Published: 13 September 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
I had a little shard of that feeling in my heart on reading Diane Armstrong’s new novel
The Collaborator. The title gives the game away, signalling that the reader is in for a story that hinges on moral ambiguity - a satisfyingly rich and complex zone of shades of grey prompting questions about courage and personal responsibility.
It’s territory familiar to those of us who found the story of Oskar Schindler, as brought to light by Thomas Keneally in his gripping Schindler’s Ark, so engrossing and at times, so uncomfortable.
There is a pantheon of heroic Holocaust figures whose names are now etched into the public consciousness to varying degrees: Raoul Wallenberg being perhaps the most shining example of courage and unambiguous goodness; American journalist Varian Fry and Japanese government official Chiune Sugihara are less well known but equally deserving examples.
Even today, when we might think such stories have been exhausted, the Holocaust continues to yield rich seams of these narratives. Armstrong is no stranger to this period, as a child survivor who arrived in Australia from Poland in 1948, telling stories of dispossessed refugees starting over in books like Mosaic, a chronicle of five generations, and The Voyage of their Lives, the story of the SS Derna and its passengers.
She moves between fiction and non-fiction with ease. The Collaborator is her fourth novel, written over two and a half years. Armstrong struck gold when talking to a Hungarian Holocaust survivor about something else entirely “and she mentioned a man who got a train and rescued Jews but did so in a slightly dismissive tone that made me curious; why was she so negative about this event?” says Armstrong.
“When I did more research, I got chills.”
The Collaborator retells the story of called Reszo Kasztner, whom she renames as the fictional Miklos Nagy, which gives her scope to invent aspects of his personal life and a parallel plot about a contemporary Australian woman.
In real life, as in her novel, Kasztner/Nagy, a Hungarian Zionist, rescues more than 1500 people from the small town of Kolostor through an act of audacity that is almost impossible to comprehend, going straight to Adolf Eichmann to bargain for their lives.
In real life, as in her novel, Kasztner/Nagy, a Hungarian Zionist, rescues more than 1500 people from the small town of Kolostor through an act of audacity that is almost impossible to comprehend, going straight to Adolf Eichmann to bargain for their lives. They depart on 35 cattle trucks, known as the Kasztner Train. So far, so good.
How then, does this man, ostensibly a hero, become vilified, the subject of scorn and a trial that sees him accused of the worst betrayal? The answer to that question is still the subject of vigorous debate in Israel. Kasztner migrated there after the war, becoming a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952. To say more about his fate and the twists and turns it took would be to spoil the second half of Armstrong’s novel, which evolves into a courtroom drama.
Subsequently, Kasztner’s granddaughter Merav Michaeli became a member of the Knesset for the Labor party and visited Australia on a speaking tour in 2017.
Armstrong is not the first person to tell the Kasztner story. She credits Anna Porter’s Kasztner’s Train as a useful source, together with Ben Hecht’s impassioned Perfidy, but has not read the more recent Kasztner’s Crime by Paul Bogdanor.
“Kasztner is still dividing opinions today,” says Armstrong. Even at the recent launch of her book, Armstrong found that feelings around Kasztner were still fresh. “One man stood up and shouted that I had whitewashed him, and [he] blamed him for the deaths of 600,000 Jews,” she says. “At another event, a woman said she had spoken with relatives in Israel who were appalled that I might have revived his reputation.”
In a softening stance, in 2018 Israel allowed Michaeli to light a candle to her grandfather at the Parliament’s official Holocaust Remembrance ceremony.
Armstrong tries to present a balanced view of her version of Kasztner, showing both his flaws and his courage. “He was a complex figure, in terms of his character and motives, but he swallowed his terror and negotiated with the most powerful Nazi in the country,” she says.
“Examples of that are all too rare. I want to leave it to the reader to decide what to make of him.” She hopes the book will be published in both Hungary and Israel, where the story begins, but the controversy shows no sign of ending.
The Collaborator, by Diane Armstrong, is published by HarperCollins
