Iren Gitta Kellner was a teenager when Hungarian railway workers forced her parents, eight siblings, and hundreds of other Jews from their town onto a train platform, looting their luggage before cramming them into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz. She was among the more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews deported to the Nazi death camp in occupied Poland over a six-week period in 1944—one of the most brutal chapters of the Holocaust. Ultimately, roughly two-thirds of Hungary’s 800,000 Jews perished.
Kellner survived and rebuilt her life in the United States, but the trauma never released its grip. Court filings describe a woman who spent decades waking up screaming from nightmares of that endless train journey. In her final years, she fought unsuccessfully for accountability, suing Hungary’s national railway, MÁV, for its complicity in the genocide.
Now, a separate group of survivors is leveraging Kellner’s failed effort to persuade American judges to hear their own claims against the railway in U.S. courts. With the survivor population rapidly dwindling, this latest attempt represents perhaps the final opportunity for living victims of the Hungarian Holocaust to secure a measure of legal relief.
A History of Complicity
Hungary aligned itself with Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s and remained a wartime ally until 1944. Only when Budapest attempted to exit the alliance did German forces occupy the country, initiating the systematic annihilation of its Jewish population. Contemporary reports captured the horror: The New York Times warned in May 1944 that Hungary was “preparing for the annihilation of Hungarian Jews by the most fiendish methods,” while Winston Churchill later described the events as “one of the greatest and most horrible crimes ever committed.”
For six weeks, four trains a day—each carrying several thousand people—rolled along the Hungarian national railway network toward Auschwitz. More than 75 years later, lawyers for the survivors argue in federal appellate filings that there has been virtually no restitution for the financial losses suffered by those who escaped or their heirs, and that Hungary’s own courts offer no viable path to justice.
Navigating Sovereign Immunity
Ordinarily, the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) of 1976 bars lawsuits against foreign governments or their agencies—including MÁV—in U.S. courts. For the past 15 years, however, a cohort of survivors has waged a complex legal battle in Illinois, arguing their case fits within the statute’s narrow exceptions.
One plaintiff, Paul Chaim Shlomo Fischer, initiated a class-action suit against the railway and several Hungarian banks in 2010. Both the district and appellate courts dismissed the case, ruling that international law required the “exhaustion of domestic remedies”—essentially directing the plaintiffs to seek justice in Hungary first.
Exhausting Every Avenue
In 2016, Kellner, then 92, traveled to Budapest to do exactly that. She sued MÁV for damages related to its role in the genocide and the theft of her family’s property. A Hungarian court rejected her claims, citing the statute of limitations.
Kellner then moved to reopen the Illinois class action, arguing that her futile experience in Budapest proved domestic remedies were unavailable. The court denied her motion on standing grounds, ruling she was not a named party in the original Fischer suit. When Fischer attempted to appeal that denial, he was similarly blocked for lack of standing in Kellner’s case.
Despite the procedural dead ends, the appellate court expressed sympathy and suggested the plaintiffs refile a fresh complaint in the lower court. That effort stalled when the district court opted to await Supreme Court guidance on related FSIA exceptions.
A Shifting Legal Landscape
To proceed under certain FSIA exceptions, plaintiffs must demonstrate a commercial connection between the foreign defendant and the United States. Last year, the Supreme Court rejected a separate suit by Hungarian Holocaust victims who argued that stolen assets had been commingled with state funds later used for U.S. bond issuances and military purchases. The justices ruled the link between the 1940s thefts and 21st-century American financial activity was too attenuated.
Richard Weisberg, counsel for Fischer, contends their case relies on a different exception that does not require tracing specific stolen assets into the U.S. However, he acknowledges the plaintiffs must still establish a “commercial nexus”—proof that MÁV generates revenue through commercial activity in the United States. A representative for the Hungarian national railway did not respond to requests for comment.
Whatever the outcome, Kellner will not witness it. She died in late 2017. “She never lived to see a measure of justice in this case,” Weisberg said, “but her courageous lifetime is a reminder that we must never forget the millions whose intentional slaughter she did survive to recount.”
