Reflections on Adlolf Eichmann Fifty Years Later May 21, 2010

Reflections on Adolf Eichmann Fifty Years Later

Rabbi Gary S. Creditor

Richmond, Virginia

May 21, 2010

 

With little public notice will pass this Sunday the fiftieth anniversary of a very historic moment. It was on May 23^rd, 1960 that Prime Minister David Ben Gurion arose in the Knesset, the parliament of Israel to announce the capture and extradition to Israel of Adolf Eichmann.  As a twelve year old, in an age that little was taught about the Holocaust, his was not a well known name. Most people would not have recognized it. In time we would. My Bar Mitzvah preparations and its celebration were framed by his capture and his execution. I remember watching segments of his trial on our black and white TV, the Hebrew unintelligible to me, in a place that I would eventually visit, but then was so very far away, about the most terrible chapter of Jewish and human history, that was yet to be revealed. When I saw a little blurb noting that it was fifty years ago, I was instantly transported back to that time, sitting on the floor of the den in my parents' house and looking at this man behind a glass cage.  I made a note in my diary to talk about it tonight.

 

What can be said fifty years later, after the unmasking of the man singly responsible for the extermination of the Jews of Europe?

 

I remember looking at him, suit and glasses and not believing that that man could have had so much power to do it. While the face of evil is quite clear in the appearance of an Adolf Hitler or Stalin, would we have noticed Haman walking down the street, or a Pharaoh, if dressed ordinary? Probably not. It is hard to recognize evildoers. That was one of the lessons from Eichmann – evil doesn't have to look macabre. It can look ordinary. The terrorists of 9/11 looked ordinary otherwise they wouldn't have been able to get on the planes. So, too, the man who parked the SUV in Times Square. Evil can look ordinary.

 

As I looked at Eichmann on television, as a naïve youth, I wondered: "Why did he hate us so much?" I was the only Jew on my block, for many blocks. We played box-ball in the concrete squares of the street and touch football between the telephone poles. We nailed vegetable baskets to scrap wood, cut out the bottom and nailed it to the telephone pole to play basketball. Did these kids secretly hate me? Did their parents? How did this happen, all of a sudden? Through this trial I would learn that the answers to my question(s) were immense. It was like peeling off layers of a gigantic onion, or trying to put together a billion piece jig saw puzzle, each layer, each piece just splicing off to many more unending pieces. Fifty years ago, looking at Eichmann on the television, was a very disturbing, upsetting experience. I did not know what to make of it. It was the beginning of an essential and indispensible piece of my education.

 

We would come to learn that Eichmann was a tremendous tactician. He created an intricate, extensive, exhaustive plan to exterminate eleven to twelve million people, the Jewish population of Europe. From his trial we would come to understand that without the assistance and complicity and complacency of millions of "ordinary" people, those who conducted the trains, those who saw the trains, those who saw the round-ups and empty apartments, who took over vacant homes, businesses and belongings, those who made up the train-schedules, and those who brought food –such as it was – and raw materials to the camps and took away finished products, the Holocaust couldn't have happened. Eichmann's diabolical scheme relied on the "common man." Furthermore, it depended on Christian Europe to kill the Jews of Europe. When I graduated high school four years later, they still had not revised the history books. That is why we bore witness at the hearings here in Virginia when they instituted SOL's. Can the "man on the street" be corrupted to acquiesce to evil, to enable evil, to assist evil? Eichmann's trial taught that the answer is "Yes." While the Holocaust is awfully complicated and complex, the truth is that good can never be taken for granted. We have to work hard to make the world a good place. We have to join hands with good people to do good things and make a good world. Eichmann's trial was a shock to me because I didn't know if the world I was looking at was true or just a veneer. Sometimes I still wonder.

 

From my public school history I learned nothing about the Holocaust, but I did learn that World War II ended in 1945. I wondered: "Where was he for fifteen years?" "How did he get out of Germany, out of Europe and into Argentina and manage to live there all these years?" I learned that that was a very big question with even a bigger answer. While the Nazis lost the war, it didn't mean that Nazism was dead. Nor were all those responsible for it captured. Growing up in the 1950's my sense of morality was shaped by such quintessential television shows such as the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. The good guys win and the bad guys lose and are punished. Like my TV, the world was portrayed in black and white. The Nazis – all the Nazis – should have been punished and punished severely. It was a shock to me that Eichmann and others had escaped and to live comfortable lives. His discovery forced me, us, to re-evaluate the world in terms of its myths of good and bad, and perhaps give us critical tools to analyze it today. Eichmann's very existence was an eye-opener to me. It boggled my mind. It called into question the structure of my world. That truth stays with me. I am always questioning my/our world.

 

Yesterday the Commonwealth put to death another criminal. I don't know how many have been put to death in whatever timeframe, not can I compare our Commonwealth to other states. But I can say with modesty, humility and pride, that despite the severest provocations of the intifadas, fedayeen, suicide bombers, and the murders of children at Ma'alot – I wonder how many remember that name – the only person executed by the State of Israel is Adolf Eichmann. In an environment where "life is cheap," where individuals are just numbers on arms, lines on page in unending books, the Jewish DNA embedded in Medinat Yisrael does NOT exact an "eye for an eye" except for the one person who would have exterminated us all. That is also a lesson to learn.

 

So when you get the newspaper this Sunday and it says "May 23^rd," pause for a moment. Reflect back fifty years and think of the great irony, the vindication and the great justice of a little, old, white wisped haired Polish born Jew, announcing in the Knesset of the Third Jewish Commonwealth that Adolf Eichmann, mastermind of the Final Solution, was captured and would be brought to justice, brought to answer for his sins in the court of the people whom he intended destroy.

 

Shabbat Shalom