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Born into a Jewish family in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, on February 26, 1934, Martha Salcudean (nee Abel) eventually became Canada's first female head of a university engineering department.
Martha Salcudean's parents were both Jewish physicians in Romania. Martha's mother overcame anti-Semitism and gender discrimination to graduate from medical school in 1925. Her courtship with Martha's father began after she treated wounds he suffered due to an attack from a rabid dog. They established a joint medical practice in his village.
As a Vancouverite, Salcudean recalled what happened to her family when she was a ten-year-old in the village of Chiocis, Romania, in Northern Transylvania, now part of Hungary, in 1944. Imprisoned in ghettos by the invading Nazis, they were later taken to the train station where they were lined up in front of a cattle car bound for Auschwitz. Martha's father made a split-second decision that enabled her to be transported instead to Bergen-Belsen.
The lives of Martha and her family were spared due to the efforts of Rudolf Kasztner, the Hungarian Zionist, journalist and lawyer who undertook negotiations with the Nazis. They were allowed to leave Bergen-Belsen and take refuge in Switzerland. As part of the Bloods for Goods bartering that occurred during the Holocaust to save a relatively few number of privileged Jews, this reprieve from death for the Salcudean family would carry a heavy, psychological price. The U.S. Holocaust Museum has provided a succinct overview:
**
Beginning in April 1944, Kasztner and Joel Brand entered into negotiations with Dieter Wisliceny and Adolf Eichmann of the SS in the hope of suspending deportations of Jews from Hungary. In late April 1944, Adolf Eichmann proposed “selling” 10,000 Jews in exchange for trucks delivered to the Nazis. Brand traveled to Turkey to present the proposal to the Allies and representatives of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine). After Brand failed to return from Istanbul, Kasztner took over negotiations with Eichmann and Kurt Becher, even as the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews began in May 1944.
In June 1944, Kasztner convinced Eichmann to allow nearly 1,700 Hungarian Jews to escape Hungary and the deportations to Auschwitz. A small committee headed by Otto Komoly, chairman of the Relief and Rescue Committee, Kasztner, and other Hungarian Jewish leaders selected the passengers for the rescue transport.
The list of nearly 1,700 Jews slated for release included wealthy Jews, Zionist leaders, prominent rabbis (including the Satmar Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum), and perhaps most controversially, Kasztner's own friends and family members. Kasztner would later argue that he had insisted on the inclusion of his own family to convince others of the safety of the convoy. There were 338 Jews from Kasztner's home city of Cluj. Other passengers on the “Kasztner train” represented a cross-section of Hungarian Jewry: journalists, teachers, artists, nurses, housewives with small children, peasant farmers, and small businessmen.
On June 30, 1944, the “Kasztner train” left Budapest, carrying 1,686 individuals in exchange for an unclear sum of money—some reports indicate perhaps $1,000 per person paid in currency, gold, jewels, and shares of stock collected by the Jewish committee. Despite a promise from Adolf Eichmann that the train would travel directly to Switzerland, the transport reached Bergen-Belsen on July 8, 1944. The passengers were held in the camp for several months in the Ungarnlager (Hungarian camp).
In late August 1944, 318 Jews from the Kasztner train were released from Bergen-Belsen and transported to Switzerland. On December 7, 1944, the remaining 1,368 Jews from the transport reached Switzerland. Kasztner traveled to Switzerland in late November 1944.
After the war, Kasztner intervened on behalf of Kurt Becher, Dieter Wisliceny, and Herman Krumey with whom he had negotiated in Hungary. He declared to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg that Becher in particular was one of the few SS leaders who had the courage to resist the Nazi plan for annihilation of the Jews and that he had, in fact, attempted to rescue Jews. Thanks in part to Kasztner's statement, Becher was not prosecuted as a war criminal.
Kasztner moved to Israel after the war and continued his active role in Labor Zionist politics, becoming a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952.
Kasztner's controversial role in negotiating with the SS became prominent news in 1953 when Malkiel Gruenwald published a leaflet accusing Kasztner of having collaborated with the Nazis. Gruenwald was a Hungarian Jew who had lost dozens of relatives in the Holocaust. He charged that through the negotiations with Eichmann and Becher, Kasztner had participated in the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. He also charged that Kasztner had personally benefitted from his negotiations with the SS while failing to warn Hungarian Jews of the impending deportations, even though he was among the first to receive a copy of the Auschwitz Protocols—the Vrba-Wetzler report—from Slovakian Jewish leaders in late April 1944.
Gruenwald sought to expose what he saw as Kasztner's crimes. A member of Ha-Mizrahi (the religious Zionist party), Gruenwald also hoped to denounce Mapai (the Labor Zionist governing party) and force the government to appoint a commission that would investigate the events leading to the destruction of Hungarian Jewry.
Kasztner subsequently sued Gruenwald for libel. Because of his position as a government official, Kasztner was represented at trial by Haim Cohen, Israel's attorney general. The trial of Gruenwald for libel would become known as the “Kasztner Trial.” Gruenwald's defense attorney, Shmuel Tamir, succeeded in turning what was supposed to be a libel trial against Gruenwald into an indictment of Kasztner and the ruling Mapai Party.
Four key charges against Kasztner were outlined in Gruenwald's pamphlet:
In his judgment on June 22, 1955, Judge Halevi accepted most of Gruenwald's accusations against Kasztner. He ruled that by saving the Jews on the Kasztner train while failing to warn others that their resettlement was in fact deportation to the gas chambers, Kasztner had sacrificed the majority of Hungarian Jewry for a chosen few. It also had become clear during the trial that Kasztner had indeed submitted testimony on behalf of Becher after the war, a fact he had earlier denied. The verdict triggered the fall of the Israeli Cabinet after the government sought to appeal on Kasztner's behalf.
The Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgment in January 1958, stating that the lower court had “erred seriously” in its decision. Before the highest court returned this verdict, however, Kasztner was assassinated near his home in Tel Aviv on the night of March 4, 1957, by three veterans of the right-wing pre-state militia group Lehi, once a splinter group of the Irgun. He died of his injuries twelve days later.
**
Returning home at war's end, Martha found her life under the new Communist regime was another descent into cruelties and fear.
During her studies, Martha met and married George Salcudean whose family members, though not Jewish, suffered torture under Communism. Their only child, Tim, was born in 1957. The Salcudean family, including Martha’s mother, immigrated to Canada in 1976.
With an introduction by Zoltan Tibori-Szabo, Salcudean's 184-page memoir, In Search of Light (Second Story 2019), contains illustrations, portraits and maps. The Canadian publisher Anna Porter had published her non-fiction book, Kasztner's Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, with the B.C.-based imprint Douglas & McIntyre in 2007.
As an internationally-recognized researcher in fluid mechanics and heat transfer, Salcudean came to Canada in 1976 to teach at the University of Ottawa before moving to B.C nine years later where she became head of mechanical engineering at UBC. She was later associate vice-president of research, working extensively with the forest industry. She then became chair of Weyerhauser Industrial Research.
In 1991, the Science Council of British Columbia awarded her the Science and Engineering Gold Medal. She also became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She received the Order of British Columbia in 1998 and became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2004. She died on July 17, 2019, just three months after her memoir was published.
BOOKS:
In Search of Light (Toronto: The Azrieli Foundation / Second Story Press 2019) $14.95 978-1988065540
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / Holocaust Lit
The Kasztner train arrives in Switzerland in August of 1944.
BELOW: Rudolph Kasztner
Martha Salcudean's parents were both Jewish physicians in Romania. Martha's mother overcame anti-Semitism and gender discrimination to graduate from medical school in 1925. Her courtship with Martha's father began after she treated wounds he suffered due to an attack from a rabid dog. They established a joint medical practice in his village.
As a Vancouverite, Salcudean recalled what happened to her family when she was a ten-year-old in the village of Chiocis, Romania, in Northern Transylvania, now part of Hungary, in 1944. Imprisoned in ghettos by the invading Nazis, they were later taken to the train station where they were lined up in front of a cattle car bound for Auschwitz. Martha's father made a split-second decision that enabled her to be transported instead to Bergen-Belsen.
The lives of Martha and her family were spared due to the efforts of Rudolf Kasztner, the Hungarian Zionist, journalist and lawyer who undertook negotiations with the Nazis. They were allowed to leave Bergen-Belsen and take refuge in Switzerland. As part of the Bloods for Goods bartering that occurred during the Holocaust to save a relatively few number of privileged Jews, this reprieve from death for the Salcudean family would carry a heavy, psychological price. The U.S. Holocaust Museum has provided a succinct overview:
**
Beginning in April 1944, Kasztner and Joel Brand entered into negotiations with Dieter Wisliceny and Adolf Eichmann of the SS in the hope of suspending deportations of Jews from Hungary. In late April 1944, Adolf Eichmann proposed “selling” 10,000 Jews in exchange for trucks delivered to the Nazis. Brand traveled to Turkey to present the proposal to the Allies and representatives of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine). After Brand failed to return from Istanbul, Kasztner took over negotiations with Eichmann and Kurt Becher, even as the mass deportation of Hungarian Jews began in May 1944.
In June 1944, Kasztner convinced Eichmann to allow nearly 1,700 Hungarian Jews to escape Hungary and the deportations to Auschwitz. A small committee headed by Otto Komoly, chairman of the Relief and Rescue Committee, Kasztner, and other Hungarian Jewish leaders selected the passengers for the rescue transport.
The list of nearly 1,700 Jews slated for release included wealthy Jews, Zionist leaders, prominent rabbis (including the Satmar Rebbe, Joel Teitelbaum), and perhaps most controversially, Kasztner's own friends and family members. Kasztner would later argue that he had insisted on the inclusion of his own family to convince others of the safety of the convoy. There were 338 Jews from Kasztner's home city of Cluj. Other passengers on the “Kasztner train” represented a cross-section of Hungarian Jewry: journalists, teachers, artists, nurses, housewives with small children, peasant farmers, and small businessmen.
On June 30, 1944, the “Kasztner train” left Budapest, carrying 1,686 individuals in exchange for an unclear sum of money—some reports indicate perhaps $1,000 per person paid in currency, gold, jewels, and shares of stock collected by the Jewish committee. Despite a promise from Adolf Eichmann that the train would travel directly to Switzerland, the transport reached Bergen-Belsen on July 8, 1944. The passengers were held in the camp for several months in the Ungarnlager (Hungarian camp).
In late August 1944, 318 Jews from the Kasztner train were released from Bergen-Belsen and transported to Switzerland. On December 7, 1944, the remaining 1,368 Jews from the transport reached Switzerland. Kasztner traveled to Switzerland in late November 1944.
After the war, Kasztner intervened on behalf of Kurt Becher, Dieter Wisliceny, and Herman Krumey with whom he had negotiated in Hungary. He declared to the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg that Becher in particular was one of the few SS leaders who had the courage to resist the Nazi plan for annihilation of the Jews and that he had, in fact, attempted to rescue Jews. Thanks in part to Kasztner's statement, Becher was not prosecuted as a war criminal.
Kasztner moved to Israel after the war and continued his active role in Labor Zionist politics, becoming a spokesman for the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1952.
Kasztner's controversial role in negotiating with the SS became prominent news in 1953 when Malkiel Gruenwald published a leaflet accusing Kasztner of having collaborated with the Nazis. Gruenwald was a Hungarian Jew who had lost dozens of relatives in the Holocaust. He charged that through the negotiations with Eichmann and Becher, Kasztner had participated in the destruction of Hungarian Jewry. He also charged that Kasztner had personally benefitted from his negotiations with the SS while failing to warn Hungarian Jews of the impending deportations, even though he was among the first to receive a copy of the Auschwitz Protocols—the Vrba-Wetzler report—from Slovakian Jewish leaders in late April 1944.
Gruenwald sought to expose what he saw as Kasztner's crimes. A member of Ha-Mizrahi (the religious Zionist party), Gruenwald also hoped to denounce Mapai (the Labor Zionist governing party) and force the government to appoint a commission that would investigate the events leading to the destruction of Hungarian Jewry.
Kasztner subsequently sued Gruenwald for libel. Because of his position as a government official, Kasztner was represented at trial by Haim Cohen, Israel's attorney general. The trial of Gruenwald for libel would become known as the “Kasztner Trial.” Gruenwald's defense attorney, Shmuel Tamir, succeeded in turning what was supposed to be a libel trial against Gruenwald into an indictment of Kasztner and the ruling Mapai Party.
Four key charges against Kasztner were outlined in Gruenwald's pamphlet:
- Collaboration with the Nazis
- “Paving the way for the murder” of Hungarian Jewry
- Partnership with a Nazi war criminal [Kurt Becher] in acts of thievery
- Saving a war criminal from punishment after the war [Kurt Becher]
In his judgment on June 22, 1955, Judge Halevi accepted most of Gruenwald's accusations against Kasztner. He ruled that by saving the Jews on the Kasztner train while failing to warn others that their resettlement was in fact deportation to the gas chambers, Kasztner had sacrificed the majority of Hungarian Jewry for a chosen few. It also had become clear during the trial that Kasztner had indeed submitted testimony on behalf of Becher after the war, a fact he had earlier denied. The verdict triggered the fall of the Israeli Cabinet after the government sought to appeal on Kasztner's behalf.
The Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgment in January 1958, stating that the lower court had “erred seriously” in its decision. Before the highest court returned this verdict, however, Kasztner was assassinated near his home in Tel Aviv on the night of March 4, 1957, by three veterans of the right-wing pre-state militia group Lehi, once a splinter group of the Irgun. He died of his injuries twelve days later.
**
Returning home at war's end, Martha found her life under the new Communist regime was another descent into cruelties and fear.
During her studies, Martha met and married George Salcudean whose family members, though not Jewish, suffered torture under Communism. Their only child, Tim, was born in 1957. The Salcudean family, including Martha’s mother, immigrated to Canada in 1976.
With an introduction by Zoltan Tibori-Szabo, Salcudean's 184-page memoir, In Search of Light (Second Story 2019), contains illustrations, portraits and maps. The Canadian publisher Anna Porter had published her non-fiction book, Kasztner's Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust, with the B.C.-based imprint Douglas & McIntyre in 2007.
As an internationally-recognized researcher in fluid mechanics and heat transfer, Salcudean came to Canada in 1976 to teach at the University of Ottawa before moving to B.C nine years later where she became head of mechanical engineering at UBC. She was later associate vice-president of research, working extensively with the forest industry. She then became chair of Weyerhauser Industrial Research.
In 1991, the Science Council of British Columbia awarded her the Science and Engineering Gold Medal. She also became a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. She received the Order of British Columbia in 1998 and became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2004. She died on July 17, 2019, just three months after her memoir was published.
BOOKS:
In Search of Light (Toronto: The Azrieli Foundation / Second Story Press 2019) $14.95 978-1988065540
[BCBW 2020] Alan Twigg / Holocaust Lit
The Kasztner train arrives in Switzerland in August of 1944.
BELOW: Rudolph Kasztner
