On the night of February 6 to 7, 1945, a train with 1,210 inmates from the Theresienstadt concentration camp crossed the Swiss border at Kreuzlingen to freedom. On the train were 663 Jews from Germany, 434 from Holland, and 104 from the Czech Protectorate.
Unlike the only other, well-known and fully documented “rescue train” of Jews permitted by the Nazis to leave German-occupied Europe with a relatively large number (1,684 Hungarian Jews), though only 320 reached freedom in Switzerland (the others were incarcerated, initially in Bergen-Belsen), hardly anyone is aware of the train that brought 1,210 inmates of the Czech concentration camp to Switzerland.
The reason for the different treatment of these two trains is apparently linked to the identity of their organizers.
The Kastner train was organized by Hungarian Zionist leader Reszo Kastner, working with Saly Mayer, the Swiss representative of the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, known as “the Joint”), the Jewish relief and rescue organization which strictly observed the regulations authorized by the American government’s War Refugee Board, prohibiting paying the Nazis ransom.
The train from Theresienstadt, on the other hand, was organized by the American Vaad Ha-Hatzala, an ad hoc rescue organization, established in November 1939, by prominent ultra-Orthodox European-born-and-educated rabbis (such as Rabbi Aharon Kotler, the rosh yeshiva of Kletzk, who established the famous Lakewood Yeshiva in New Jersey; Rabbi Avraham Kalmanowitz, the president of the Mir Yeshiva; and anti-Zionist Jacob Rosenheim, a prominent leader of Agudat Yisrael in Germany) initially for the sole purpose of helping save the rabbis and students of the Lithuanian yeshivas, who had fled Eastern Poland, occupied by the Soviets in September 1939.
From the establishment of the Vaad Ha-Hatzala in mid-November 1939, the rabbis refused to join ranks with the three major American Jewish philanthropic organizations that had united in the wake of Kristallnacht to assist German Jewry.
These were the JDC (the most important US relief agency established to aid Jews overseas, responsible for the relief and rescue of Jews in distress outside the US); the United Palestine Appeal (for aiding Jewish resettlement in the Land of Israel); and the National Refugee Service (which assisted newcomers to the US).
They banded together under the umbrella of the US-created United Jewish Appeal (UJA) – a major Jewish philanthropic organization still in existence, that had great success during its initial campaign in 1939.
The rabbis of the Vaad refused to join them, even though another of the groups that made up the JDC was the Orthodox Central Relief Committee since the majority of the rabbis making the decisions there were Reform and Conservative, a situation the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbis of the Vaad could never accept.
When the rabbis were criticized for refusing to join the other American Jewish aid agencies, the Vaad claimed that they would only solicit contributions from Jews who prayed in shtiblach (small, privately-owned synagogues), therefore, they were not in competition with the UJA.
It did not take long, however, for the leaders of the Vaad to realize that they could not raise sufficient funds if they only solicited worshipers in small synagogues. They then approached local Jewish federations throughout the United States, threatening to conduct fundraising campaigns in the middle of the local UJA campaigns – unless they would contribute a large sum to the Vaad.
Needless to say, most federations had no idea whether the Vaad was a genuine charity, worthy of their support, and they were afraid that they could not even reach their own targets – since the local Orthodox Jews would prefer to contribute to the Vaad.