One last chance for justice Down Under

Wednesday morning in Canberra the Australian High Court will announce whether Charles (Karoly) Zentai, who is accused of murdering a Jewish teenager he caught on a Budapest tram without the requisite yellow star in November 1944, can be extradited to Hungary. The decision will mark the culmination of a legal battle which has gone on for almost eight years, since I first exposed him living in Perth, Australia, in late 2004.

The Zentai case was initially brought to my attention earlier that year, shortly after the Wiesenthal Center launched its “Operation: Last Chance” project — which offers financial rewards for information which will facilitate the prosecution and punishment of Nazi war criminals — in Hungary on July 13, 2004. Several weeks later, I received an envelope from Budapest with a letter and some unusual documentation from an unexpected source. The letter was from Prof. Laszlo Karsai, a Holocaust historian of Jewish origin, who had harshly criticized the launch of “Operation: Last Chance” in Hungary (and ever since has time and again — most recently this past July — attacked me and the Wiesenthal Center in this regard).

Karsai had been contacted by a survivor living in Budapest whose brother, Peter Balazs, had allegedly been murdered by Karoly Zentai. What was unique about the accusation in this case was that it was supported by extensive witness testimony from a Hungarian postwar trial of one of Zentai’s accomplices, a very rare instance in which an allegation reaches our office backed up by witness testimony from a trial that unequivocally names a suspect as a murderer.

What was missing from the information was two key elements. The survivor had no idea whether Zentai was alive and if so, where he was living. He did know that in 1958 he had been living in Australia, but that was 46 years earlier and there was no indication as to his present whereabouts. It did not take long for me to determine that Karoly, now Charles, Zentai was very much alive and healthy and living in the Willeton suburb of Perth. I sent the information to the Australian and Hungarian authorities and within a very short time, in March 2005, the latter, to their credit, asked for his extradition to Budapest. That should have been enough to insure that Zentai would be brought to justice in the country where his alleged crime took place, but unfortunately, that has not been the case.

When Zentai was initially exposed in late 2004 on national television, he said he wanted to go to Hungary to clear his name, but the minute Hungary sought his extradition, the Zentai family started doing everything in its power to prevent that from happening. By a variety of legal maneuvers, it has succeeded until now in hindering the extradition, with every delay only increasing the chances that medical considerations might ultimately achieve the result that the family could not attain withiin the framework of the law.

In this respect, the Zentai case is of unique importance in Australia, since barring any new developments, it will be the last case of its kind to be brought to court. Despite the fact that numerous Nazi war criminals/collaborators were admitted to Australia in the immediate postwar era (1948-1955), and the government passed legislation in 1989 enabling their prosecution and established a Special Investigations Unit to do so, not a single Holocaust perpetrator was successfully prosecuted in Australia. The three cases brought to trial were either lost or dismissed for medical reasons and the effort was basically (although not officially) abandoned in 1992. However, several important Nazi war criminals could almost certainly still have been convicted. The breakup of the Soviet Union created much better potential for finding documents and witnesses against the suspects in Australia, almost all of whom were East Europeans.

So the enormous effort to hold the Nazi war criminals who found refuge in Australia accountable appears to have boiled down to the Zentai case. It’s not as dramatic as those of the Lithuanian and Latvian murder squad officers whose victims numbered in the thousands, but the principle remains exactly the same. The passage of time in no way diminishes the guilt of these criminals and old age should not afford protection to murderers. Peter Balazs, moreover, a fine young Jewish boy of eighteen — who was also a wonderful brother to his handicapped twin Paul — merits that the person responsible for his murder not be allowed to live out his life in the peace and tranquility that he does not deserve.

At this point, I can only hope and pray that the Australian High Court concurs.