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Setting the Past Free

Setting the Past Free: Episode 1: Part I, Mark Lawson explores the retellings of one of the most controversial stories to emerge from the Holocaust

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Episode 1: Part I, Mark Lawson explores the retellings of one of the most controversial stories to emerge from the Holocaust

Part I, Mark Lawson explores the retellings of one of the most controversial stories to emerge from the Holocaust

BBC Radio 4 - Setting the Past Free, Part I, Mark Lawson explores the retellings of one of the most controversial stories to emerge from the Holocaust

Mark Lawson on how the story of Rudolf Kastner has been retold outside Israel.

Mark Lawson explores how the story of Rudolf Kastner, one of the most controversial figures to emerge from the Holocaust, has been retold outside Israel.

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. His negotiations with Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for the deportation and extermination of the Jewish communities in Europe, saved Jewish lives but did he pay for them with other Jewish lives?

This question has been the subject of court trials, books, poetry, documentaries, television dramas, and plays - each one retelling Kastner's story from a new perspective. Two of those cultural retellings, one in the UK - the 1987 play Perdition, and the other in Israel - the 1994 television drama The Kastner Trial, managed to make headlines of their own.

And still the retellings continue with one of Israel's most celebrated playwrights, Motti Lerner, in the process of writing a new version of Kastner's story. The new play will be staged at Israel's National Theatre in 2017, thirty years after Jim Allen's play, Perdition, led to one of the most incendiary episodes in British theatre history.

In part 1, Mark Lawson talks to those outside Israel - including the film director Ken Loach, the historian Professor Derborah Lipstadt, and the theatre critic Michael Billington - who have wrestled with Kastner's story and the issues it raises.

Presenter - Mark Lawson

Interviewed Guest - Dr Yaacov Lozowick

Interviewed Guest - Ken Loach

Interviewed Guest - Michael Billington

Interviewed Guest - Professor Deborah Lipstadt

Interviewed Guest - Gaylen Ross

Translator - Rotem Carmeli

Actor - Cokey Falkow

Producer - Ekene Akalawu.

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Mark Lawson explores the cultural retellings of the story of Rudolf Kastner.

Mark Lawson explores the cultural retellings of the story of Rudolf Kastner, one of the most controversial figures to emerge from the Holocaust.

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Setting the Past Free

Episode 1: Part I, Mark Lawson explores the retellings of one of the most controversial stories to emerge from the Holocaust

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