The heroes of our story played poker with Hitler’s grim reaper, Adolf Eichmann. 1942/1943, while Hungary still enjoys independence: Hansi Brand, a beautiful woman in her early thirties, owns a small manufacturing business. Her husband Joel Brand, a German Jew who fled to Hungary, joins the firm as salesman. The Brands live a seemingly "happy" middle class life in Budapest.

Summer 1942. Hungary deports Jews who don’t have a valid passport. Hansi’s sister is among them. The Brands organize a rescue mission, to get her back. Within a year, the "Relief and Rescue Committee", also known as "VAADA" has grown into a powerful organization, operating both within Nazi occupied countries and neutral Turkey and Switzerland. VAADA’s backbone is a network of couriers and smugglers, mostly German military intelligence officers, who are opposed to Hitler.

Enter Rezsoe (Rudolf) Kastner, a dashing lawyer and journalist with political aspirations. He joins VAADA as the third leader of the group. Kastner and Joel Brand become fast friends, although their personalities are far apart.

Kastner falls in love with Hansi and courts her. The feeling is mutual. The two become lovers. Joel has no inkling of the affair, but he knows that his marriage to Hansi is falling apart, ever since she confronted him about his own amorous adventures.

Hansi and Kastner make plans for a future together.

March 19th, 1944 changes everything. Hitler’s armies occupy Hungary. The Jews of Hungary are faced with annihilation. All members of the rescue committee go underground, still protected by German military intelligence officers ("Abwehr") . Himmler’s executor of the Final Solution arrives in Budapest: Adolf Eichmann and his hand-picked staff roll up their sleeves, eager to start the deportations.

Faced with an Allied invasion, SS leader Heinrich Himmler veers off the party line and makes a desperate attempt to negotiate a separate peace with the West, using Hungary’s Jews as bait. They are the last million left alive. They are the only goods he can trade. Eichmann is instructed to seek out a Jewish emissary in Budapest, and send him to a neutral country to offer to the West the release of one million Jews, in exchange for 10,000 army trucks, winterized and stocked with food supplies. Because of VAADA’s reputation as Hungary’s most resourceful rescue group with far-flung connections abroad, Eichmann seeks out Joel Brand.

Joel Brand flies to Istanbul on board a German courier plane. But the British refuse to discuss Eichmann’s offer. They suspect Joel of being a German spy. However, President Roosevelt sends an emissary, Ira Hirschmann, to Turkey to meet with Joel Brand. But Ira Hirschmann never catches up with him, as Joel is lured out of Turkey by the British and arrested in British-controlled Syria.

While Joel languishes under British house arrest in Cairo, beating his head against the wall, Hansi Brand introduces Kastner to Eichmann. None of them are aware of Joel’s fate. Themselves constantly under threat of deportation, Hansi and Kastner continue the negotiations with the grim reaper. Just like in poker, it’s a game of bluff for high stakes. And in their daily battle for survival, the two lovers’ passion for each other becomes all consuming.

Blood for Money. . .

What follows, is the unparalleled story of the frantic attempt to save the last European Jewish community from Hitler’s reach. While Eichmann, in record time, sends 437,000 Hungarian Jews to their deaths, Kastner organizes the escape of 1700 Hungarian Jews by train from German occupied Budapest to the safety of neutral Switzerland, the only Jewish rescue of its kind during the Holocaust. Through his negotiations, Kastner finds another 18,000 Jews safe haven in an Austrian work camp. And the 150,000 remaining Jews in Budapest are saved by Kastner’s bluffs and Hirschmann’s negotiations in the middle of a bridge between Nazi Germany and Switzerland.

The tragic love triangle of Hansi Brand, her husband Joel and her lover Rezsoe Kastner reaches a dramatic conclusion in Israel, long after the end of the war. A right-wing newspaper accuses Kastner of collaboration with the Nazis. Kastner sues for libel. The trial culminates in the now infamous verdict against Kastner, for having "sold his soul to the Devil" while negotiating with the SS. In 1957 he is gunned down in front of his home in Tel Aviv. Ten months after the assassination, the Supreme Court reverses the lower court’s decision and fully exonerates Kastner.