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Books: Smelted Away
Tibor Krausz
The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary
by Ronald W. Zweig
William Morrow
312pp; $26.95
The story of a train, laden withthe wealth of murdered Jews, that disappeared into the night
When I was a boy in "Goulash communist" Hungary in the early 1980s, my grandmother would often regale me with stories about our decimated family�s prewar riches. She would tell me how, less than two years after my grandfather�s death in the winter of 1942 while digging trenches on the Russian front, thugs bearing the Hungarian fascist Arrow Cross Party�s insignia arrived one day and stripped her home of all movable valuables: The robbers even took the gold-plated medals my grandfather had won as a champion wrestler. I never cared too much about bygone family fortunes. But boy, would I have loved to see those medals.
Gabriel Schellinger had similar sentiments. The elderly Holocaust survivor, who spent the war as a teenager in Budapest, would pore over documents in a Jerusalem archive, seeking not restitution for family possessions lost in the expropriations of 1944, but answers to what had happened to his parents� gold wedding bands. Coincidentally, Ronald W. Zweig, a professor of modern Jewish history at Tel Aviv University, was conducting his own survey in the same archives on the broader implications of that very question. His findings about "a last unsolved mystery of the war," dedicated to the late Schellinger, are neatly laid out in "The Gold Train."
During the night of March 29-30, 1945, a locomotive, accompanied by a convoy of trucks, dragged 46 freight cars across the Hungarian border into Austria. The ramshackle procession was manned by fleeing minions of the deposed Arrow Cross government; it was laden with gold jewelry, silverware, religious items, exquisite furniture and Persian carpets, all seized during 1944 from the assimilated and well-heeled Jews of Hungary, who had until 1938
formed the backbone of the country�s cultural and financial elite. The loot and its keepers were supposed to be on their way to the "Alpine Redoubt," a fortified eyrie high in the German Alps, where loyal leaders of the Nazi Eagle (the remnants of Hitler�s henchmen) and their steadfast Hungarian followers planned to hole up and await their chance for a Second Coming: another shot at world domination, as the USSR and the West would inevitably fall on each other.
An absurd idea, yes -- especially as the redoubt existed only on paper. So after a bumpy ride, the cache, minus some pilfered items, ended up in Allied hands in Salzburg.
But the loot�s journey was just beginning. The liberating U.S. forces duly considered the train�s prized contents "persecutee property," shorthand for looted Jewish assets, and rebuffing Hungary�s appeals for their return, earmarked them for repatriation to displaced Jewish refugees. But not so fast. The valuables, whose worth was estimated at up to $300 million ($3 billion in today�s currency), careened from one ownership claim to another, buffeted between the conflicting interests of erstwhile allies in a redrawn world of postwar settlements. Meanwhile, as wrangling over restitution played out in London, Paris, New York and Budapest, the loot�s value was fast depleting, not only because wishful thinking probably had greatly inflated it in the first place, but also because pieces were being filched. Finally, throughout the late 1940s, marketable personal accessories ended up at auctions in New York; crates of diamonds vanished without a trace; the Soviet Union skimmed off its share, too.
The final twist to the Gold Train saga comes with Zweig�s pithy conclusion: The prewar wealth of Hungarian Jewry lay not so much in the weight of its gold, but in the more intangible worth of its cumulative cultural and financial influence. "It was the people who gave real value to the items on the Gold Train; the value was not inherent in the objects themselves," Zweig writes. It�s comparable to the great difference in value between a stamp collection�s worth to a thief and to its owner. And hence the incalculable loss: tons of irreplaceable religious and personal items smelted into gold and silver ingots.
The few blemishes on Zweig�s meticulously researched opus are small; such as when he identifies a Czech-Hungarian eyewitness from a labor battalion forced to bury some of the Gold Train�s treasure as "probably Jewish," while the man�s name (K�roly Ol�h) suggests that he was almost certainly a Gypsy. That said, Zweig provides a lucid, engaging account of shifting postwar alliances and of the Allies� intensifying bickering over the spoils of war. He also steers clear of speechifying in the service of restitution lawsuits under way in New York, and allows the facts, more damning than any jeremiad, to speak for themselves. (A fact in point: Whereas light-fingered American GIs did palm watches and gold rings, not even collectively did they pocket enough to warrant the lawsuits filed recently by survivors against the U.S. government.)
As for the Gold Train�s destination? If the past is any guide, it will be chugging ahead, dragging heavy quantities of gold, precious stones, priceless family mementos, and not least, despoiled victims� receding hopes for compensation. Somewhere there, disappearing over the horizon in a haze from the steam engine, are the wedding rings of Gabriel Schellinger�s parents and my grandfather�s gold medals. But now at least we have a minutely detailed map of the route followed so far. And that�s compensation of sorts in itself.
Tibor Krausz is a regular contributor to The Report.
April 7, 2003
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