CONCLUSION
The trial’s impact extends far beyond Adolf Eichmann and his nefarious deeds. Some of the changes it wrought emanated directly from the court proceedings; others germinated at the trial but were nourished by subsequent events. Some changes affected the Jewish community; others had a far broader reach. Some were profound; others were stylistic. One of those stylistic changes was the adoption of the term “Holocaust.” It had already been used before the trial, including in the official translation of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. However, it was cemented into the lexicon of the non-Hebrew-speaking population when the court translators used it throughout the trial. The trial did not just give a universally accepted name to an event, but greatly accelerated the growth of a field of study. In the wake of the trial, scholars already immersed in researching the Final Solution found a growing audience for their work. More scholars began to explore the topic, thereby accelerating the development of what today we call Holocaust and genocide studies. It also had a significant forensic impact. In the immediate aftermath of the trial, a German Ministry of Justice official, in an oblique reference to his country’s anemic record of pursuing the war criminals in its midst, predicted, “An avalanche of prosecutions will now have to follow.”1 Prosecutions did follow, though they can be called an “avalanche” only in contrast to what preceded them. Furthermore, the sentences meted out were often embarrassingly short, given the nature of the crime. The trial was partially responsible for convincing the German government to reverse its opposition to extending the statute of limitations, thereby enabling additional war criminals to be prosecuted.2 The trial reinforced the notion that there is universal jurisdiction over genocide. Even though legal scholars differ over whether Israel was justified in trying Eichmann, there is now a virtual consensus among democratic states that genocidal killers cannot take refuge behind claims of obedience to superior orders.
The trial either caused or accelerated many changes, but there are certain things it did not do, despite being credited for them. In both scholarly and popular circles, some have believed that before the trial the topic of the Holocaust was absent from the Israeli and American agendas. Typical of these claims was Tom Segev’s assertion that in Israel, until the trial, there was a “depth of silence” about the Holocaust. When I told various Israeli and American acquaintances that I was working on this book, they echoed that view.3 Sometimes the popular perception about the break in the silence is tied to both the trial and the 1967 Six-Day War. People argue that the trial unlocked the doors of silence regarding the Holocaust and the Six-Day War threw them open. There is, however, a fundamental problem with all these theories as they apply to Israel, America, and even the European continent. If one looks at the historical record, the notion of a “black hole” about the Holocaust prior to the trial seems to be more imagined than real.4 In the 1950s in Israel, the Holocaust occupied a prominent place in the national discourse. Memorial books and community records were published in Hebrew and Yiddish. Forests, plaques, and monuments commemorated the victims. In 1956, forty thousand Israelis participated in Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies.5 The Holocaust was also present on Israel’s political agenda. In 1950, the Knesset, at the insistence of survivors, passed the law for prosecuting Nazis and their collaborators, the law under which Eichmann was charged. The 1954 Kasztner trial also thrust the topic onto the front page. Kasztner’s murder in 1957 revived discussion of aspects of the Final Solution. Throughout the decade, there were spirited legislative discussions about establishing Yom HaShoah. Religious parties wanted to link it to a traditional day of Jewish mourning; secular representatives wanted a “neutral” date. There were even debates about its name. Proposals included “Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising,” “Holocaust, Uprising, and Bravery Remembrance Day,” and, the one that was finally adopted, “Holocaust and Heroism Day.” (It is striking that the stripped-down and unheroic “Holocaust Remembrance Day,” as it is known outside of Israel, was not seriously considered.)6 The creation of Yad Vashem was a matter of contention. Though few objected to a memorial, there were fights, many of which spilled over into the public realm, over whether its purpose was to compile survivor testimonies or to conduct research.7 Throughout these years, Israelis hotly debated and, on occasion, nearly rioted about accepting reparations—“blood money”—from Germany. A few months before Eichmann’s capture, many Israelis protested Ben-Gurion’s decision to meet with Chancellor Adenauer as part of an effort to forge closer diplomatic relations. In America as well, the Holocaust was not absent from the communal agenda. It was commemorated in synagogues, Jewish community centers, and camps. It was even the topic of television shows, including dramas such as Judgment at Nuremberg and popular shows such as This Is Your Life, which related the life of a Holocaust survivor and her success in America. Novels and memoirs such as The Wall, The Diary of Anne Frank, Mila 18, and Exodus were best-sellers and became Hollywood blockbusters.8
These findings present us with a conundrum. If there was such extensive discussion and commemoration of the event prior to the trial, why do so many people believe otherwise? Why do many astute observers believe Eichmann’s trial precipitated, in the words of Haim Gouri, a “major upheaval”? Why was the editorial board of the leading Israeli newspaper, Davar, “amazed” by what it heard at the trial? What was the “sudden and clear realization” that came upon the poet Natan Alterman during the trial? Why did witnesses such as the magistrate Beisky and the Holocaust historian Israel Gutman, as well as the BBC correspondent and long-term Israeli resident Geoffrey Wigoder, insist that the trial brought about dramatic changes regarding the public’s attitude toward and knowledge of the Holocaust? Thirty-five years after the trial, Gutman recalled how “the public here in our country … especially young people … listened and … heard perhaps for the first time what happened … this caused a very strong, a very profound change in the approach to the average survivors.”9 If there was already so much attention devoted to the Holocaust, why did Hausner feel compelled to bring the story of the tragedy to the world? This was a story he and so many others were convinced had not yet been heard. Somehow all the publications, commemorations, and popular productions had not pierced the Israeli national consciousness. And if it had not pierced the consciousness of the country in which there were more survivors than any other place in the world, we should not be surprised that it had not pierced the consciousness of the rest of the world.
Even though the Holocaust had been remembered and commemorated, never before had it received such consistent attention. Never had it been on the front pages of newspapers throughout the world, as it was during the trial. However, it was not just the degree of attention that made the trial feel so very different to observers. At Nuremberg, the perpetrators and their documents had been at the center; the victims had barely been a sidebar. Hausner’s determination that this trial would be founded on the human story of the Jewish victims’ suffering stands, from a perspective of five decades, as the trial’s most significant legacy. Though the judges, who were exemplary in their conduct and judgment, dismissed it as of no forensic importance, they misjudged the lasting impact of this testimony. The survivors’ presence in the witness box moved their intensely personal stories from the private to the public realm. Many survivors had, of course, told their stories before, but never had such a steady stream of them appeared on an internationally illuminated stage. Through their testimony, what happened to European Jewry was transformed in the public’s consciousness. The trial and the debate that followed inaugurated a slow process whereby the topic of the Holocaust became a matter of concern not only to the Jewish community but to a larger and broader realm of people. However, before it could become something that transcended the parameters of the Jewish community, both the event and the people whose lives it had devastated had to be embraced in a far more personal, vivid, and intimate way by other Jews. That process was generated by the trial. It began most palpably in Israel. Moshe Shamir, the
novelist and literary editor of Maariv, described in 1963 how the trial had transformed the Holocaust from something he saw from outside “the burning house” into a “personal, moral, problem.” Leora Bilsky observed many years later that after the trial “abstract knowledge became real” and “history [was] turned into collective memory.”10 In short, as a result of the trial, the story of the Holocaust, though it had previously been told, discussed, and commemorated, was heard anew, in a profoundly different way, and not just in Israel but in many parts of the Jewish and non-Jewish world. The telling may not have been entirely new, but the hearing was. This is where those who have recently documented the extent to which the Holocaust was “present” in postwar Jewish life have missed the mark: they failed to ask whether the information about the Holocaust seeped into a certain Jewish consciousness. Jews knew the basic facts, but they did not construct a full-blown apparatus of memory. Despite the many references to the Holocaust in Israel, America, and elsewhere, the story did not penetrate into their reality the way it did beginning with the Eichmann trial. The new hearing of the history of the Final Solution would shape our contemporary understanding of this watershed event in human history.
In Israel the entire episode—capture, abduction, and trial—had the most immediate impact. It enhanced Israel’s conviction that the nation had a legitimate right to represent world Jewish interests. Eichmann’s abduction contributed to Israel’s sense of “derring-do.” As one contemporary commentator boasted, using an idiom of that day, it was evidence of Israel’s “moral robustness, and even masculine character.”11 The legacy of Garibaldi Street would ultimately be evident in the Entebbe Airport, at the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor, and numerous other places where Israel perceived threats to its citizens. It would also be seen in the late twentieth century, during the struggle to free Soviet Jewry. Israel insisted to Diaspora Jewish organizations that it would take the lead on this matter. It argued that it spoke for world Jewry, particularly Jews in distress.
Ironically, in Israel the narrative of the trial seems to have also generated two contradictory trends simultaneously. It reinforced a Zionist version of history that contrasted Israelis, who were citizens of a sovereign state, with Diaspora Jews, who depended on the benevolence of others for protection. According to this narrative, Israelis could defend themselves and bring those who did them harm to justice; Diaspora Jews could not. Ben-Gurion described the trial as unveiling for young Israelis “the profound tragedy of exile, of dependence on alien mercies, of abandonment to the evil and willful impulse of tyrants.”12 But the trial accomplished something else as well, something that is a polar opposite to this Zionist Weltanschauung. It fostered a different perception of the victims. In Israel and much of the rest of the world, the prevailing impression was that the victims had gone like sheep to the slaughter, and that those who survived had done something untoward in order to ensure their survival.13 The law under which Eichmann had been tried, the 1950 Nazis and Their Collaborators Law, was instituted in response to grassroots pressure from survivors, not to punish Nazis, but to punish Jews. The Knesset did not adopt the law in anticipation of the arrival of Nazi war criminals in Israel. The intent of the law was to ensure that Jewish survivors who had “collaborated” with the Nazis by serving as Kapos or the like were punished. During the Knesset deliberations, Minister of Justice Pinhas Rosen spoke of the “suspicion and mutual recrimination” among survivors about what they did to stay alive.14 This began to change as a result of the trial. Before, Alterman, expressing a view regnant in Israel, considered survivors a group that was “separate … unfamiliar and anonymous” to the rest of Israeli society. After watching them testify, he came to see them as “an ineradicable part of the nature and image of the living nation to which we belong.” Israelis began to comprehend that the victims had not been victims because of some inherent cultural or ideological characteristic. As one Israeli teacher wrote in 1962, “If fate had been cruel to us and we were there—our fate would have been the same as theirs and our heroism no less. The differences do not lie within the nation, but in the ‘here and there.’ ” Israelis increasingly recognized that the distinction between Jews in the Diaspora and those in Israel was not “moral or qualitative,” but a matter of a “chronological accident.”15 Haim Gouri made the same observation shortly after the trial:
Far be it from me to blur the distinction between one who dies without putting up a fight and one who fights back or tries to fight back, because a people who loves life will, by its very nature, always prefer those who try to exact the highest possible price for their own lives.… But we must ask the forgiveness of the multitudes whom we have judged in our hearts, we who were outside that circle. And we often judge them without asking ourselves what right we had to do so.
The detailed stories Gouri heard from the witnesses helped him and many others better understand “the state of utter paralysis in which the victims had found themselves the whole time.”16 Dalia Ravikovitz, a young Israeli writer, observed that the trial transformed the Holocaust into “an exploding hand grenade; each of us has been struck by his private splinter.…” The testimony of Beisky, Gurfein, Kovner, and Lubetkin-Zuckerman together with that of so many others demonstrated that heroism came in many forms, and that those who went to their death without fighting were not, ipso facto, weaklings. Some Israelis began to grasp that, rather than constituting a different breed of Jews, they were simply generationally and geographically lucky. This was, Leora Bilsky argues, a “crucial step toward developing a more tolerant society in Israel.”17 The recognition that Israelis were not “genetically” different from these Diaspora Jews marked what historian Anita Shapira has described as the initial “step of Israeli identity’s long and tortuous path back to the Jewish people.” Even though one of the leitmotifs of the trial was that Israelis were a new “breed” of Jew, an increased interest in and even respect for the traditional image of the Jew emerged from the trial. Among the generation of Israelis born in the wake of the establishment of the state, it initiated a “long deferred immersion” in the Diaspora past. The survivors—the witnesses for the prosecution—became a “bridge to the destroyed Diaspora” as Israelis engaged in “reconciliation with the past.”18 These contradictory Israeli reactions—“We are Sabras, who would never let this happen to us,” together with “What happened to the victims was simply a matter of chronology and geography”—coexisted in the wake of the trial. Embedded in both these reactions was a deeply pessimistic Weltanschauung, one that perceived Jews as eternal victims who must forever be vigilant about their own fate. It was as if the the verse from Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” had been inscribed over the proscenium arch of the Jerusalem theater that had been transformed into a courtroom. For better or for worse—depending on one’s perspective—it cemented in the minds of many Jews, particularly in Israel, an “existential fear and suspicion of the outside world” and a reminder, as Hannah Arendt noted, that only those “too weak to defend” themselves fall back when they are threatened on the “compromised phraseology of the rights of man.”19
In the United States and much of the rest of the Western world, the discourse about the victims took a somewhat different direction, thanks in part to the public’s understanding of Arendt’s work. Survivors found themselves on the defensive. Scholars took direct aim at them. Bruno Bettelheim universalized his own rather limited and relatively benign experience in a Nazi camp to condemn Jews for “having grown infantile,” “grovel[ing],” and then “walk[ing] themselves to the gas chambers.” He berated Anne Frank’s father for choosing a hiding place with no escape route and glibly declared that their party could have armed themselves “with a gun or two had they wished.” Historian Raul Hilberg’s theory that centuries of Jewish accommodation with the oppressor had left Jews completely unprepared to deal with the Nazis found added resonance with many people. (Ironically, Arendt, who used much of his work—far more than the Baec
k citation—without attribution, thought, what she called Hilberg’s “death wish” interpretation of Jews’ action was ludicrous.) Survivors seethed with anger at those intellectuals who, despite sitting in safety, knew “exactly how the Jews should have behaved to save themselves.”20 Their responses varied. Some felt hurt and terribly angry. Others decided not to depend on intellectuals to tell their story. Growing numbers wrote their memoirs, turned to Yad Vashem to have their relatives’ names listed as among those who perished, and began to speak in schools about their experiences. Over the course of ensuing years, survivors became the driving force in the creation of Holocaust museums and memorials. Those with the means endowed chairs in Holocaust studies at various universities. It would be facile to credit all these developments to the trial alone. Other factors certainly contributed. Survivors, many of whom were teens when the war ended, had by the 1960s and 1970s built families and become rooted in their new lives. Many felt distant enough from the trauma to speak of it, not just to other survivors and their families, but to strangers. Yet it was not just survivors who began to change during this period. The 1967 Six-Day War gave Diaspora Jews a sense of pride in Israel that they had not had before. With it came an increased willingness to speak of why Israel was so crucial to them. The Holocaust was an essential part of that. By this point in time, the Baby Boom generation had come of age. Carrying no sense of guilt for what was and was not done by American Jews during the Holocaust, and looking for a tool to differentiate self-righteously their activist response to the persecution of Jews from what they perceived as their parents’ passive response, they delved into the topic. Contrasting their outspokenness on Jewish issues with the supposed “silence” of American Jewry during the Holocaust, they compared the Holocaust to the persecution of Soviet Jewry. Then, in the 1970s, the spectacular success of NBC’s Holocaust miniseries generated an exponential increase in the “demand” for survivors to speak about their experiences. When one watches the nine-hour saga today it is hard to fathom how such a Hollywood soap opera could have had such an impact, not just in the United States but in Germany, a nation where one imagines there should have been more serious vehicles with which to explore this topography of terror. All this took place in a post-Vietnam America which had begun to make room for and even celebrate the oppressed—African Americans, Latinos, gays, and Holocaust survivors. Even among Jews who disavowed any connection with Israel were those who found the trial had a profound impact on them. Paul Jacobs, a freelance writer who covered the trial for The New Leader, described the trial as having forced him “to wonder why … the Spanish Civil War was far more important to me” than European Jewry, and why he “did not care as much or as deeply about their fate as [he] had about the fate of the Spanish Loyalists.” He also concluded that he “had no right to ask anyone who came out of a concentration camp alive, ‘How did you survive?’ because merely to ask the question was to judge them.”21
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