The Eichmann Trial (23 page)

And then there was the Hannah Arendt who seemed unable to acknowledge that the Final Solution, despite its “universal” implications, was not a great rupture in all that had come before, but was the outcome of the anti-Semitism that was scripted culturally and theologically into the bedrock of European culture. Eichmann and his cohorts did not randomly go from being ordinary men to being murders. They traversed a path paved by centuries of pervasive anti-Semitism. They “knew” this road and, given the society in which they lived, it seemed true and natural. Arendt, so deeply and viscerally committed to the European culture that nurtured the animus, seemed unable to acknowledge this reality. Though she protested—methinks a bit too much—that she wrote as the neutral observer, in fact she was torn between the particularism of her Jewish roots and the universalism of the intellectual world to which she was so wedded. (Much of that world was, of course, inhabited by Jews, who were universalists in a mode unique to Jewish intellectuals.)
⁶²

She was rightfully criticized for her ahistorical comments about the Judenrat. Yet it must be acknowledged that she raised painful and important questions in relation to leadership and individual responsibility. In notes for a lecture given at Wesleyan before her articles appeared in
The New Yorker
, she wrote, “If you say to yourself in such matters: who am I to judge?—you are already lost.”
⁶³
The Judenräte leaders were not the collaborators she paints them to be. They had no cards to play. They lacked the power to halt the Nazis’ resolute determination to murder Jews. However, can we afford to shy away from asking if they had the right to arrogate for themselves the choice of victims? Who gave them the authority to withhold crucial information from people who voluntarily boarded deportation trains? Who empowered them to decide who should board those trains? I cannot answer—much less even fully pose—these questions, but Arendt reminds us that they hover in the gray zone.

As a woman—and one cannot deny that some of the passionate fury against her was intensified because she was a woman—with an acerbic mode of expression, Hannah Arendt sometimes seemed more interested in turning a good phrase than on understanding its effect. She wanted to needle her readers to examine their assumptions. Yet, in order to do so, one must write in a manner that will allow one’s words to be heard. She was guilty of precisely the same wrong that she derisively ascribed to Adolf Eichmann. She—the great political philosopher who claimed that careful thought and precise expression were of supreme value—did not “think.” She wanted to provoke her readers to re-evaluate their assumptions, but she either did not care or did not fully consider how her caustic comments might be heard by them. Many of the important things she had to say were lost in the din she created with her cruel statements and haphazard treatment of historical data. Ultimately, though she claimed to be shocked and deeply hurt by the wrath she had provoked, she was the author, writ large, of her own misfortune.

On some level, of course, it is ridiculous to speak of “misfortune” in relation to an author whose work has shaped contemporary perceptions of the Final Solution. Yet her work, even as it tried to explain critical aspects of the most extensive genocide in human history, submerged the most fundamental and indispensable element of this event. She ignored the bedrock of the Holocaust: the long, tortured (torturing) history of anti-Semitism. It may have taken German National Socialism to pull from the thick soil of Jew hatred the means to murder millions. However, without a pre-existing animus that was so deeply ingrained in Western culture—both secular and religious, enlightened and unenlightened—the Nazis could never have accomplished what they did. Any attempt to separate anti-Semitism from the ignominious legacy of the Final Solution is to distort historical reality. There was an animus that prompted perpetrators to murder with impunity and bystanders to close their countries’ doors to those seeking refuge.

Some people, particularly in the Jewish community, will tell you, year in and year out, that anti-Semitism is always increasing in intensity and danger, and that this year the situation is exponentially worse than during the preceding one. These repeated assessments—it’s always terrible, and getting more so—have, until recently, been contradicted by reality. Simply put, they were wrong. In North America and Europe, the pessimists based their claims on minor acts of vandalism and rather inane expressions of anti-Semitism. One cannot dismiss these acts, but they never constituted an existential threat. Sometimes the fear of anti-Semitism has been mobilized to motivate Jews to observe rituals, donate to philanthropic causes, or take a particular political position. As someone who delights in her Jewish identity, I cringed whenever I heard someone suggesting that we should “be,” “do,” or maintain our Jewish identity because “everyone hates the Jews.”

However, in the past decade matters have changed dramatically. With the marked exception of North America, the level of anti-Semitic rhetoric has reached new proportions. Though anti-Semitism still emanates from the far right, its increase is due to an embrace by select portions of the Muslim community and by parts of the left as well. In Iran, the ability of a man who is an overt anti-Semite and Holocaust denier to wreak havoc in the world increases daily. Distasteful and historically absurd comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis. The existence of this anti-Semitism, while deeply troubling, surprises me far less than that so many people accept it with great equanimity. Jews are often admonished, including by fellow members of their “tribe,” for overreacting even when the body blows are real. Gross accusations against Israel—rooted in traditional anti-Semitism, as absurd as the charge that an Israeli medical team went to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake to harvest body parts—are accepted by scholars, journalists, and politicians as matters worthy of investigation. While Holocaust deniers do not surprise me, for they are at heart naught but traditional anti-Semites who have found an attention-grabbing tool, I
am
surprised by the number of serious people who, at least until my trial, thought these anti-Semitic charges should not be taken seriously.

One cannot and should not draw a direct line from Arendt’s view of the Eichmann trial to those who berate Jews for making too much of contemporary anti-Semitism. Nor, however, can one dismiss the way in which she so seamlessly elided the ideology that was at the heart of this genocide. She related a version of the Holocaust in which anti-Semitism played a decidedly minor role. Others who have found her work a convenient foil for their own political views have picked up the ball and run with it, some of them in order to justify views she would probably never have condoned.

CONCLUSION

T
he 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.