Eichmann's Executioner

by Astrid Dehe

  Drop

  Ready! calls the commander.

  The tension in the room is palpable, solid as something with its own length, width, and height. The smell of sweat hangs in the air; the reaction of the nervous system to various stimuli.

  The guards’ sweat is caused by first-night nerves. They have no experience of this situation, and no one knows if the director’s manual can even be trusted. Is the mechanism underneath the iron plate reliable, will the rope run down as planned, and as planned come to a stop? Will the frame of the gallows hold? Should the British experts have been brought here? The name Albert Pierrepoint was mentioned several times in the media; it was assumed that he would carry out the sentence. But those responsible had never considered using an executioner from another country. We must do this ourselves, was the feeling, and we can do this ourselves. They had used a sack for the practice run, guessing its weight because they did not have any suitable scales. The sack fell neatly through the hole, then hung serenely from the noose, but what does that mean? Broken neck? Choking? A sack does not die. It just hangs there.

  The preacher’s sweat is biological disbelief. No human body says: Death, where is thy sting? Everyone struggles, fights, rejects this dull denial that frightens everyone to the core despite all the Good News. An age-old reflex, the fear shared by all living beings, which no one can take from us.

  The prison director’s sweat is metaphysical. A consequence of the absurdity that these two poles, the extremes of being and nothing, could be short-circuited in a matter of seconds. Not to be borne. All pores open up, the cold secretions numb the skin that is warmed by the overburdened brain.

  Ready!

  The matter is now delegated to the man, the men behind the curtain. The preacher has seen a lever. Other eyewitnesses describe a piece of equipment with two buttons, in front of which two guards stand. Both of these guards, so they said, pressed their buttons at the same time, but only one triggered the mechanism. Neither knew which was the real trigger. No one should be able to say: It was me, I killed this man.

  Ready!

  The condemned man raises his head, opens his mouth—for one last, his very last sentence?

  A click. The iron plate beneath his feet gives way, the condemned man falls into the depths.

  It is two minutes to midnight.

  Then silence. The self-sufficient song of the dead, monosyllabic, interrupted only by the swinging of the rope and the regular, persistent dripping of some liquid onto the floor of the room into which the trapdoor has opened.

  Him and Me

  After some time, there is movement behind the black curtain. Something is shifted, someone coughs slightly, clears their throat. The sheet is pushed to one side, Nagar comes out, blinking, the sudden brightness in the room confuses him. No one is there now.

  Empty stage. Spotlight. And here he stands, the small Yemenite, guard, executioner, with shaking hands. What has he done?

  He remembers, recalls each of the day’s events in turn, bringing them back out into the light, onto the stage.

  They pulled him into a car, tore him away from Ora and the boy on the stony path to the hills, with the engine screeching they drove him to the prison, gave him hurried instructions, charged him with the weight of his duty. Representative for millions of victims. Ambassador of a people. Hand of justice.

  Then the walk through the building, the stairs, the long corridor. The men whom he passed. His colleagues among the guards, the preacher, the doctor, journalists with notepads under their arms, the director came toward him, hurried into his office, the three judges who had given the death sentence sat on three chairs. In front of the door to the execution room were two guards whom Nagar did not know. Everyone looked at him, with deference, respect, perhaps awe—he should have grown under their gazes but instead he shrank. The door grew before him, he could hardly reach the handle.

  The condemned man stands in the room on the plate that seals the hole in the ground. Nagar is alone with him. No others there? No one. They were all in the corridor. Even the commander waited outside.

  Nagar is alone with the condemned man. He looks him in the eye and the condemned man returns his gaze, for the first time in all these months. Blue eyes, blue-gray, eyes that reveal nothing. The soul of the condemned man is reflected somewhere else. Nagar sees only himself in these pupils. The guard, the executioner.

  Nagar loops the noose around the neck of the condemned man, who once again looks past him, pulls the knot tight, takes half a step back. The condemned man nods. And now he says something, a long German sentence, gives a brief German speech, with raised head, as though speaking before an audience, his victims perhaps, who have come together somewhere here, in innumerable numbers, they need very little space, only the air that the condemned man breathes. Or is he talking to his old Führer, reporting numbers transported, the concluding figures, the final balance sheet? Or perhaps he is just speaking to the walls, wants his last words to reverberate in this room, wants to know they will be preserved here for all eternity, these baying words that sound like polished boots and the death’s head, incomprehensible to Nagar.

  The sentence is uttered. But the condemned man raises his head once more, looks at Nagar, calm and sharp, holds him firmly with his gaze. Captures him. You and me, say his eyes. The shadow of a smile plays around his thin lips. He opens his mouth—

  The commander comes, pulls a white hood over the condemned man’s head, and leaves the room once more.

  Nagar stretches his back, goes behind the black curtain. He feels the weight of the condemned man on the iron plate, wears the noose around his neck, twice, three times, the shackles are heavy, everything weighs him down, grows strangely heavier. He can hardly raise his arm. He looks ill, too, the light is fading, soon it will be night behind the curtain. Nagar—

  Nagar does not know what he is doing. Later, he no longer knows what he has done. He knows what he hears; a loud click, the buzz of the rollers on which the rope runs, the muffled lurch as it comes to a stop.

  His memory samples images, shows here a black button that his thumb presses, there a long lever that he pulls, a stick that he moves, a knot that he loosens.

  Nagar hears the click of the catch on the iron plate being released, and as the rope is ripped from the rollers, he feels how the Earth turns and casts off a person like a horse his hated rider.

  The fall has no end. Two, three, ten meters, this man falls forever.

  The Final Sentence

  According to the prison director’s manual, the heartbeat of a hanged person takes around twenty minutes to stop. No heart has ever beaten for more than forty minutes from the moment of hanging. The manual recommends leaving the hanged person on the rope for one hour.

  The director leaves his man hanging for two hours. Some say it was three. Nagar remembers it being ten hours.

  In any case the condemned man hangs for a long time, feared even as a corpse, although he is just a dead man being pulled down by gravity. Someone must brace themselves against this gravity so that the body can be taken down from the rope. This task, too, is assigned to Nagar. He goes with the commander to the storeroom underneath the execution room, palely lit by a single light bulb.

  Nagar does not look; he has seen nothing until now. He hears the commander pick up the ladder they put there for this very moment, wood scrapes across concrete, the commander leans the ladder against the ceiling opening, now the steps are creaking, the commander is climbing upward. It stinks in the room, a faint mixture of feces and urine.

  What’s wrong, Shalom? Lift him up!

  Nagar opens his eyes with his head bowed. There is a puddle on the floor, he has already stepped in it. He slowly raises his head.

  Checked felt slippers pointing downward. Dark brown cotton trousers, far too wide—two men would fit inside them. Light brown cotton shirt, a dark streak, dark flecks on his chest. Dried blood. His neck: elongated, deep grazes and cuts on both sides, skin hanging in shreds over them. Th
e noose under his chin, as if it wanted to take his head off his body, only it would not give way. Even so, his mouth is half open, his tongue hangs out, it glistens with something dark, that, too, is blood, still wet, even now still wet. His head is tilted toward the left shoulder, his face bloated, white as chalk. His eyes popping out. His eyes oozing from their sockets, large, round. Set free at the end, they looked for the last image they had seen, searched for it until the very last moment. Now they find it again.

  The commander does not notice this; he has seen everything else and will note it down later in his report, which he keeps dispassionate and factual. The director, who receives the report for signing, knows from his manual what these symptoms mean: The cause of death was not a broken neck, but a slow, agonizing suffocation. Beginner’s mistake. The drop was too short; the man did not fall far enough. Or was he too light, did he lose weight rapidly in his final hours? No excuse. With his hands and feet tied, he could only fight with his neck after the fall. How long for? This question will haunt the director. Years later, on the morning on which someone shoots him dead in the middle of the street, he awakes with a sore throat and, looking in the mirror, sees that he has bitten his tongue.

  Hold him by the stomach, Shalom, with both arms!

  Nagar takes hold, but nothing happens.

  Hold him lower down! Lift him up!

  Nagar grips him lower down, lifts him up, the body folds together, face in his face, almost touching—the lolling tongue, still wet, even now still wet, the popped-out eyes!—and now the dead man speaks, spits a deluge of noises in Nagar’s face, a bloody vocal clump, words, pressed together somewhere in his throat, cut down from the rope, now, two, three, ten hours later they unfurl—the end of the sentence he was not allowed to finish in his cell? The sentence he spoke on the roof the day before the sentencing, over and over, because none of the guards understood him? A sentence meant just for him, Nagar, a legacy, to spit out after my death? A curse, a curse on the executioner?

  Nagar lets the body fall, staggers back two paces, the commander grabs at the air. What are you doing, Shalom? he asks, irritated. Nagar wants to undo everything. No dead body should spit at him, sully him with his blood. Blood is the dwelling place of the soul, leave it, do not touch it! It has touched him, colored him, marked him, on his chest, it covers his face, it is even in his mouth, which is open from exertion and horror, this blood is even in his mouth. Who is he now? Still Shalom Nagar? It is someone else who once again stands in front of the corpse—grips him by the hips, lifts the dead body with all his strength, until the noose is loosened—who stands there, alone, the body in his arms.

  Transport of a Body

  Time does not stand still. The commander climbs back down the ladder, two colleagues come and take hold as well, a gray blanket is laid out, then the body is lying on it. His head hangs to one side. His tongue? Someone has put it back inside his mouth.

  The colleagues undress him. They undress Eichmann. Nagar stands beside them. Shirt, felt slippers, trousers, socks, undershirt, underpants, they cover him with the blanket. Someone fetches a stretcher.

  They lay the body, wrapped in the blanket, on the stretcher. They move through the narrow corridor, to the yard, where a van is waiting. Nagar follows them.

  Nagar does not know where they travel to. He knows only that wherever they end up it is hot. Bright and hot. They get out, open the back doors, pull the stretcher out. No, he does that. Alone. His hands shake, he cannot get a firm grip, Nagar pushes the stretcher like a wheelbarrow.

  He notices that the prison director is there. The preacher, too. Here, now he is here, too. The body falls off the right-hand side of the stretcher, without the blanket. The naked Eichmann is on the ground, it smells like a forest, is that the smoke? Two men leap over, Nagar does not recognize them, the director and the preacher? No, not him, he turns away, holds a book over his eyes. Eichmann is back on the stretcher, Nagar pushes him onward. The heat hits him like a blow, every step is a struggle, the air becomes resistance. The body falls off the left-hand side.

  The oven, now he sees the oven, behind a shimmering curtain. It sits on a small hill; Nagar must push uphill. He knows the man stoking the fire, his name is Kols. The heat becomes a giant hand, Nagar swerves, the stretcher sways. They have laid down tracks, sees Nagar, rusty iron bars, along the last few meters to the oven door. But he is still too far away. How does Kols stand the heat? He is made of something else. Or he has already been burned by life.

  Nagar pushes, lifts, trembles. Step by step, his stretcher on the rails, up to the oven, now Kols grabs the lever, opens the door—a fiery gullet. The other men who were here, the ten, twenty men Nagar saw along the way, have disappeared. Only the gullet, the rails, the body, and Nagar.

  Flames shoot out, slide over the body, which they do not want to touch at all, the man lies still, head tilted, the flames grip Nagar, tap him on the chest, in the face, lick at him from all sides, a thousand arms, thousands upon thousands.

  Then the door is shut. A hum, as if the oven might burst, a groaning, a sigh—smoke billows out from the chimney. Nagar sits on the ground, the commander stands in front of him. It’s all right, Shalom, he says. Epstein will drive you home now.

  Three

  I hadn’t seen Nagar again since his visit. Ben hadn’t been to see me either, I didn’t know why. I spent the days sitting at my typewriter, and the nights in flickering dreams full of elongated necks severed by a noose, and a face that melted in the flames. Sometimes it was the face of my father.

  One day, Ben stood at my door again. I had been trying to write the beginning of the next chapter since early that morning but had only managed to type the title:

  Ashes in a Glass

  Are you writing, Moshe?

  A question, of course. My friend, Ben. He’ll never tell anyone anything. Like why he hasn’t been over to see me recently. Or what he actually does on the days he isn’t with me and Nagar at the meeting place. He points to the sheet of paper stuck in my typewriter: The final chapter?

  What do I know? Is there such a thing as a final chapter? The hero is filed away, his life forced into a circle, it’s just repetition from now on, so die: You put a period at the end of a sentence, and turn the following white, empty pages into the kind of nothingness that is often mistaken for eternity, even by the most critical readers. Or the hero finds water in a desert of woe that had seemed infinite, each hope just a mirage until suddenly, a spring appears and turns the white, empty pages into a future full of hope for readers who long for happiness and find harmony everywhere. What do I know?

  Shalom was here, Ben.

  He came to visit you?

  He brought me some lamb, but that wasn’t why he came.

  Why then?

  He had doubts. For the first time, he was doubting the stories he tells. He wanted me to help him. You have to write it the way it was, Moshe, he said.

  And did you?

  There is no real “way it was,” Ben. If there were, you could never write it down. And if it could be written, then no one would be able to understand it. Not even the person writing.

  What happens happens, Moshe. When something has happened, that’s the way it was. And you can’t write that?

  No, because that isn’t what happens. What really happens shatters. You’re watching in a mirror that breaks at exactly that moment.

  So you aren’t going to help Shalom?

  I had no answer to that. Let’s go to the meeting place, I said.

  We could hear the sheep bleating before we reached the compound. They stood there, nervously banging their heads against the chicken-wire fence. Ben gave them some water, fetched some food. Nagar’s apron was dangling from its nail in the shed, his smock was gone. There were tools scattered all over the floor along with several shoes. The whole area looked as if it had been abandoned. The chickens are gone, Ben said. So are the geese. He pushed me past the coops—nothing there apart from a few feathers. He pushed me to the meeti
ng place. There was a brown pool of water on our table and a few nibbled bones beside it. Do you think Shalom will come? He wasn’t going to come, Ben knew that. Nagar hadn’t been here for a long time. Shall we go and see if he’s at home?

  Singing interrupted by blows of a hammer. But this wasn’t the little song of praise we were used to hearing. It sounded as if Nagar were singing all sorts of songs without finishing any of them. Ben opened the iron gate and pushed me around the house to Nagar’s little garden. Chickens strutted through the long grass with geese standing next to them. There were doves sitting on the clothesline. Nagar stood with his back to us. He was wearing the blue smock, singing and working away at something big and square-shaped that he was making out of plywood. Two even bigger structures were already finished. They were obviously going to be used as coops for the chickens and geese. The one he was working on would be the dovecote. Nagar had painted the plywood red and paint had run and dripped everywhere. It looked as if it had been thrown or splashed onto the wood. The sides of the structures had also been painted with a checked white pattern of thin shaky lines. There was no door, just a few holes at different heights that looked as if someone had knocked them out with their fist. These weren’t coops, really. They were cages, and there was more wood waiting along with a large roll of barbed wire.

  Nagar didn’t seem to have noticed us yet, he sang and hammered away, banging in long nails here and there, which didn’t necessarily seem to be fixing anything but were being driven into the wood because there had to be hammering. Shalom! Ben called. He had given up the attempt to maneuver my wheelchair through the chaos of wood, wire, and tools. Shalom!

  Nagar turned around at last, waved his hammer, banged in another nail, and then came over to us.

  What are you doing here? Shalom?