The true, heart-wrenching tale of Hungary's own Oskar Schindler, a lawyer and journalist named Rezso Kasztner who rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews during the last chaotic days of World War II -- and the ultimate price he paid.

In summer 1944, Rezso Kasztner met with Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, in Budapest. With the Final Solution at its terrible apex and tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews being sent to Auschwitz every month, the two men agreed to allow 1,684 Jews to leave for Switzerland by train. In other manoeuvrings, Kastzner may have saved another 40,000 Jews already in the camps. Kasztner was later judged for having "sold his soul to the devil." Prior to being exonerated, he was murdered in Israel in 1957.

Part political thriller, part love story and part legal drama, Porter's account explores the nature of Kasztner -- the hero, the cool politician, the proud Zionist, the romantic lover, the man who believed that promises, even to diehard Nazis, had to be kept. The deals he made raise questions about moral choices that continue to haunt the world today.

Anna Porter was born in Budapest, Hungary, during the Second World War and escaped with her mother at the end of the 1956 revolution to New Zealand, where she graduated with an MA from Christchurch University. Like so many young Kiwis, after graduation she travelled to London, England, where she had her first taste of publishing. In 1968, she arrived in Canada, and was soon swept up in the cultural explosion of the 1970s. At McClelland & Stewart, run by the flamboyant Jack McClelland, she quickly found herself at the heart of Canadian publishing. In 1982, she founded Key Porter Books and published such national figures as Farley Mowat, Jean Chrétien, Conrad Black, and Allan Fotheringham. She went on to write both fiction and nonfiction works, including Kasztner’s Train, which won the Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the Jewish Book Award, The Ghosts of Europe, which won the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and has published four mystery novels. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Order of Ontario. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Julian Porter. Visit her at AnnaPorter.ca.

Anna Porter's profile page

• Winner, Canadian Jewish Book Award for History
• Nominated, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
• Winner, Nereus Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize

"Kasztner's Train is an extraordinarily affecting book that deserves to be read both for its masterful storytelling and for the timeless moral interrogatives at its heart."

Edmonton Journal

"[A] fascinating and painstakingly researched biography."

Toronto Star

"Every once in a long while a book comes along that makes history so real that it trumps fiction. Kasztner's Train easily falls into that category, and it is Anna Porter's consummate art as a storyteller that makes this true tale so compelling."

Hill Times Ottawa

"Anna Porter's intention in her new book, Kasztner's Train, is clear from the start: to restore the reputation of her subject, Rezso Kasztner...Porter describes Kasztner's Train as popular history, but she has brought an impressive amount of scholarship to bear on the telling of this complex and controversial tale."

Montreal Gazette

"It's a fascinating story about a Hungarian Jew who had the chutzpah to bargain with the Nazis. As Porter sees it, 'If you're in hell, who do you negotiate with but the Devil?'"

Globe & Mail

"Porter's book makes clear that Kasztner ultimately became a casualty in the search for reasons why more Jews did not violently resist their oppressors...It is obviously time that the reality of his accomplishments, as well as the price he and his family paid, are finally discussed."

Quill & Quire

"Perhaps the most important question Porter's book asks is, what is the value of a human life?"

Daily News Halifax