The task of having to assemble the case against Eichmann and conduct it under the hot spotlight of world attention, often critical, clearly left Mr. Hausner a ravaged and passionate man, fired by a need to make the public know. What is regrettable is that, writing in a language not his own and ill-served by his editor, he reaches, particularly at the start, for overblown prose to express strength of feeling. This is unfortunate, as it tends to arouse resistance in the reader. However, by skipping the first two chapters, which are unnecessary, the reader will find that the deeper the author gets into his material, the more he lets it speak for itself. All one needs to know is here; the total is overwhelming.
The central and dominant figure is, of course, Lieutenant Colonel Eichmann himself, chief, under Heydrich and Himmler, of the Jewish Affairs bureau of the SS, executive arm of the Final Solution. The evidence shows him pursuing his job with initiative and enthusiasm that often outdistanced his orders. Such was his zeal that he learned Hebrew and Yiddish the better to deal with the victims. When even one threatened to escape him, as in the case of Jenni Cozzi, Jewish widow of an Italian officer, he fanatically and successfully resisted her release from the Riga concentration camp against the reiterated demands of the Italian Embassy, the Italian Fascist party, and even his own Foreign Office.
When the Dutch made difficulties, he had to, as he put it, “fight for more [deportations].” His record in Hungary, where, even under the threat of the advancing Soviet Army, deportations were pressed with such urgency that at times five trains loaded with fourteen thousand people were arriving at Auschwitz daily, was climaxed by a maniacal effort, conceived and organized in minute detail by himself, to round up the four hundred thousand Jews of Budapest in a single day. “It needed something like genius,” wrote one observer at the trial, the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, “for a mere SS lieutenant-colonel to organize in the middle of war … and in fierce competition for the essential resources, the transport, concentration and murder of millions of people.”
Eichmann was an extraordinary, not an ordinary man, whose record is hardly one of the “banality” of evil. For the author of that ineffable phrase—as applied to the murder of six million—to have been so taken in by Eichmann’s version of himself as just a routine civil servant obeying orders is one of the puzzles of modern journalism. From a presumed historian it is inexplicable.
Any historian with even the most elementary training knows enough to approach his source on the watch for concealment, distortion, or the outright lie. To transfer this caution to live history—that is, to journalism—should be instinctive. That he was just an ordinary man, a “banal” figure, was of course precisely Eichmann’s defense, his assumed pose desperately maintained throughout his interrogation and trial. It was the crux of his lawyer’s plea. Hannah Arendt’s acceptance of it at face value suggests either a remarkable naïveté or else a conscious desire to support Eichmann’s defense, which is even more remarkable. Since simple caution warns against ascribing naïveté to the formidable Miss Arendt, one is left with the unhappy alternative.
The question that has raised further controversy—the extent of the Jews’ cooperation in their own destruction—is clarified here for anyone who wishes to understand rather than judge. Indeed, the dispute, it seems to me, is a matter of attitude rather than facts. There is a peculiar stridency about those who, having remained safe outside, now seize eagerly on the thesis that the Jews submitted too easily and were somehow responsible for their own slaughter. The attractiveness of the thesis is that by shifting guilt onto the victim, it relieves everyone else.
If by cooperation is meant that the Jews, at gunpoint and outside the ordinary protections of society, went where they were told and did what was ordered without organized resistance, then certainly they cooperated because this was their traditional means of survival. It was bred in the bone during two thousand years as an oppressed minority without territory, autonomy, or the ground of statehood under their feet.
Always helpless against the periodic storms of hate visited upon them, they chose compliance rather than hopeless battle out of the strongest instinct of their race—survival. Their only answer to persecution was to outlive it. Who was to know or believe that this time death was deliberately planned for all of them? At what stage is finality accepted? When as in the Warsaw Ghetto, it was accepted, the Jews fought as fiercely and valiantly as their own ancestors had against the Romans—and as hopelessly.
Inside the camps what motive was there for resistance or revolt when there was no place to go, no chance of friendly succor, no refuge? At the very edge of the grave, at the door of the gas chamber, they obeyed orders to undress, unwilling to invite death a moment earlier by refusal. One’s mind revolts at this submission. Yet it was the brothers and cousins and uncles of these same people who, in Palestine when their situation was changed, fought against the longest odds ever known in war, to win, at long last, independence.
Mr. Hausner makes the additional point that lack of resistance inside the death camps was not unique. The Germans massacred literally millions inside the Soviet POW camps without resistance that we know of. And he recalls the American paratroop company inside the Bulge, executed after being ordered to dig their own graves. They too complied.
To convey to Israel’s younger generation an understanding of this issue and of the nature of the tragedy that overtook their lost people was a main objective of the Eichmann trial. Among the many letters Hausner received when it was over was one from a girl of seventeen: “I could not honor all my relatives about whom I heard from my father. I loathed them for letting themselves be slaughtered. You have opened my eyes to what really happened.” In a larger context the trial was undertaken by the state that was wrenched into life out of the aftermath of the tragedy, from a sense of responsibility to its people, to the dead, and to history.
* * *
New York Times Book Review, May 29, 1966.
Israel: Land of Unlimited Impossibilities
NO NATION IN THE WORLD has so many drastic problems squeezed into so small a space, under such urgent pressure of time and heavy burden of history, as Israel. In a country the size of Massachusetts, all included in one telephone book, it must maintain national existence while subject to the active hostility of four neighbors jointly pledged to annihilate it. Under their boycott it is cut off from trade, transportation, and communication across its entire land frontier. In this situation it must perform three vital functions at once: maintain a state of military defense at constant alert, forge a coherent nation out of a largely immigrant population, and develop an economy capable both of supporting defense and absorbing the continuing flow of newcomers who now outnumber the founders of the state by two to one. It speaks a language, Hebrew, distinct from any other both in grammatical structure and alphabet, which must be learned on arrival by virtually all immigrants. To become self-sufficient in food, or by trade in food, it must restore fertility to the soil and reclaim the desert. Half of its land is non-arable except by irrigation, and its water supply is both inadequate and under threat of diversion by the Arabs. It must create industry where there was none and compete with more developed countries for foreign markets. It must operate with two official languages, Hebrew and Arabic, plus a general use of English; two sets of schools, religious and lay; and three forms of law, Ottoman, English, and rabbinical. While carrying the living memory of the mass murder of European Jewry who would have been its reservoir of population, and whose survivors and sons and daughters are among its citizens, it must, out of necessity, accept financial “restitution” and economic assistance from the nation of the murderers.
The drama of the struggle is in the atmosphere and in the facts of life. It is in the half-finished buildings of poured concrete going up on every hand, the most ubiquitous sight in Israel; in the intense faces of a class in an ulpan where adults from twenty countries learn Hebrew in five months; in the draft for military service, which takes every citizen of both
sexes at eighteen; in the barbed wire dividing Jerusalem and in the empty house in no-man’s-land still standing as it was left eighteen years ago with shattered walls and red-tiled roof fallen in; in the sudden sound of shots on a still Sabbath morning from the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee; in the matter-of-fact underground shelter dug in the yard of a kibbutz kindergarten near the Syrian border, with two benches against earth walls and a concrete door always open; in the fantastic machinery and belching smokestacks of phosphate works in the Negev; in the weed-grown dirt streets and emergency shacks of a new village where a bearded Jew from Morocco stares out of dull eyes at a strange land, and a Hungarian Jew with more hope has hung out a sign: SALON BUDAPEST—HAIRDRESSING; in the compulsive talk of plant manager, government official, or school principal as they explain to a visitor what conditions were like five years ago and what they will be five years hence; in the energy of marching youth groups on a mass hike, singing and swinging as they walk, with a purposefulness almost too arrogant; in plant nurseries with millions of pine and cypress seedlings for reforestation of the barren hills; in two figures on the wharf at Haifa after a ship has come in—an immigrant father locked in the arms of a waiting son as if all the deaths and griefs of the lost six million were enclosed in their wordless long embrace.
The landscape too is dramatic, both in Israel and Jordan, which together make up the country of the Bible. Seeing it at first hand, one realizes it was no accident that God was invented and two religions originated here. In the desert with its endless horizon by day and brilliance of stars at night, the vastness of the world would make a man lonely without God. The grotesque pillars of basalt and eroded sandstone on the shores of the Dead Sea, the red mountains of Edom, the weird gulfs and crags and craters of the Negev could not have failed to make him wonder what immortal hand or eye had shaped them. If he saw God in a burning bush, one recognizes the bush today in the blaze of yellow blossoms on the broom, as well as the origin of another story in the extraordinary brightness of the star hanging over Jerusalem (and over Bethlehem five miles away in Jordan). To Abraham and his progeny the supernatural would have seemed close at hand in the sudden ferocity of cloudbursts that can wipe out a village, or in rainbows of startling vividness with all the colors and both ends visible. Even the sun does not set reasonably here, as it does in the Western hemisphere, but drops all at once in what seems less than a minute from the time its lower rim first touches the Mediterranean horizon. Visions like miracles occur in the constant play of moving clouds across the sun, as when a hilltop village or ruined crusaders’ castle will suddenly be picked out in a spotlight of sunshine and then, when a passing cloud blots out the light, as suddenly fade into the shadowed hills and vanish. A suffused pale light, sometimes luminous gray, sometimes almost white, constantly changing, shines always on Jerusalem, and when the sun’s rays shoot skyward from behind a cloud, one sees instantly the origin of the halo.
The past lies around every corner. Herod’s tomb is next door to one’s hotel in Jerusalem. And at Megiddo, the site of Armageddon that dominates old pathways from Egypt to Mesopotamia, archeologists have uncovered the strata of twenty cities, including Solomon’s with its stalls for four thousand horses and chariots. The past is seen from one’s car on the way to Tiberias, where workmen cutting into the road bank have laid bare a row of Roman sarcophagi. It lies on the beach at Caesarea, where one’s shoe crunches on a broken shard of ancient pottery. One is sitting on it when picnicking on a grass-covered tel, or mound, thought to be the site of Gath, where Goliath came from. One walks on it along the crusaders’ ramparts of Acre, where Richard the Lion-Heart fought Saladin, or on the hill of Jaffa overlooking the harbor besieged by Napoleon. It is present, if somewhat obscured by cheap souvenirs, at Nazareth.
Archeology is a national occupation, hobby, and, in a sense, the national conscience. The government maintains a department for the exploration and study, preservation and display of ancient sites and monuments. Students in summertime volunteer for “digs.” Although private digging is forbidden, a national hero like General Moshe Dayan, who is not easily restrained, pursues it with the intensity he applied to the Sinai campaign, piecing together amphorae from fragments in his studio and dragging home two entire Roman columns to set up in his garden—not without stirring up the usual wrangling in the newspapers, another favorite Israeli sport. The most spectacular recent work, under the direction of another wartime hero, General (now Professor) Yigael Yadin, is the uncovering of Massada, high on the cliffs above the Dead Sea, where in 73 A.D., after the fall of Jerusalem, 960 Jewish zealots holding out against Roman siege with the energy of despair finally committed mass suicide rather than surrender. Not far away, in Dead Sea caves reached by rope and helicopter, Yadin’s team found further reminders of ancient valor in the letters of Simon Bar Kochba, who in 132–5 A.D. raised the remnants of Palestinian Jewry and maintained for three years the last battle for independence against Roman rule.
To feel itself a nation, a people must have not only independence and territory but also a history. For Israelis, so long and so widely dispersed, the distant past is important and the recent past even more so. Both the mass disaster, or Holocaust as they call it, suffered under Hitler, and the War of Independence against the Arabs in 1948 pervade the national consciousness and have their memorials on every hand. For Arabs the memory of 1948 is full of gall, but for Israelis it is heroic, and they leave its mementoes in place with deliberate pride. Along the road up to Jerusalem, so bitterly fought for in 1948, the rusted relics of their homemade armored cars have been left where they fell under fire. A captured Syrian tank stands in the village of Degania and a Bren-gun carrier in the garden of the kibbutz Ayelet Hashachar. A ship named Af-Al-Pi-Chen (“In Spite of Everything”), one of those which ran the British blockade to bring in illegal immigrants, has been hauled up as a monument where it landed at the foot of Mount Carmel, on the road a few miles south of Haifa.
Unforgotten and unforgettable, the memory of the Germans’ extermination of the majority of Europe’s Jews is no less a part of the nation’s history. Six million trees to reforest the Judean hills have been planted as a “Forest of Martyrs” in the name of the six million dead, as well as an avenue of trees for each of the “Righteous Gentiles” who, at risk to themselves in Gestapo-controlled Europe, saved and hid Jewish neighbors. A central archive of material on the extermination has been established, and it supplied much of the evidence for the Eichmann trial. In itself the trial was a form of memorial, for its main object was perhaps less to bring a war criminal to justice than to solidify the historical record. The archive is housed in the dark new memorial to the dead called the Yad Vashem, unquestionably the most impressive building in Israel. Nowhere has architectural form more clearly and unmistakably expressed an idea and an emotion. It stands on a hill outside Jerusalem—a low, square, forbidding structure on a stark plaza, with walls of huge rounded stones, each like a dead man, surmounted by a heavy lid of wood that seems to press down with the weight of centuries. The building is unadorned by lettering or decoration of any kind. Indoors a raised walk behind a railing surrounds a bare stone floor. Flat on its surface, so that one looks down on them, lie in metal letters the names of the concentration camps: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Theresienstadt, and the others. A memorial flame burns in one corner. There is nothing else, and nothing else is needed. The building is a coffin and a grave, a monument to death.
Groups of visitors, Israeli and foreign—Americans, Scandinavians, Italians, French—come daily to stand at the railing, shaken, or silently weeping, or just uneasy. Like the seated Lincoln brooding in his marble hall on the Potomac, the Yad Vashem leaves no one unmoved. Israel, as the state whose people were the immediate victims, is the nearest heir of the tragedy (apart from Germany, which is another matter). As such it keeps the memory alive, not merely to mourn but with a sense, perhaps, of some mission to history.
. . .
Jerusalem, the Washi
ngton of Israel as compared to Tel Aviv, the country’s New York, still exerts the same magnetism as it did on pilgrims through the long centuries of the Middle Ages. There is something heartbreaking in its division between Israel and Jordan. One can stand at one’s window and look out on the wall of the Old City in the Jordanian half, under the lovely and mystical light, and feel as sad as if one had lived here all one’s life, instead of having just arrived for the first time two days before.
At night the city is still and dark. In the stillness one can hear the wail of the muezzin calling Moslems to prayer in the Old City. Broadcast nowadays by loudspeaker to save the muezzin from climbing the minaret five times a day, it has a harsh sound, yet eerie and full of nostalgia for something one has never known. It is so close, yet from another country—one from which attacks sporadically erupt onto Israeli territory. Mostly these are sabotage raids on pump houses and irrigation pipes by marauders of al-Fatah, an Arab terrorist organization with headquarters in Syria, or they may be haphazard rifle fire by a nervous or fanatic sentry at the border. The Israelis have not submitted meekly to these attacks, and in recent weeks the U.N. Security Council censured Israel for its reprisal action against Jordan. These incidents, together with serious episodes involving artillery and jet aircraft on the Syrian and Egyptian borders, numbered about forty last year and caused more than thirty-five deaths.
Practicing History: Selected Essays Page 15