ZUG UM ZUG - BUDAPEST 1944

In an extreme situation where are the boundaries between trade ethics and questionable collaboration? Zug um Zug is a thought provoking docudrama that takes a selection of scenes from the original stage play, based on a true story, and investigates further aspects of the story through the use of eyewitness accounts and other documentation.

This is the story of Rudolph Kasztner, sent to represent the Jewish Aid Organisation-Waadah, and explores the moral ethics of deals he was forced to make with Adolf Eichmann in order to secure the release of as many Hungarian Jews as he could. Promising goods that he couldn't deliver and wares that he didn't possess, Kasztner bluffs and double bluffs his way through what becomes a poker game of power, with each round he wins or loses representing thousands of lives.

In the end, of the 600,000 deported he saves 1,684. This was not enough to save him from an investigation into suspected collaboration by an Israeli court in 1955 and he was assassinated 2 years later by a Zionist extremist. Neither play nor film attempts the impossible task of judging Kasztner’s actions, instead we are asked to evaluate the concept of responsible trade in terrible circumstances.