Toronto Dispatch. 5.

Witch Hunt [site] isn't about the FBI hunting communists. It's an inquiry into the prosecution of alleged sexual abusers in Kern County, California, in the city of Bakersfield, where an ambitious District Attorney was elected in 1982, and seems to have found that a campaign against "child molestation" would fuel his rising political career. It did just that. The problem was that alleged molesters didn't commit the "molestation," even though they were convicted and spent years in prison - one of them, 20 years.

The documentary by Dana Nachman and Don Hardy, executive produced by Sean Penn, follows the scandal through the eyes of these parents, all of whom were cleared. They describe being arrested and tried, and found guilty on the basis of testimony from their children. It turns out that the children and other neighborhood kids were questioned illegally by investigators, and that they said almost anything that investigators wanted to hear. It worked.

John Stoll, a local contractor, did 20 years in prison, where child molestors receive a special kind of prison justice once they're inside. We don't hear about what these victims faced behind bars, but "molestation" might not be far from what happened there, too. Stoll and others who never stopped claiming their innocence were set free when it came to light that prosecutors concealed evidence from them, and children who testified recanted. The earnest film, in a rudimentary style packed with archival tape, examines how this happened. Politicians found that the public could be rallied with the fear that child molesters were among them, and accountability went out the window. The newspapers fueled the flames and interrogators operated with impunity. The jurors clearly fell for it all, although we never hear from them.

Unfortunately, we don't hear much from law enforcement here, either, except from officials, some of whom are still in power, who say that things got out of control. The District Attorney who led the prosecutions, Ed Jagels, is still in office, and has been uninterruptedly since 1982. Why he hasn't been prosecuted is a question that the film doesn't answer.

Parallels with Patriot Act interrogations aren't drawn. Perhaps they are too obvious to be necessary. Yet it's now clear that suspects were rounded up on the basis of the most minimal suspicion, and held with impunity - in Iraq, in the US, and wherever the CIA operated. They had (and have) fewer rights than the accused in the trials examined in Witch Hunt. As we've seen, the prosecutors in the war on terror have been able to act with impunity.

Earlier in the week, I told a colleague in the industry that I was going to see the Kasztner documentary. "I didn't know there was a film at the festival about Kevin Costner," he said. He was not alone. Even young Israelis often don't know about the Hungarian Jew Rezso Kasztner (also called Rudolf or Israel Kasztner) who negotiated with the Nazis (even with a Adolf Eichmann) to save more than 1600 Jews from extermination by organizing a train that transported them to safety in 1944. This was at a time when Germany had invaded its former ally, Hungary, and deportations of Jews from outside Budapest were sending 12,000 Jews to near-certain death every day. Stigmatized by a smear campaign as a collaborator after the war for not having saved more Jews, Kasztner (born in 1906) was murdered by right-wing militants in front of his Tel Aviv home in 1957, after the Israeli government lost a libel case brought against his detractors. Killing Kasztner tells his story.

While there are still some gaps in the knowledge of Kasztner's exact role in his negotiations with the Nazis, he did save lives, more Jews than any other Jew during the Nazi Era, the film argues. But the right-wing opposition in Israel saw him as a traitor willing to make compromises with the enemy (as they viewed David Ben Gurion, the Israeli prime minister who negotiated with colonial powers to create Israel), and Kasztner became the symbol of the Jew who would negotiate instead of pursuing total victory. What his options really were in Nazi-occupied Hungary is another question.

Documents shown in the film indicate that an offer was made by the Nazis to the Allies that Jews would be spared in exchange for 10,000 trucks. It never happened, yet Kasztner's train did take its passengers to safety, in spite of a bizarre detour in Bergen Belsen, the dreaded concentration camp. Survivors tell the story. So do members of Kasztner's family, who want him vindicated and recognized in the many Holocaust museums and memorials in Israel. Today there is only one monument to Kasztner in Israel, and it is practically disguised to avoid controversy. He was almost invisible in a museum devoted to Hungarian Jewry.

Kasztner's story is complicated. Two books about him were recently published. The Israeli government lost the libel case against amateur tabloid journalist and Kasztner-hating stamp collector Malchiel Gruenwald, a two-year battle (1953 - 55) which ended in an acquittal for Gruenwald and a ruling by the judge that Kasztner had "sold his soul to the devil" for not alerting Hungarian Jews to the fate that awaited them upon deportation. The decision became a fait accompli after documents showed that Kasztner, after the war, had written to war crime prosecutors and asked for leniency for Nazi officials with whom he had negotiated the train's passage. One of those Nazis, Kurt Becher, was an official whom Kasztner has paid more than $1 million, about $1000 per Jew. Historians interviewed testify that bribery turned out to be a more effective way of saving lives than resistance. Perhaps Kasztner was on to something.

In 1957, a right-wing militant, Ze'ev Eckstein, who had been an informer on his right-wing friends for Shin Bet, military intelligence, shot Kasztner with a pistol (which misfired at first) as Kasztner ran from his car toward his house. Eckstein claims to have fired two shots, although he suggests coyly that a third bullet heard that night killed the man. Eckstein and two accomplices from the fiercely anti-Labor opposition were convicted, and did a mere 7 years in prison. It's not clear whether Shin Bet knew about the killing beforehand, or even had a role in it. Perhaps more will shake out once the film premieres in Israel in October.

The Kasztner case still inflames tempers in Israel. The killing of Yitzhak Rabin shows that right-wing murder can still certainly happen there, and not just to Palestinians. At two hours and ten minutes, and with extended detailed testimony from a largely unrepentant Ze-ev Eckstein, who gives a step-by-step account of the shooting, the film takes you through a mini-history of Israel's contentious early days, and into debates have not been resolved. Expect Killing Kasztner to fuel those fires on the festival circuit after Toronto.

- David D'Arcy

Posted by dwhudson at September 11, 2008 7:55 AM