Eichmann's Executioner

by Astrid Dehe

  Let me tell you a story. When I attended the Torah school back then, after I’d left the prison service, my teacher told me what the word meant: Amalek. He was a wise man. He had studied the Torah for thirty years before he turned blind. But he’d seen everything. The son of Eliphaz, the grandchild of Esau. He asked me: Do you know what he is called, Shalom?

  Amalek, I said.

  No one knows his true name, Shalom, he said, but he was called Amalek. And do you know why? I didn’t know! Amalek is a people “Am,” who lick blood, Shalom, he said. Our blood! He feeds on the blood that flows from our wounds, like flies. He comes when we are weak and wounded to lap our blood and so he survives. Then he stands, made strong by our weakness, and opens his mouth to shout the war cry, gushing blood. Then I understood, you know. I saw him in front of me again. Eichmann on the rope, as Merhavi ordered me to lift him up. His tongue hanging out, down to here, down below his chin, all covered in blood.

  Samuel cut Agag to pieces, Ben—Amalek returned. Mordechai hanged Haman—Amalek returned. And me, don’t I see Eichmann every day, every night? Doesn’t he follow me wherever I go?

  Eichmann is dead, Shalom.

  Do you know the meaning of my name? It means something.

  You told us there was a kingdom called Nagar.

  Yes, but in another language, I don’t know which, Nagar means to gnaw at something. And it means to eat, too. Shalom Nagar, do you see?

  See what?

  Peace, Ben, gets eaten away.

  Ashes to Ashes

  Even on that morning, the morning on which the president adjudges the appeal for mercy, a stack of lined paper sits on the prison director’s desk. Pages written by the condemned man, delivered by the night shift guard as his orders command.

  They wait, demand to be read and sorted, if necessary passed on. A routine imposed on his guards by the condemned man; stubbornly, unobtrusively, authoritatively. Simply by writing. The papers include letters, notes for the defense, and records that he has called “My being and doing,” or “Here, too, in the shadow of the gallows.” He has already produced a library, sometimes up to eighty pages per day, the writing on every page stretching to each edge, certified by the author’s long signature. Line after line in effortlessly flowing handwriting that bears witness to his thoroughness and certainty.

  The first page on today’s stack is different; the director’s gaze is drawn to a bar, printed diagonally across the page, a barrier that is evidently supposed to prohibit reading of the text. Heading: Will. Above the heading is written: Invalid draft. The text, however, is not obscured, the director takes the sheet and scrutinizes the last will of the condemned man with a feeling of tension and uneasiness that he can scarcely admit to himself. A draft, declared invalid, yet not torn up, instead sent to him, the prison director; after all, the condemned man knows on whose desk his pages end up.

  The writing is bigger than usual, the spaces that the author has left like pedestals underneath each short sentence demand respect, perhaps representing a deep drawing of breath that shows the solemnity and heaviness of the author’s thoughts while writing, and conveys this to the reader.

  In the case of my death, the condemned man writes, I ask the following:

  I wish my body to be taken by my brothers out of this country and returned to my homeland.

  There, it is to be burned.

  My ashes are to be divided into seven parts.

  One-seventh of the ashes should be placed in my parents’ grave.

  One-seventh of the ashes should be scattered in the garden of my house in Buenos Aires.

  The remaining five-sevenths should be given to my wife Vera and my four sons. These parts should be placed in each of their coffins once their earthly lives, too, have come to an end.

  In smaller letters, he adds:

  This should serve as a reassurance and to dissipate any fear of death.

  This is followed by a justification written in extra-large letters:

  Because: Death is no worse than birth, and thousands upon thousands of other lives await us.

  The prison director closes his eyes, listens to the echo of these final sentences, which ring hollow and dull inside him. Sees someone walking, scattering ashes like grain. Obscuring the light, multiplying in the dust. Graves open and take in his ashes, graves that do not even exist yet, graves of the future.

  The director opens his eyes again, his gaze wanders to the side, compelled, he only calms himself when he sees the words at the top: Invalid draft. He turns the page, lays it face down next to the stack and takes the second page. This, too, has the heading: Will. The director reads, hesitates, turns the first page back over, lays the two pages next to one another, and compares them.

  In the case of my death I ask . . . to divide into seven parts . . . thousands upon thousands of other lives.

  Word for word the same gloomy liturgy, sentences hewed as though in stone. And again, the bar that crosses out the writing, again the note: Invalid draft.

  Numbed by the sentences that have sunk into him, and that he already knows by heart, the director takes the third page. For the third time, now. For the third time, he reads the same words, this will, that a body be transported to the homeland and ashes divided for the past and future. The same sentences, word for word. Only the bar is missing this time, this time the accompanying remark is missing. This page is valid. Final.

  The director reads, sees the previous day’s date and, at the edge, the signature of the condemned man. The desire to exterminate the page courses through him. He wants to tear it, burn it, unwrite it. But the sentences remain, engraved in his consciousness. Once again power, again dominion. Once again this man is making a decree, giving instructions, he wants to enforce something. The master of transport. Transport of a body this time, his body. Cremation. Further processing. The scrawny fingers of the director hold on, they clutch the paper like the scruff of a neck, he could kill, can, will kill. Will kill and cremate, scatter the ashes in the sea. The director stands up, shuffles the papers together, and places them all, together with the unread pages, in the safe.

  I read Eichmann’s will to Ben without rolling the r’s, without pausing after a conjunction, without turning periods into exclamation marks. I read softly, to allow the number seven to resonate. Divide the ashes into seven parts; the legacy is contained in seven sentences. He uses our number just the way he recited our prayer.

  But why, Moshe?

  Creation took seven days, the menorah has seven branches. Perhaps Eichmann wanted to turn his death into his own godless genesis. Perhaps he knew that the last owner of the menorah was a German, king of the Vandals. Perhaps he thought that the symbol of the holy light belongs to the Germans.

  Did he hope to let his ashes glow the way Moses lit the seven lamps of the menorah?

  I don’t know, Ben. I don’t know anything. These entanglements, it’s as if they can never leave each other alone, Amalek and Israel, not during their lives and not after death. Yesterday the newspaper said: Heinrich Müller’s grave has been found. He was Eichmann’s superior. The head of the Gestapo.

  So?

  Müller is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Berlin Mitte. Where Moses Mendelsohn was buried. In the Jewish cemetery, Ben! The persecutor next to the victims. All alike in death, their bones pale together.

  Who buried him there? The Germans?

  I don’t know. Müller died in the final days of the war. That’s all we know. Maybe the Red Army shot him, maybe he was killed in an air raid. One of thousands of people killed in Berlin. Too many to bury in single graves. They dug mass graves. There are so many cemeteries in Berlin, but they put him in the old Jewish cemetery in his general’s uniform. It’s not an irony of history, it’s something else.

  What do you mean?

  An invisible force. An awful necessity?

  Or is it just coincidence, Moshe? They had to bury Müller somewhere.

  But not there. Not in that place, Ben. Did it have to be
one of Eichmann’s victims who was offered Eichmann’s apartment, as happened to Leo Hauser, one of the few Jews to survive Auschwitz? How many residential areas were there in Berlin at that time? Fifty? A hundred? Hauser ends up in the one that Eichmann had lived in with his family. Two thousand apartments in that area and Hauser is given Eichmann’s apartment. He had to live somewhere? I’d prefer to believe in chance, Ben. But it’s such a close-knit circle. Think about my father, the persecutor who became a victim and who wanted to be a persecutor again. Caught in a circle. And look at Eichmann. When he starts school, what do the other pupils think he is? A Jew. The little Jew, that’s what they called him. Who becomes his best friend? A Jew. Which department is he transferred to when he arrives in Berlin? To the Jewish department. Which race did he admire? The Jewish race. Somewhere he writes he would have made a good Jew. He could imagine that! And he’s alleged to have said that one of the Jews he met in Hungary would have made a good SS soldier.

  Moshe, stop it. That’s disgusting.

  Do you know that Eichmann only had good things to say about Hausner, his relentless prosecutor? I have often looked the attorney general straight in the eye, he writes. He never detected any hatred: His eyes look sad, beautiful, deep to me. He must be a good man in private. He liked him! And he even admired one of the judges—Halevi—he goes on about the intelligent-looking shape of his head and his pleasant voice. Cool-headed Eichmann, Ben, who sent a chill through the courtroom—when he studied his own heart, all he found was warmth.

  He was a hypocrite! A hypocrite and a liar. Foul and two-faced, through and through.

  He praises his guards, too. They always treat me correctly. Never utter an unkind word. I have never faced hatred, Eichmann writes, and no hint of physical violence. He had the utmost respect for the men’s composure.

  He cursed Shalom and spat his blood on him, Moshe!

  Says Shalom.

  You don’t believe him?

  I think he believes what he says.

  You know him, Moshe. You watch him. That was fifty years ago but you know how Shalom lives, Moshe, he lives in fear! Every single day. That fear is called Eichmann.

  He can’t let Eichmann go, it’s true. And somehow, Eichmann can’t let him go, either. And Heinrich Müller can’t leave the victims alone, while he rots beside them in Berlin. They share the same earth, they share the same worms—

  Stop it, Moshe!

  I can stop, Ben. But this will never stop! Müller in the Jewish cemetery, Eichmann’s victims in his own apartment, Eichmann’s executioner sitting at the table with someone who owes his life to Eichmann. You call it coincidence? I say: These are signs.

  Signs of what?

  Maybe there can be no division of men. People try hatred, persecution, killings, but they achieve the opposite: They create a never-ending bond. Don’t you notice the person you hate more than the person you love? Can’t you see the person you are hunting more clearly than the one living quietly next door? And you will never forget a person you have killed, although you can banish someone from memory whom you brought into being.

  You mean your father?

  I mean so many fathers. You are not my son. How many have said that? But no culprit has declared: You are no longer my victim. And no victim ever let his persecutor go.

  There is deliverance, Moshe.

  If there is such a thing, then only through others. No one can free themselves.

  Did you say Kaddish for your father?

  No.

  Why not?

  How could I answer Ben’s question? The orphan’s Kaddish, the prayer of the son for the dead father, which allows his soul to rise up to the Lord. I had become a Jew, I had to fulfill the obligations. Reciting Kaddish was a part of that. But could I do it? Stand in front of a congregation, allow them to answer “Amen” for a man who had first been a Jew without knowing it and then against his will? Who hoped to annihilate the Jew in him through his son and his son’s sons? To recite the Jewish prayer of death for him had seemed absurd and outrageous at the same time. I took my dilemma to a rabbi, told him everything. The rabbi listened with his head bowed, and remained silent when I had finished. A silence that would be followed by damnation, or so I feared. Damnation of the father and of the son. Weren’t they both fleeing? One from his roots, the other from his duty?

  But the rabbi did not condemn us. Bera mesake aba, he said. The son delivers the father. The factual calm of his answer confused me.

  My father was a renegade, Rabbi, I said. He disowned his Jewishness.

  A guilty Jew is still a Jew, the rabbi answered.

  He was a wrongdoer, Rabbi, a persecutor of the Jews!

  The evil father can be redeemed by the good son.

  But he doesn’t deserve that! I cried. My father does not deserve to have a Jewish congregation pray for him.

  The Kaddish is not earned by the father, the rabbi said. It is the son’s duty. And with those words, he dismissed me.

  Why not, Moshe? Ben had waited while I was lost in thought, but now he was getting impatient. Why not? Your father was a Jew, after all.

  The son of a Jewish mother.

  Then it was your duty, Moshe.

  It was, Ben, but I couldn’t do it. The rule says: For eleven months you must say Kaddish every day, starting on the day of burial. Two months had already passed before I heard about my father’s death. One day I received a letter that had taken many detours before it got to me. It said that my father had died—the date of his death, the date of the funeral, nothing else. I have no idea how he died or where he’s buried, whether he was cremated, or if he was put in the earth.

  The Kaddish wouldn’t have counted because you had missed two months? That wasn’t your fault. You could have simply prayed for nine months, or added on a couple of months. Did you think someone was counting?

  That’s what I wanted to believe.

  What saying Kaddish for your father would have achieved can be achieved by living a good life, too. If you live a good life, you can still redeem him.

  A Thousand Degrees

  The decision of what to do with the body was made a long time ago. An hour’s drive away, in a city called Petah Tikva—gateway to hope—a man is welding together iron and steel. He does not mind working late into the night or until early morning. He is even happy to stay behind on his own, alone with his oven that is slowly taking shape, after the last shift of welders leaves the factory. Then he works in silence in the empty hall, undisturbed by questions from his colleagues, who must not be told the true identity of the client or the purpose of the oven. He says it is for a company in Eilat on the Red Sea that processes fish bones. They want an incinerator for sharks, he says, whale sharks, reef sharks, white tip sharks; he describes the shape of these predators, their skeletons, and he adjusts their sizes, at which he can only guess, to fit the size of his oven.

  Pinchas Zeklikovsky is proud to have been chosen for this secret mission. He is an expert in his area, was recommended as a reliable specialist. The fact that he is the only survivor in his family, that his father, mother, brother, and sister are among the victims of the man whose sentence is soon to be carried out, was not taken into account. It is just a coincidence. Zeklikovsky carries out his work for them, too. His client’s instructions are kept to a minimum. The design and materials are up to him; he has only two conditions to fulfill. One: The oven must be big enough to hold a man lying down. Two: The burning temperature must be able to reach 1,800 degrees Celsius.

  At first, Zeklikovsky thinks there must be a mistake; ovens normally burn up to 800 degrees. But the number is confirmed. A thousand degrees more than necessary. Zeklikovsky had wanted to point out the problems associated with such temperatures—the time it would take to light, the danger for the men operating the oven, strain on the materials—but he stopped himself. He thought he understood that there was more at play here than technical measurements. A thousand pieces of silver, a thousand generations, a thousand victims of Solomon�
��s fire. When something can no longer be counted, when something moves beyond the realm of human comprehension, the Ethics of the Fathers says: a thousand. A number that represents the uncountable, an oven beyond comprehensible standards. Built by a human to fit a human, and yet destined to exterminate a human, finally, absolutely, to burn flesh and bones to more than just ashes. To dust, perhaps, which flies up into the depths of the sky, to the furthest edge of creation, where the cosmos is still no different from chaos.

  Zeklikovsky began by making the incinerator, a cylinder measuring two meters in length and one and a half meters in height. For the base, he welded together square panels and then riveted three metal ribs around the whole structure. He attached the oven door to the head of the incinerator—a heavy iron door that can be opened and closed using a lever on the side. To finish, Zeklikovsky built the chimney, three meters high. He fitted it to the rear end of the chamber and attached it in such a way that it can be removed for transport.

  Now Zeklikovsky stands in front of the finished oven. He cannot deliver it with a clear conscience. He should check that the chamber can sustain the required temperature, if the seams hold, how close a person can get to the oven while it is at its hottest. Can the door even be opened at that point? Or should he lengthen the lever? These are not really his concerns. The order was clear, the order has been fulfilled. But Zeklikovsky does not want to hand over the oven. As long as he is working on the oven, his dead are with him, the dead whose graves he does not know, who probably do not have graves, who have become ashes, blown away. Zeklikovsky’s oven is an extension of their vengeance. It is justice.

  Zeklikovsky takes off his hat and wipes his brow. This man, who has been condemned—what does he do in his cell? Wait? Does he imagine what it will be like to be hanged? Does he think about the oven, does he know that his body will be burned? If he does know, does he imagine the flames beating at his body, cracking the skin, the flesh ripping apart, sizzling?