Peace, And A Good Life

There are wars and then there is peace.  And the combatants on either side of a war, once peace is achieved, return to their former activities within society.  For most, that would be a return to the peace-time barracks of each country's military establishment.  During a more widespread conflict when countries conscript into the ranks of their military, post-war, soldiers return to the civilian life they enjoyed before they were swept up into the conflict.

Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary back in 1941 was a chief of police in the Slovakian town of Kosice.  He is closing in on the century-mark, at 97 years of age, and remains in fairly good health.  Which means for over sixty years following the end of World War II, the man has lived well.  He lived very well, it appears in Canada, for fully forty years.  Thirty of those years with no one suspecting his past where he helped to organize the deportation of over 15,000 Jewish men, women and children to Auschwitz, and death.

In 1985, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney decided that Canada had ignored the presence of Nazi war criminals in the country for long enough.  He put together a Commission of Inquiry to look into allegations that Canada hosted hundreds of war criminals.  The Commission reported in 1986 that they had unearthed enough evidence to look more closely at 20 people living in Canada. Ladislaus Csiszsik-Csatary's name was among them.

"Ladislaus Csizsik-Csatary was accused of involvement, while a member of the Royal Hungarian Police in 1944, in the confinement of thousands of Jews and their subsequent deportation to death camps.  In July 1997, just before his trial was to begin, he decided not to oppose the loss of his citizenship.  He has since left the country."  1998 Parliamentary report on the Deschenes Commission

Canada was not involved in taking it upon itself to prosecute Nazi war criminals.  But Canada did revoke the citizenship of anyone who had presented themselves other than what they were, and when Csizsik-Csatary applied for citizenship in 1955 as a successful art dealer living in Montreal, he left details of his background during the war out of the picture.  Which was the later basis for his citizenship being revoked, since it is unlawful in Canada not to reveal a criminal past when applying for entry and citizenship in Canada.

He returned to Hungary and lived there, making no attempt either there or while he lived in Canada to disguise himself with an assumed name.  He had been convicted in absentia for war crimes in Czechoslovakia in 1948, and sentenced to death.  He arrived in Nova Scotia a year later, hiding his identity and assuming life in Canada.  He evaded justice for most of his life and now, in his old age, he faces tardy justice.

He was known as a brute, whipping prisoners, raping women, humiliating the vulnerable and sending them to their deaths.  Countless innocent people, thanks to his hatred and involvement with the Nazis, had their lives taken under the most inhumane circumstances.  His collaboration with Nazi occupation forces while serving with the Royal Hungarian Police, gave him no nightmares post-war.

According to prosecutor Tibor Ibolya of the Budapest Prosecution Office which has taken the man into custody, Csatary claims "he was obeying orders".  Mr. Ibolya describes Csatary as an unrepentant anti-Semite: "He doesn't relate to certain fellow human beings in what we would consider to be a normal way."

He does, however, have the loving support of his relatives who will doubtless not miss a day of the court case to come, expected to last several months.