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.”23 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?24
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.25
A few days later, the resistance fighters, those to whom this question did not have to be asked, testified. On that day Kol Yisrael, Israel’s radio station, which had halted its continuous broadcasts of the trial, resumed them. Now, many Israelis anticipated, would come respite from the unrelenting stories of victimhood. Yet these witnesses also spoke of suffering and humiliation. Yitzhak Zuckerman, who had been in the Warsaw Ghetto, could hardly contain his emotions when he described learning of the mass murder in Ponary Forest, outside of Vilna. “I left my parents and my family in Vilna.… As a child, I played nut games in Ponary. And here … they were putting to death Jews of Vilna in Ponary.” His wife, ghetto fighter Zivia Lubetkin-Zuckerman, described the “fear of being collectively responsible for the acts of each individual Jew.” Fifty Jews might be shot if one Jew resisted. She recalled the “strong young” German guards and the “cruelty” they directed “against helpless people.” But then she added something that expanded the traditional concept of heroism. Initially, Jews in the ghetto thought that the Germans’ objective was to “degrade … depress … starve us.” By closing all educational institutions they would “change us into a nation of slaves, ignorant people, lacking culture.” At that point, they decided to “develop a spirit of revolt.” But the revolt of which she spoke was not the subsequent battle that would become an iconic element of the history of the Holocaust. “When I say ‘revolt’ I do not refer … to a particular rebellion but rather to preserve the human, social, and cultural character of the youth.”26 She, who fought with arms, insisted that heroism came in many forms. This was something young Israelis—and so many others—needed to hear.
Shortly thereafter, the leader of the Vilna resistance fighters, Abba Kovner, testified. In December 1941, he had called for active resistance against the Nazis. This was probably the first such call in all of Europe. In it, he used a phrase that subsequently was used colloquially as a means of denigrating the victims: “Let us not go like sheep to the slaughter.” After leading the Vilna uprising, he joined a Soviet resistance group. He subsequently became a kibbutznik and one of Israel’s leading poets. As a man of the land, arms, and letters, he epitomized the “new Jew.” Yet his testimony was riddled with pain. He told of his student Tsh
erna Morgenstern, a “tall upstanding girl” with “wonderful eyes,” who was taken with her classmates to Ponary. An SS officer ordered her to step forward: “Don’t you want to live—you are so beautiful.… It would be a pity to bury such beauty in the ground. Walk, but don’t look backwards.” As she walked away, her classmates watched with envy until the officer shot her in the back. Kovner told all this and more. Toward the end of his speech—it was more that than anything resembling testimony—he turned to the judges and declared, “A question is hanging over us here in this courtroom: How was it that they did not revolt?” As a “fighting Jew,” he would “protest with all my strength” if someone asked that question with even “a vestige of accusation.” In fact, rather than question why most Jews did not rise up, people should recognize that not resisting was the rational thing to do. Resistance organizations are created by calls from a “national authority.” There was no Jewish authority to issue that call. There was no one to organize an uprising. Rather than demean the victims, contemporary generations should recognize how “astonishing” it was that “there was a revolt. That is what was not rational.”27 Kovner’s words, together with Beisky’s earlier testimony, constitute eloquent responses to a question that people who live privileged and secure lives seemed to have few compunctions about asking.
Kovner had barely left the witness box when there was an unexpected turn of events. Judge Landau turned to Hausner and attacked not just Kovner’s testimony but the entire premise of Hausner’s prosecutorial strategy. With undisguised fury, Landau lectured Hausner. Kovner had “strayed far from the subject of this trial.” Hausner should have controlled the witness and eliminated the portions of his testimony that were “not relevant.” Landau warned him not to place the court “in such a situation” again. Hausner, visibly nonplussed, protested that his summation would demonstrate the testimony’s relevance. Landau would have none of it. Hausner’s indictment was the framework for the trial and he could not now add extraneous matters. Hausner, unwilling to concede, argued that the judges might not be fully aware of all he “intend[ed] to bring” to the court. An exasperated Landau cut off the exchange by noting, with decided condescension, “We heard your opening address which, it seems to me, lays down the general line of what you wish to place before the court.” With that, Landau ended the session.28
Landau’s attacks on Hausner’s expansive view of what was relevant did not end with this exchange. For much of the remainder of the trial, Hausner was in the court’s crosshairs. Such was the case when Zvi Zimmerman, a Knesset member and Ben-Gurion’s political ally, testified. Given the nature of his testimony, there is good reason to assume that Hausner had been under political pressure to include him. He had little to add, and his testimony came late in the trial. If Hausner’s objective was to give Zimmerman a platform, his efforts backfired. Zimmerman enraged Judge Landau by engaging in long discourses on his role in the underground even though the judge asked him not to do so. When he claimed to have heard about Eichmann from Gestapo men, Landau exploded. “The value of this evidence is, shall we say, next to nothing.… This is, in fact, gossip.”29
After the resistance fighters’ testimony, Hausner continued to paint a picture of the wider European tragedy. Most of the focus was on Eastern Europe, with virtually no mention of how the Holocaust spilled over into North Africa. There was little relief from the familiar story line: an overwhelmed Jewish population poised against an Eichmann-devised deportation system fully committed to ensnaring every Jew. Then into this unrelenting saga of grief and terror came a brief moment of emotional respite. Werner Melchior, son of Denmark’s chief rabbi, described the rescue of Danish Jewry. He related how bishops, ambulance drivers, fishermen, housewives, neighbors, and strangers facilitated the escape of these seven thousand Jews—almost the entire Danish Jewish community—to Sweden. Shortly before being ferried across the strait, Melchior, demonstrating what some might consider an aggravated sense of responsibility, went to the university to return library books. At the entrance, students whom he knew in passing stopped him. “In case there is anything at all which you think we can reasonably do … you can get in touch with us.” This, Melchior testified, happened not once but twice in the space of ten minutes. “During the preceding three and a half years of the occupation, there was not a single moment when the population was united so closely together” as during the rescue of the Jews. (After this rescue it was Eichmann who was dispatched to Denmark to determine precisely how this had happened and to prevent it from occurring again someplace else.) At last, into this Jerusalem courtroom, had come the uplift for which so many had thirsted. Haim Gouri described it as “artificial respiration.” Jews in the courtroom were reminded that they had not been completely abandoned. One woman was weeping. Asked why she was crying now: “I cry whenever someone is kind to me.”30
During this long succession of witnesses, Servatius, who was supposed to be defending Eichmann, was hamstrung. Well aware that he was unlikely to garner sympathy for his client by aggressively challenging those who had endured such harrowing experiences, he conducted almost no cross-examinations. When he did challenge a witness’s testimony, his goal was to demonstrate that it bore no relevance to Eichmann’s activities. Leon Wells told of Operation 1005, the group of Jewish prisoners assigned to eradicate the evidence by opening mass graves and exhuming, burning, and pulverizing the bodies. Servatius objected and argued that Wells could not connect Eichmann to this operation Furthermore, all the information Wells was imparting was already documented and well known. Though the judges rejected Servatius’s complaint, they did put Hausner on notice that he had to demonstrate the “personal responsibility of the Accused for the act.” Servatius had more latitude when cross-examining witnesses who were not survivors. During the testimony of an Israeli diplomat who had reviewed the eleven-thousand-page diary of Hans Frank, head of the Generalgouvernement, that area of Poland in which the death camps were located, Hausner had the witness expound on what Frank had called “our war against the Jews.” Servatius asked but one question: “Was Adolf Eichmann’s name mentioned in these twenty-nine volumes?” It was not. Servatius, having made his point, sat down. Servatius took the same approach with Judge Michael Musmanno. Immediately after the war, the United States Navy sent Musmanno to interview leading Nazis. He subsequently served as a judge at Nuremberg. According to Musmanno, the Nazi officials he interviewed all mentioned Eichmann’s “powerful and authoritative hand” in the Final Solution. Servatius suggested that these Nazis were trying to shift the blame to Eichmann. Musmanno insisted that Eichmann’s name had come up incidentally. Servatius, correctly dismissing this as hearsay, scored his point when he pointed out that at Nuremberg Musmanno presided over a murder trial for twenty-three defendants. Though a number of them testified about Eichmann’s role, “you yourself did not mention Eichmann in your judgment by so much as one word.” Judge Landau buttressed Servatius’s challenge when he asked whether Eichmann’s name appeared in the book Musmanno wrote regarding his experiences. It did not.31
Servatius’s cross-examination of Dr. Heinrich Grüber, Protestant dean of Berlin, was less productive. During the war, Grüber, then a parson at a Berlin church, frequently intervened with Eichmann on Jews’ behalf. Eventually he was imprisoned and tortured in Sachsenhausen and Dachau for his actions. He described Eichmann to the court as “a block of ice, or a block of marble, and everything you tried to get through to him just bounced off him.” During the cross-examination, Servatius posited that Eichmann’s animus toward the Jews was no different from the attitude of respectable and distinguished segments of German society, including academic and church leaders. To illustrate his point, Servatius read from the Berliner Evangelisches Sonntagsblatt (Berlin Evangelical Sunday Gazette). Showing its satisfaction with the regime’s anti-Semitism, the paper observed that in all “the dark events of the past fifteen years the Jewish element played a leading role.” Regarding the April 1933 government-sponsored boycott of Jewish sto
res, the paper celebrated the fact that now there would be “a containment of Jewish influence in Germany’s public life. Nobody will seriously be able to object to this.” Given that such sentiments, Servatius continued, were harbored by scholars and respected members of German society, shouldn’t Eichmann, who never finished high school, have been justified in thinking they were correct? How could he be condemned for views that were espoused by leading members of society? Grüber would have none of it. It was one thing, he told Servatius, to be enthusiastic about National Socialism in 1933, and quite another to facilitate murder, as Eichmann had done.32
The Eichmann Trial Page 9
