The Eichmann Trial (11 page)

I immediately said to my colleagues that I do not know whether I was meeting the same man. The change was so awful.… I previously had thought that this was a minor official, the type they call a “clerk” or a “bureaucrat” who fulfills duties, writes reports, and so on. Now, here was this man with the attitude of an autocrat controlling life and death, he received us impudently and crudely.
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When the delegation returned to Berlin, word of their experience spread. A reporter for a Yiddish-language French paper picked up the story and wrote an article in which members of the delegation described Eichmann as a
Bluthund
and
Judenfiend
, a bloodhound and an enemy of the Jews. An irate Eichmann summoned the leaders to Gestapo headquarters. Benno Cohn told the court how they stood behind a rope separating them from his desk while Eichmann subjected them to a barrage of “rude, barrack room language.” When one of the leaders again complained that the Reich’s taxation policy made it hard to get entry visas to other countries, Eichmann exploded, calling him an
alter Scheissack
, an old shit bag, and adding the ominous observation: “It seems it is a long time since you have been to a [concentration] camp.”
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Such was his decent relationship.

Jews were not alone in fearing Eichmann’s newfound power. Bernhard Lösener, head of the Ministry of the Interior’s Jewish Desk, visited the Viennese emigration operation. After the war, he recalled that he wanted to talk with the Jews there but decided against it because he “felt himself under Eichmann’s surveillance.” He witnessed how “women pulled their children aside in horror as soon as they saw Eichmann, who casually passed by as though along an empty street, shoving aside the waiting human unfortunates.” Jewish leaders who had been waiting for hours “immediately jumped up.… Eichmann rapidly pointed each out by name, told me with equal rapidity which area they would report on; they then immediately droned through their information like trained animals. The expression of justifiable mortal fear could be read in each face.” If a Nazi official felt personally afraid, one can imagine the terror Eichmann evoked in the Jews. Eichmann was soon boasting of having facilitated the emigration of fifty thousand Jews. Though this was an inflated figure, his superiors in Berlin credited him with designing a system that increased emigration, retained Jews’ assets, and brought foreign currency into the Reich’s coffers.
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These skills would become even more prized by his superiors as the Final Solution entered its more dire stages.

With the start of the war in 1939, the number of Jews under German control increased exponentially. It did not take long for German officials to recognize that emigration was no longer a viable solution. Rather than push the Jews out of the Reich, their goal became finding some Reich controlled territory appropriate for resettling Jews. When Heydrich convened a meeting a few days after the beginning of the war to discuss moving the Jews to the farthest corner of German-controlled territory, Eichmann was the most junior officer present, an indication that he was now considered a central player. Shortly thereafter, in October 1939, Eichmann was instructed to deport the Jews of Katowice, a Polish city destined to be incorporated into the Reich. Eichmann rushed to make the arrangements and, despite his relatively low SS rank, managed to have Jews from both Vienna and Ostrava, a town near Katowice, included among those to be deported. He raced from city to city to organize matters. It is telling that he left finding a destination to be the final step. Getting Jews out of the Reich was far more important than figuring out where they might go. Shortly before the trains were scheduled to roll, he flew to Poland. He had instructed that he was to be met by a Mercedes and a Lancia. They were to convey him and his party to a region “suitable” for depositing the Jews. He quickly decided on Nisko, a small wetland area conveniently located near a railroad. When the first group of Jews arrived, he was there.

Witness Max Burger told the court what the Nazi officer who greeted them—he later learned it was Eichmann—had said: “The Führer has promised the Jews a new homeland. There are no flats and no houses; if you carry out the construction you will have a roof over your head. There is no water. Wells in the whole area are infested; cholera, dysentery, and typhoid are rampant. If you start digging and find water, then you will have water.” After walking a number of kilometers, they were told to leave their luggage and climb up to the site of the proposed settlement. Horse-drawn carts brought the luggage to the foot of the site. The horses were then released. The men were harnessed to the carts and instructed to pull them up the hill. Eventually, those who could not work or were considered too old—over forty—were driven off in the direction of Soviet territory.
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Complications soon arose. The army needed the trains that were being used to deport these Jews. Moreover, Hitler decided to conduct a far more massive transfer of ethnic Germans living in Polish territories back to the Reich. Since the two programs could not be conducted simultaneously, Eichmann was told to halt his operation. Having predicted “flawless execution,” Eichmann fought to dispatch another series of transports to Nisko. Even after receiving a telegram from the Gestapo to stop, he continued, arguing that since the communiqué was not from his superior he could ignore it. When subsequently told to suspend the transports, he dispatched yet one more train, in order to maintain “prestige.” The couple of thousand Jews remaining in Nisko were left without shelter or support. Some were chased by the SS toward the river that abutted the Soviet border. The survivors returned to their homes. They paid their own fare.

The program’s failure did not impede Eichmann’s career. These, the first organized transports of Jews to Poland, became the prototype for subsequent transfers of multitudes of European Jews. By the end of 1939 he had demonstrated that tens of thousands could be removed from their communities without their or their neighbors’ opposition. The victims, plied with promises about the opportunities awaiting them, cooperated. Despite the failure at Nisko, his superiors must have been satisfied with Eichmann’s performance. Shortly thereafter, he was named “special officer” for the “clearing of the Eastern provinces.” Ultimately the section of the RSHA, the Reich’s main security office, that he led would be responsible for coordinating the deportation of approximately one and a half million European Jews to killing centers.

H
ausner next began to call those who had witnessed the murderous aspects of the Final Solution. He had sought people with a “good story,” who could bring the tragedy alive.
²⁰
Among his initial witnesses were two women who did exactly that. Ada Lichtmann was called to testify about the “small-scale” terror in Poland. Speaking in Yiddish, the language that evoked the voices of so many victims, she described how the Germans conducted a mass shooting, killing adults and children: “I saw everything.” An equally harrowing scene was described by Rivka Yoselewska. She told the court how a German shooter debated whom to shoot first, her or the child she was holding. After the child was shot, she fell into the pit that already held the bodies of most of her family. Miraculously, she was later able to crawl out. When she did, she saw a fountain of blood spurting from the ground, an observation that evoked Eichmann’s recollection in his interrogation of having also seen such a fountain.
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Equally troubling was Professor Georges Wellers’s description of the Jewish children in France who were rounded up in July 1942 and brought to Drancy, the camp outside of Paris, without their parents. They slept over a hundred to a room on “straw mattresses on the ground—mattresses which were filthy, disgusting, and full of vermin,” many with no adult allowed nearby. It was not uncommon for them to awake during the night screaming for their parents. Some were too young to know their own names. Since they had already been interned in other camps, their state of cleanliness was “frightful.” This was compounded by the waves of diarrhea that affected many of them. Wellers told of taking a fellow camp inmate, René Blum, brother of French premier Léon Blum, to see the children. They spoke with one boy who was “remarkably handsome, with a face which was very intelligent.… He wore clothes which must have been of very good quality, rather stylish, but in a pitiful condition. One foot was bare.” When asked about his parents, the boy said, “My father goes to the office and Mummy plays the piano.” They reassured him that he would soon rejoin his parents, though both Wellers and Blum knew the child was headed for Auschwitz. The boy happily showed them a biscuit he was saving for his mother. Blum “bent over the little boy who looked very happy, very engaging. He took his face in his hands and wanted to stroke his head, and at that moment the child, who only a moment ago had been so happy, burst into tears.” The four thousand children, rounded up by the French police, were all deported to Auschwitz a few weeks later on Eichmann’s orders. When the time came for that deportation, many of the children fought and had to be brought to the roundup place “struggling and screaming.”
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Hausner elicited from each witness as many details as the often impatient judges would allow. He also did something that stupefied many people. He did it not once but multiple times, in open court, and in front of a gallery filled with reporters and survivors. In Israel and many other places there was a persistent leitmotif when the discourse turned to Holocaust survivors:
Why didn’t you resist? Why did you comply with the orders? There were fifteen thousand prisoners and a couple of hundred guards. Why didn’t you revolt?
These questions were rarely addressed directly to survivors, certainly not in such a confrontational fashion or in such a public setting. Yet Hausner asked not once but multiple times. Ya’akov Gurfein told how his mother had pushed him from a deportation train. He managed to make his way to the Kraków Ghetto. When he realized how bad things were in the ghetto, he escaped to Plaszów, the labor camp on the edge of Kraków made famous by
Schindler’s List
. He subsequently escaped from there and, after crossing Slovakia, Romania, and Hungary, reached Palestine. Hausner asked this remarkably resourceful man, “Why did you board the train?” Despite the passage of eighteen years, his answer captured both the despair and the inexplicable residue of hope that the victims had felt. “This was in 1943. After so many years we did not have the strength to resist any more.… We wanted to die more quickly.” So why, Hausner persisted, did you jump? “The moment we saw that the train was going in the direction of Belzec … some spark was … kindled within people who wanted to save themselves.”
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Not long thereafter, Hausner asked again, this time of Magistrate Moshe Beisky. He was revered for having passed up opportunities to escape from Plaszów because he knew that the commander, Amon Göth, would apply collective punishment, probably death, to the eighty other prisoners in his barracks if he escaped. When he entered the witness box, the judges offered him the option of sitting while he gave testimony. He declined. For an hour, he stood and dispassionately described what he had witnessed. At one point, fifteen thousand prisoners were ordered by SS men armed with machine guns and bayonets to watch as a young boy was brought to be hanged. The child was lifted up to the gallows, but the rope broke. Beisky recalled, “He was again lifted on to a high chair which was placed under the rope.” The child then “began to beg for mercy. An order was then given to hang him a second time.” Beisky had just barely begun to describe this harrowing scene when Hausner pounced: “15,000 people stood there—and opposite them hundreds of guards. Why didn’t you attack? Why didn’t you revolt?” Beisky struggled to respond. The articulate witness was replaced by a man who floundered, groped for words, and left sentences unfinished: “This was already in the third year of the War.… Nevertheless there was still hope. Here were people working on forced labor, they apparently needed this work. Possibly, maybe …” Mid-sentence, he stopped and asked to sit. After a moment’s pause, he gave voice both to the terrible dilemma Jews faced and to the obtuseness of the question.

I cannot describe this … terror inspiring fear.… Nearby us there was a Polish camp. There were 1,000 Poles.… One hundred meters beyond the camp they had a place to go to—their homes. I don’t recall one instance of escape on the part of the Poles. But where could any of the Jews go? We were wearing clothes which … were dyed yellow with yellow stripes. [In] the hair at the centre of [our] head … they made a kind of swath in a stripe 4 centimeters in width. And at that moment, let us suppose that the 15,000 people within the camp even succeeded without armed strength … to go beyond the boundaries of the camp—where would they go? What could they do?
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After reading Beisky’s unrehearsed answer, I photocopied it and slipped the page into the file folder I use for my weekly lectures in my Holocaust-history course. Someday—probably long before this manuscript appears as a book—a student will ask, “Why didn’t they fight back?” And I will give her the spontaneous testimony Gideon Hausner elicited from a very brave, but at that moment rebroken man.

Why did Hausner ask this question? Was he using these interchanges to impress upon young Israelis the difference between the response of most Diaspora Jews to persecution and that of the “new” Israeli Jew? Hannah Arendt excoriated him for asking it. Echoing Beisky, she correctly observed that no one else—Jew or non-Jew—acted any differently. After his testimony, Beisky, shaken and angry at being blindsided, accosted Hausner. In his memoir Hausner recalled Beisky’s angry question: “Why did you not at least warn me beforehand?” Hausner told Beisky he wanted a “spontaneous reaction.” Though Hausner’s tactics seem callous, he believed that the answer he elicited from Beisky justified them. He described Beisky’s testimony as “the most convincing piece of human truth I have ever heard on the subject.” Critics interpreted his question as emanating from the self-assured, if not arrogant, perspective of the person who was not there but who nonetheless knew what he would do. Hausner’s objective was in fact quite the opposite. He wanted to demonstrate the inherent unfairness of this question. Over the course of his preparation for the trial, he had come to know the survivors. Shortly before the trial, he told the Israeli Cabinet that he would resist letting the courtroom become a venue for “clarifying how the victims should have resisted.” He criticized Judge Halevi for letting that happen at the Kasztner trial. “It is very easy to sit on the court … and say Kasztner ought to have behaved in this way or that in Budapest in 1944.” Hausner was well aware that native Israelis, who had vanquished five armies in 1948, did not comprehend why Jews who so vastly outnumbered their captors did not do the same. Hausner wanted them to understand why the two situations could not be compared. That is why he described Beisky’s response as having “brought the trial to a new moral peak.” The real wonder, Hausner observed after the trial, was that there
had
been so much organized and widespread resistance.
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