Setting the Past Free

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For some Rudolf Kastner is a hero, for others a traitor. Mark Lawson explores the cultural retellings of a story that began in Nazi occupied Hungary in 1944. At the time Kastner, a lawyer and a journalist, was deputy chairman of the Relief and Rescue Committee. He negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to save Jewish lives but did he pay for them with other Jewish lives? In this programme, Mark Lawson talks to those within Israel - including the playwright Motti Lerner, the Chief Historian of Yad Vashem Professor Dina Porat, and the literary critic Professor Dan Laor - who have wrestled with Kastner's story and the issues it raises. Image: A Hungarian woman looks for her relatives names on the Hungarian Jewish holocaust victims memorial wall in Budapest, Credit AFP/Getty Images