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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=477502" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Restaurant Keeper</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">In the City of Toronto there was once<br>a restaurant owned by a man named Imre Finta.<br>Born in 1912 in Austria-Hungary, Finta spent<br>his years of youth in my hometown Szeged, <br>immigrating to Canada after the Second World War.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Settling in Toronto, in 1953 Finta bought<br>the Candlelight Restaurant but it did not go well, <br>so he closed it. Then he opened The Moulin Rouge<br>on Avenue Road at DuPont Street. <br>The old fashioned Hungarian gentleman greeted<br>his guests warmly, politely kissing the right hand<br>of his female patrons.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">I had never dined at the Moulin Rouge<br>but I encountered Finta in a brickyard and <br>at the railway station of Szeged in the summer<br>of 1944. At that time I was eight years old <br>and Finta, aged 32, was a Captain <br>of the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie. <br>He was also a Nazi collaborator who supervised<br>the deportation of 8,617 Jews to slave labour lagers<br>and death camps. I was one of them.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">A few months earlier, on March 19,1944, <br>the German Army occupied Hungary <br>and Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest. <br>His Mission was to implement in Hungary <br>the “Final Solution”, a Euphemism the Nazis<br>used to disguise the mass murder of the Jews.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">In June 1944, swearing gendarmes pushed <br>a group of Jewish prisoners from the ersatz ghetto<br>of Kistelek onto a freight train. My mother, <br>my three year old sister Vera and I were <br>among them. We travelled thirty kilometres to <br>Szeged where the gendarmes led us to <br>an abandoned brick factory that was turned into<br>a makeshift concentration camp.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The brickyard camp commandant was<br>SS captain Angermayer, whom I remember<br>as a tall and lanky silhouette moving among <br>the prisoners in a black uniform. <br>He was assisted by ruthless gendarmes <br>in cock-feathered hats, armed with <br>bayoneted rifles and swords, <br>who terrorized the captives. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Living conditions in the makeshift ghetto <br>were dreadful. Only one water tap served <br>almost nine thousand people and the latrine<br>did not deserve that name. Garbage was strewn<br>all over the place. The silence of the night<br>was broken by the screams of the mentally ill. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Captain Finta, head of the Department<br>of Investigations in Szeged, appeared<br>in the brickyard day after day. <br>Accompanied by a group of his detectives, <br>he repeatedly threatened to shoot every person, <br>who hides his or her own money and valuables. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">This chief of “investigations”<br>and his police thugs had beaten and tortured<br>innocent Jewish men and women in order<br>to find and confiscate their private property. <br>Many of them committed suicide.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Aided by doctors and midwives, the gendarmes<br>conducted the bodily searches, including anal<br>and genital inspections. Not everyone in Hungary<br>was impressed though by the efficiency of police<br>investigations. Endre Hamvas, the Catholic Bishop <br>of Csanad, for example, was shocked and sent <br>a protesting report to church officials <br>on the brutal police searches. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">On June 21, Finta initialled and submitted<br>a memorandum to the Mayor stating that <br>the German SS command decided to deport<br>the Jews from Szeged on June 25,27 and 28, <br>on three freight trains. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">The deportations occurred under dreadful weather <br>conditions, amid thunder storms. A lot of rain<br>fell on the city in June. The dark skies opened<br>their gloomy gates. The heavens were weeping <br>for the sorrows of mothers, the anguish of fathers, <br>for the misery of the world.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Finta came to the railway station to oversee<br>how the gendarmes pushed us onto the crowded<br>cattle cars. About eighty people were squeezed into<br>each box car like sardines. The guards provided for <br>every car a bucket of water and another bucket<br>to serve as the toilet. When a woman called out, <br>“please, give us more water”, a gendarme replied: <br>“You don’t really need water because<br>you will be soon dead”. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Finta stood at the station cursing the Jews. <br>His former fiancée was among the deported, <br>and he told her that she was “a Jewish whore”. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Three months later his police career was over. <br>The advancing Soviet Army crossed the Tisza River<br>and on October 11,1944, had taken Szeged. <br>Finta did not wait for their arrival and fled from <br>the city.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">After the war a Hungarian People’s Court in Szeged<br>tried him in absentia for his complicity in torture, <br>robbery, forcible confinement, kidnapping and <br>manslaughter. In 1948 it convicted Finta for <br>war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was <br>sentenced for five years of prison with forced labour.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Yet Finta was free. He and hundreds of other Nazi<br>war criminals arrived in Canada, hiding their <br>terrible secrets. They committed harrowing atrocities<br>in their own country. Then they fled and found safe<br>haven in Canada. Not knowing their horrific crimes, <br>Canada welcomed them with open arms.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">However, in 1987 Finta was arraigned in Toronto<br>and prosecuted for war crimes. But, how do you <br>deliver justice half a century later? The crimes were<br>committed in another country, in a different era, <br>while the memories of the witnesses have faded. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">Mind you, the judicial system is not about justice<br>but the power struggle between prosecution and<br>defence. And the Finta trial was very poorly<br>designed. He was not judged for robbery, torture, <br>kidnapping, deportation and murder but for<br>his mind set in 1944. Thus Finta managed to pass<br>the responsibility for his crimes to his superiors. </div><div style="margin:10px 0">In 1990 the 78 year old Finta walked out<br>of the court hall as a free man, proclaiming his love<br>for the Jewish people. He did not forget to add that<br>he used to have many Jewish friends and that once<br>he even had a Jewish fiancée.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">As his victim, I do not feel any anger or bitterness <br>over his acquittal. I do not believe in punishment<br>for revenge. Moreover, what sort of justice can result<br>from a trial? After all, courts cannot compensate us<br>for our sufferings, for our lost years of youth.<br>Nor can they bring back to life the dead.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Paul+Hartal">Paul Hartal</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=477502" data-title="The Restaurant Keeper de Paul Hartal" data-description="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 ..."></div>
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