The Restaurant Keeper

In the City of Toronto there was once a restaurant owned by a man named Imre Finta. Born in 1912 in Austria-Hungary, Finta spent his years of youth in my hometown Szeged, immigrating to Canada after the Second World War. Settling in Toronto, in 1953 Finta bought the Candlelight Restaurant but it did not go well, so he closed it. Then he opened The Moulin Rouge on Avenue Road at DuPont Street. The old fashioned Hungarian gentleman greeted his guests warmly, politely kissing the right hand of his female patrons. I had never dined at the Moulin Rouge but I encountered Finta in a brickyard and also at the railway station of Szeged in the summer of 1944. At that time I was eight years old and Finta, aged 32, was a Captain of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie. He was also a Nazi collaborator who supervised the deportation of 8,617 Jews to slave labour lagers and death camps. I was one of them. A few months earlier, on March 19,1944, the German Army occupied Hungary and Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest. His Mission was to implement in Hungary the "Final Solution", a Euphemism the Nazis used to disguise the mass murder of the Jews. In June 1944, swearing gendarmes pushed a group of Jewish prisoners from the ersatz ghetto of Kistelek onto a freight train. My mother, my three year old sister Vera and I were among them. We travelled thirty kilometres to Szeged where the gendarmes led us to an abandoned brick factory that was turned into a makeshift concentration camp. The brickyard camp commandant was SS captain Angermayer, whom I remember as a tall and lanky silhouette moving among the prisoners in a black uniform. He was assisted by ruthless gendarmes in cock-feathered hats, armed with bayoneted rifles and swords, who terrorized the captives. Living conditions in the makeshift ghetto were dreadful. Only one water tap served almost nine thousand people and the latrine did not deserve that name. Garbage was strewn all over the place. The silence of the night was broken by the screams of the mentally ill. Captain Finta, head of the Department of Investigations in Szeged, appeared in the brickyard day after day. Accompanied by a group of his detectives, he repeatedly threatened to shoot every person, who hides his or her own money and valuables. This chief of "investigations" and his police thugs had beaten and tortured innocent Jewish men and women in order to find and confiscate their private property. Many of them committed suicide. Aided by doctors and midwives, the gendarmes conducted the bodily searches, including anal and genital inspections. Not everyone in Hungary was impressed though by the efficiency of police investigations. Endre Hamvas, the Catholic Bishop of Csanad, for example, was shocked and sent a protesting report to church officials on the brutal police searches. On June 21, Finta initialled and submitted a memorandum to the Mayor stating that the German SS command decided to deport the Jews from Szeged on June 25,27 and 28, on three freight trains. The deportations occurred under dreadful weather conditions, amid thunder storms. A lot of rain fell on the city in June. The dark skies opened their gloomy gates. The heavens were weeping for the sorrows of mothers, the anguish of fathers, for the misery of the world. Finta came to the railway station to oversee how the gendarmes pushed us onto the crowded cattle cars. About eighty people were squeezed into each box car like sardines. The guards provided for every car a bucket of water and another bucket to serve as the toilet. When a woman called out, "please, give us more water", a gendarme replied: "You don't really need water because you will be soon dead". Finta stood at the station cursing the Jews. His former fiancée was among the deported, and he told her that she was "a Jewish whore". Three months later his police career was over. The advancing Soviet Army crossed the Tisza River and on October 11,1944, had taken Szeged. Finta did not wait for their arrival and fled from the city. After the war a Hungarian People's Court in Szeged tried him in absentia for his complicity in torture, robbery, forcible confinement, kidnapping and manslaughter. In 1948 it convicted Finta for war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced for five years of prison with forced labour. Yet Finta was free. He and hundreds of other Nazi war criminals arrived in Canada, hiding their terrible secrets. They committed harrowing atrocities in their own country. Then they fled and found safe haven in Canada. Not knowing their horrific crimes, Canada welcomed them with open arms. However, in 1987 Finta was arraigned in Toronto and prosecuted for war crimes. But, how do you deliver justice half a century later? The crimes were committed in another country, in a different era, while the memories of the witnesses have faded. Mind you, the judicial system is not about justice but the power struggle between prosecution and defence. And the Finta trial was very poorly designed. He was not judged for robbery, torture, kidnapping, deportation and murder but for his mind set in 1944. Thus Finta managed to pass the responsibility for his crimes to his superiors. In 1990 the 78 year old Finta walked out of the court hall as a free man, proclaiming his love for the Jewish people. He did not forget to add that he used to have many Jewish friends and that once he even had a Jewish fiancée. As his victim, I do not feel any anger or bitterness over his acquittal. I do not believe in punishment for revenge. Moreover, what sort of justice can result from a trial? After all, courts cannot compensate us for our sufferings, for our lost years of youth. Nor can they bring back to life the dead.