Slovakia’s Central Union of Jewish Religious Communities (UZZNO) will ask Slovak authorities to initiate the extradition of Laszlo Csatary, suspected Nazi-era war criminal, from Hungary to Slovakia, the organisation said on Tuesday.
Head of the Jewish religious community of Kosice Pavol Sitar said the organisation had started collecting documents that will support the request for extradition.
According to the Jerusalem-based Wiesenthal Centre, Csatary (97), as police commander of the local ghetto at a brick factory in Kassa (now Kosice, Slovakia, had a key role in the deportation of over 15,000 Jews to the Auschwitz death camp in spring 1944, and around 300 Jews to a camp in western Ukraine’s Kamyanets-Podilsky.
At the end of the war, Csatary fled Hungary and settled in Canada, where he was granted Canadian citizenship in 1955. He was sentenced to death in absentia by the Czechoslovak authorities in 1948. Sitar said at the press conference that these documents were filed at the state archives from 1986 but a part of them went missing in 1995.
In October 1997, Csatary left Canada to avoid procedures of expulsion after it turned out that his application for citizenship back in the 1950s had contained false data. Hungarian authorities placed Csatary in house arrest last week.
