A 97-year-old former Canadian citizen who was charged with Holocaust war crimes in Hungary this week lived quietly in Montreal for nearly 50 years.
Laszlo Csatary raised a family in the city’s Notre Dame de Grace neighbourhood and sold art.
It is alleged that 70 years ago he abused and deported thousands of Jews to the Auschwitz death camp in his role as chief of an internment camp in the Slovakian city of Kosice, part of Hungary at the time.
In 1948 a Czech court sentenced him to death in absentia. He arrived in Nova Scotia the following year, became a Canadian citizen in 1955 and lived in Montreal with his wife.
He told neighbours that he was an art dealer.
The real estate agent who sold his home recalled there were many paintings in the house.
“It was set up as storage for a tremendous number of paintings, perhaps 200 paintings,” Dale Newton, a local real estate agent, told CTV Montreal.
Csatary left Montreal in 1997, apparently heading for Europe. This was after Canadian authorities alleged that Csatary did not disclose information about his collaboration with Nazis while working for the Royal Hungarian Police and his participation in the internment and deportation of thousands of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps.
His citizenship was revoked in August 1997 and a deportation order was issued, based on his obtaining citizenship by giving false information. Before authorities ruled on his fate in a deportation hearing, Csatary left the country.
The case was brought to the attention of Hungarian authorities in 2011 by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish organization active in tracking down Nazis not yet brought to justice.
In April, Csatary topped the organization’s list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals.
According to a summary of the case released by prosecutors in Budapest, Csatary was a police officer in the Slovakian city of Kosice, at the time part of Hungary.
It is alleged that in May 1944, Csatary was named chief of an internment camp at a Kosice brick factory. Some 12,000 Jews were deported from the internment camp to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.
Authorities said Csatary was present when the trains were loaded and sent to concentration camps.
Csatary "regularly" used a dog whip against the Jewish detainees "without any special reasons and irrespective of the assaulted people's sex, age or health condition," the prosecutors' statement said.
At the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre, news of his possible prosecution was received with mixed emotions.
“If it's just to take revenge on him....at 97? I don't know,” author Catherine Shvets told CTV Montreal.
Alice Hersovitch, who works at the memorial centre said that Csatary’s advanced age and that fact that he was able to evade prosecution until now makes her even angrier.
“He deported thousands of people… to Auschitz and we all know very few came back,” Hersovitch told CTV Montreal.
“There is no victory here.”
Investigators say despite his age, Csatary is still in good health and possibly capable of paying for his alleged crimes.
