A few days ago, Ladislaus “Laszlo” Csatary, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s #1 most wanted Nazi war criminal was found living in Budapest based on information provided by the Center.
Between 1941-1944, Csatary a senior police officer, beat, brutalized and sent 16,000 Jews to their deaths in the Ukraine and Auschwitz. He perpetrated his evil deeds in the city of Kosice, where, in 1944, Hungarian authorities transferred thousands of Hungarian Jews to German control and transport to the Auschwitz death camp. Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, personally visited there in late April 1944 to supervise the campaign to destroy Europe’s lost Jewish community. The total hopelessness is mirrored in these desperate words from a Kosice Jew awaiting his death enroute from Hungary to Auschwitz:
"I am afraid I cannot stand it for long, for we are suffering beyond description. We lie in the dust, have neither straw mattresses nor covers, and will freeze to death. The place is sealed, I do not see any way out.... We are so neglected, that we do not look human anymore. There is no possibility for cleaning anything. We have not taken of four clothes since coming here. Best greetings to you all, pray for us that we shall die soon."
Today in Israel, during a meeting with Hungary’s President Janos Ader, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned, “There is concern in Israel and the Jewish world over a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Hungary…such a dangerous phenomenon must be uprooted before it can spread.”
One of the most effective ways to combat the rising wave of anti-Semitism, and extremism in Hungary is to put on trial a Hungarian who embraced anti-Semitic, genocidal hate a generation ago. His trial will serve as a warning for young people attracted to Hungary’s extreme far-right.
“We urge the Hungarian authorities to complete the rest of the judicial process and bring Csatary to justice as quickly as possible.
This is the debt owed to his many victims who were tortured and sent to be murdered at Auschwitz. The passage of time does not diminish the guilt of the killers and old age should not afford protection to the perpetrators of Holocaust crimes”
—Dr. Efraim Zuroff, Simon Wiesenthal Center Chief Nazi Hunter, on the arrest and indictment today of Laszlo Csatary, who heads the SWC’s Most Wanted list, and who was discovered living in Budapest by Zuroff
