The Rescue of the Satmar Rav

1. From Cluj to Switzerland

Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944. Rabbi Yoel reached the Kolozsvár—Cluj—ghetto and on 9 June joined a group of 388 Jews sent from Cluj to Budapest. On 30 June, the special transport commonly called the Kasztner train left Budapest carrying about 1,684 passengers.

The train did not proceed directly to Switzerland. After an early crisis near Mosonmagyaróvár and a stop in Bratislava, it reached Bergen-Belsen on 9 July. A first group of 318 passengers entered Switzerland in August. The remaining passengers, including Rabbi Yoel, were released in December and crossed through Bregenz into Switzerland.

Inside that route stand the people whose interventions made Rabbi Yoel's place possible and the two moments when the journey appeared ready to turn toward destruction.

2. Weissmandl and the Europa Plan

Before the Hungarian transport negotiations, Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandl and Gisi Fleischmann led the clandestine Bratislava Working Group. Beginning in 1942, it tried to bargain with Nazi officials and advanced the Europa Plan: a proposal to halt or slow deportations in exchange for millions of dollars.

The plan established an earlier transnational network of ransom, messages, couriers, and foreign contacts. After the German occupation of Hungary, Weissmandl initially urged Budapest contacts to approach Dieter Wisliceny and later pressed more urgently for escape and resistance. When the special transport stopped in Bratislava, his network helped the passengers and sought foreign oversight.

Rabbi Weissmandl understood the tragedy as a failure of free-world Jewish and Zionist leadership to move money and political pressure with the urgency required. He had handled the rescue appeals, correspondence, and negotiations himself. In Min HaMeitzar, the lost possibility of a much broader rescue stands beside the eventual special transport and the unbearable cost of delay.

Rabbi Weissmandl and the Satmar account make a sharper charge. The Budapest negotiators did not originate an isolated rescue initiative: they assumed control of negotiations that had begun as an effort to rescue Jews on a mass scale, narrowed them into a selected transport, and used their control over the list to include relatives, associates, and Zionist activists. The train also carried Orthodox Jews and others outside Kasztner’s circle, but that does not answer the central accusation. The question is how a negotiation directed toward a general rescue became a struggle over a limited list—and who gained preferential access when that narrowing occurred.

The passenger list shows how the transport was assembled through connections, payments, negotiations, and communal intervention. It included Kasztner's relatives and colleagues, wealthy passengers, Orthodox and Neolog rabbis, refugees, Polish Jews, orphans, intellectuals, Zionists, anti-Zionists, and ordinary families. Gisi Fleischmann, Rabbi Weissmandl's closest partner in the Working Group, was herself a Zionist leader who placed rescue before ideological division.

3. Two Fischers—and one important correction

Kasztner later testified that his father-in-law, Dr. Joseph Fischer, made an exceptional personal request that Rabbi Yoel be included.

A well-known Hasidic account adds a dream, but the names are often confused. Moshian Shel Yisroel and Ro’eh Yisrael preserve the corrected Satmar tradition: Dr. Theodor Fischer—not Joseph Fischer—was the dreamer, and the two men were unrelated. Theodor repeatedly dreamed that his deceased mother urged him to secure the Satmar Rav’s place. He then pressed Joseph, and Joseph pressed his son-in-law Kasztner.

Moshian Shel Yisroel and Ro'eh Yisrael tell the chain clearly: Theodor was the dreamer; Joseph was Kasztner's father-in-law and the intermediary who pressed for Rabbi Yoel's place. They were two unrelated men joined by one urgent request.

4. Chaim Roth, Pinchas Freudiger, and Orthodox financing

Orthodox communal records and Satmar testimony place Orthodox financing near the center of the rescue. They identify Budapest activists, especially Chaim Roth and Pinchas Freudiger, as men who raised money, secured places for rabbis and Orthodox families, and intervened when the transport was endangered. Randolph Braham's history also records Freudiger's negotiations and payments for prominent Orthodox Jews.

Moshian Shel Yisroel gives Chaim Roth a particular role: he purchased eight places for the Rabbi's household and assured Rabbi Yoel that the places used by the Rabbi and Rebbetzin had been paid from Orthodox funds.

Kasztner's committee conducted the transport negotiations. Personal pressure and Orthodox money secured and protected the places through which that negotiated transport became Rabbi Yoel's route of escape.

5. Mosonmagyaróvár: Auspitz or Auschwitz?

Satmar accounts preserve a grave early crisis. Soon after leaving Budapest, the train was held near Mosonmagyaróvár; transport leaders were told of a diversion toward Poland, Orthodox representatives intervened, and further money was demanded before the train continued. The account identifies the terror as real and the intervention and payment as consequential.

Passenger Ladislaus Löb and historian Randolph Braham refer to a proposed route through Auspitz—the German name for Hustopeče in Moravia—which the passengers heard as Auschwitz. Satmar sources remember the warning as a diversion toward Poland and the Orthodox intervention and payment that followed. In both tellings, the transport believed it was turning toward destruction before it was allowed to continue.

6. Bergen-Belsen and the final telegram tradition

The train reached Bergen-Belsen rather than Switzerland, and negotiations continued while the passengers were held there. A first group left in August; the remainder crossed into Switzerland in December. The release followed continued bargaining and outstanding payments involving Kasztner and SS officer Hermann Krumey.

Satmar and Rubinfeld family tradition preserves the decisive final episode. An order arrived directing that the passengers be returned to German control because an expected payment had not reached the negotiators. Leibush Rubinfeld, carrying dollars and wearing a military uniform, paid Krumey, who recorded the telegram as arriving only after the train had departed.

Satmar and Rubinfeld family tradition tells this as the final intervention that allowed the train to cross. It was a separate episode from the earlier panic near Mosonmagyaróvár: one occurred soon after departure from Budapest, the other at the last threshold before freedom.

7. Who, then, saved him?

The rescue grew from an Orthodox effort that did not begin with the Kasztner train: Rabbi Weissmandl's wider ransom network, Fischer's intervention, Orthodox funds, donors, and activists who kept intervening whenever the journey was threatened. Kasztner and the Budapest committee conducted the negotiations for the particular transport.

The irony extended beyond the securing of Rabbi Yoel’s own place. The selected transport—including Kasztner’s relatives, associates, and Zionist colleagues—also benefited from Orthodox fundraising and repeated Orthodox intervention when the undertaking was endangered. In the Satmar understanding, the people later portrayed as the Rabbi’s rescuers were themselves beneficiaries of the sacrifice and intervention of the Orthodox Jews whose role was subsequently minimized.

Satmar tradition sees a deeper reversal. Kasztner may have believed he granted the Rabbi a place, while the Rabbi’s presence became a source of merit and protection for the transport.

Rabbi Weissmandl's rescue network and Orthodox activists form the moral and communal center of the story. Joseph Fischer's pressure helped secure Rabbi Yoel's inclusion; Orthodox leaders financed and protected places; and Kasztner's committee handled the Nazi negotiations through which the train moved.