THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

sensitivity, and thanks to the tools of speech, thought, memory, and skill. Unlike us,the Nazis wanted to return to the law of the jungle, with one species of man who isthe son of the gods, and views the other as if they were disease-carrying rats. Thiswas their culture of crime, and Eichmann was one of its best technicians. Because ofthe short lapse in time, the depth of Eichmann’s depravity escaped the prosecutors,judges, witnesses, listeners, politicians, and executioners. He was an effectivemurderer even though no corpse was available to which the prosecution couldindicate and say, he killed this man. This was a murder case without the habeascorpus that is essential to ordinary criminal procedures. When Eichmann said againand again, “I never killed a Jew, and for this purpose a non-Jew . . . I never gave theorder to kill a Jew and no order to kill a non-Jew,” he meant it. Neither theprosecution nor he himself understood his innovation. In his eyes, he was just abureaucrat, a bolt in a machine. It is unlikely that he understood that the machine wasa Golem, a Frankenstein who assaulted the entire human creation. Reading the trial’sminutes, it appears that Eichmann was quite limited mentally and could notconceptualize and grasp the essence of the crime that he had committed. His beliefthat he was only responsible for the transportation of the victims but not for theirdeaths sent him to his death feeling that a great injustice was done to him. But in thosedays, the jury did not make the distinction between a murderer with blood on hishands and a murderer whose forms, regulations and clerks sent the Gypsies,Slovenes, and Jews to the slaughterhouses of his Aryan brethren.When I read the minutes and the exchanges in the court hall, I remembered myfather’s story, told again and again by him and by us after his death, how on one nightthe Nazis knocked on the door of the apartment that he shared.“What should I tell them?” the German landlady asked.“Tell them I’m not here,” my father said, begging for his life. “But I cannot lie,” saidthe lady, shocked. Her honesty would not stop at the gas chambers.“Then I’ll leave the room so you can say that I’m not in the room,” my fatherwhispered with his classic Talmudic sophistry.“All right then,” the landlady said, “but please leave the room.”Thus his life was saved, and our own.My father’s landlady and Eichmann came from the same place. Until the momentthat his soul left his body he was convinced that he was paying for others’ crimes.