimes against humanity was suitable only for actions committed against a mass of people, prosecutors replaced the charge with “war crimes,” an offense also punishable by death. The atmosphere in the trials of that period, so close to end of World War II and the Holocaust, was like the atmosphere among the Israeli public in general. The Israeli people—a significant portion of whom were survivors of the Holocaust—were unable to face the agony of the Holocaust and the suffering of the millions of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Porat insists, “Legislators formulated the law so as to put Nazis and their Jewish collaborators on equal footing, a perspective that failed to take into account the antithetical worlds in which they lived” (4).
The most prominent trial in the first period was against Yehezkel Jungster. Three judges presided over this trial at the Tel Aviv District Court in January 1952, with Pinchas Avishar as head judge. Jungster, a Holocaust survivor who lost his family, was an inmate in two camps, Grodziszcze and Faulbruck, during the war. In both of the camps, he served as a kapo, a prisoner in Nazis’ camps assigned by SS guards to enforce labor. As a kapo, he was brutal and cruel, like the Nazi guards in the camps. In the verdict, the three judges sentenced the accused to death—for the first time in Israel's history. Jungster appealed to the Supreme Court, and it revised the verdict of the district court and changed it to incarceration. After Jungster's appeal to the Supreme Court, judges in the collaborators’ trials issued no more death sentences.
The second period under examination, from February 1952 to 1957, includes the Kasztner trial. Formally, the defendant in the trial was Malkiel Gruenwald, but the one really accused was Dr. Israel Kasztner, who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in Budapest in 1944 to rescue Jews in Hungary. The trial caused an uproar among the Israeli public and in the political arena. In his verdict, the sole judge, Benjamin Halevi, wrote that Kasztner “sold his soul to the devil”—Eichmann. In March 1957, Kasztner was murdered, a victim of incitement that originated with Judge Halevi. The state appealed to the Supreme Court, and in January 1958, it accepted the appeal. In the main verdict Judge Simon Agranat wrote, “The defendant's intent is crucial. Even if a person knew that some of the actions would benefit the Nazis but his overall motivation was morally justified.” Agranat's verdict was a turning point in the attitude of the Israeli public toward the survivors.
In the third phase, from 1958 to 1962, the legal system changed its view, influenced by the Supreme Court's ruling on Kasztner. It claimed that most functionaries who had committed wrongs had done so with good intentions. It was ready to accept a Jew who cooperated with the Nazis because he “believed that sustaining a good relationship with Nazis would enable him to save Jews in the future” (5).
In the third period, the most significant trial was that of Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question,” which ended with a guilty verdict and a death sentence. The main figure who changed Israeli society's image of collaboration was Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor in the Eichmann trial. He removed the charge of collaboration from kapos and policemen in the ghettos. Porat notes that “unlike the kapos trials where survivors’ accounts served as the grounds for conviction, Hausner's use of witnesses was primarily for educational purposes” (174). The Eichmann trial also meant that Israelis ceased to see themselves as divided between those who survived the Holocaust and those who had not been at risk. Rather, a unified sense of victimization spread throughout the diverse Israeli population. Dan Porat's book is an important contribution to research about the kapos’ trials, and the attitude of the Israeli legal system toward the Holocaust and its victims.
