Escape From Justice

"With his actions, the accused wilfully assisted in the illegal killings and torture carried out against the Jews deported from Kosice to the concentration camps in areas occupied by the Germans."
June criminal indictment of Laszlo Csatary, Budapest, Hungary

FILE This Wednesday, July 18, 2012 file photo shows alleged Hungarian war criminal Laszlo Csatary covering his face in a car as he leaves the Budapest Prosecutor's Office after he was questioned by detectives on charges of war crimes during WWII and prosecutors ordered his house arrest in Budapest, Hungary. Csatary, a former police officer indicted in June 2013 by Hungarian authorities for abusing Jews and contributing to their deportation to Nazi death camps during World War II, has died. He was 98. Csatary died Saturday Aug. 11, 2013 of pneumonia in a Budapest hospital, said his lawyer, Gabor Horvath B. (AP Photo/MTI, Bea Kallos, File)

The most unsavoury of characters, Hungarian war criminal Laszlo Csatary was welcomed to an unaware Canada as a new immigrant to the country in 1949. Perhaps news of events, prosecutions, criminal actions and other such were not as readily accessible back then as they are now. For the year previous to his arrival in Canada, Laszlo Csatary was sentenced to death (in absentia) by a court in Czechoslovakia.

And Canada was where Mr. Csatary found refuge, settling down comfortably in Montreal, as an art dealer. Where formerly he was a police officer indicted in his 98th year of life as a war criminal for his abuse of internment camp Jews, aiding in their deportation to Nazi death camps. Reputation and recognition of his role in the extermination of European Jewry finally caught up to the man. Too late, however, for punishment.

Authorities in Hungary identified Mr. Csatary as chief of an internment camp set up in Kosice, a Slovak city that was part of Hungary in 1944, in an old brick factory. The indictment accused him of beating Jews with his bare hands and with the use of a dog whip. He was charged with "actively participating" in the deportation of thousands of Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.

All of the charges brought against the man were denied by him. Holocaust survivors testified to their experiences where Laszlo Csatary was involved in imprisonment, beating and transportation to death camps leading to the slaughter of Jews. Despite the horrors of his involvement in the Final Solution to exterminate all of European Jewry through the dedication of the Third Reich to ridding the world of Jews, he arrived in Halifax, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1955.

Finally alerted to the identity of the personage who had lived comfortably in Canada for over fifty years he was informed that authorities would be serving him notice of a deportation hearing. He chose to take evasive action, taking it upon himself to quietly remove himself from Canada, returning to Europe. Ironically his citizenship had been revoked on the basis of his having claimed to be a Yugoslav national.

Lying about the past and one's personal history and affiliations on entry to Canada as an prospective immigrant represents just cause for revocation of citizenship. The Budapest court decided to suspend the case against Csatary, citing Hungarian prosecutors having filed the same charges as those in the 1948 Czechoslovakia conviction. Hungarian prosecutors appealed the double jeopardy decision and were awaiting a ruling.

Just as he had evaded personal responsibility for his wartime activities and justice was never meted out to the man for his atrocious human rights brutalities, he managed to evade justice as he approached his 99th year of life.