by Evans, Mike
I looked at him a moment. “Do you know where he is?” “Who?”
“Adolf Eichmann,” I said in a low voice. “Do you know where he is?”
Kastner looked at Shiloah. “I told you she was a good choice.” Shiloah smiled at me. “He is one of the reasons we want you to come work with us. I know from your file—” “I have a file?”
“Yes. We have been following developments in your life for some time now. Particularly since you enrolled in law school.”
“Why would you want to know about me?” “Mossad was formed to know things.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” I leaned back in my chair. “Would you like to see Eichmann brought to justice?”
“Yes, but not at Nuremberg.”
“Not there.” He tapped the table with his finger. “Here. In Jerusalem. We would bring him to justice in Jerusalem. Try him. Convict him, hopefully. And execute him.”
“And what makes you think I could be of help to you in that effort?” “As I was saying, we know from your file you have been acquainted with him since childhood.” He gave me a knowing look. “Some think perhaps it was more than friendship.”
Anger flared inside me. “Never,” I snapped. “It was never more than friendship and that only of a little girl infatuated with her teenaged neighbor.”
“You are interested?” “Yes. I am interested.”
“Good.” Shiloah stood. “We will be in touch.”
That night I told Eli about the offer. He was excited, but concerned. “You realize if this works out, it will bring you face-to-face with all those things that used to bother you at night.”
“I know.”
“Are you ready for that?”
“I think this is something I must do, ready or not.”
Early in the summer, I graduated from law school and went to work for Mossad as part of a group meeting in offices near the King David Hotel. Known officially as Bureau 06, the team was comprised of people from Mossad, investigators from Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, and prosecutors from the Attorney General’s office. Our sole mission was to locate Nazis who were involved in the persecution of Jews and build a credible criminal case against them. The team was supervised by Nathan Metzger.
Metzger was born in Buczacz, a town that is now in western Ukraine, and came to Israel with his family long before the war. He had a distinguished career in the army during our fight for independence and went on to work as a prosecutor for the military court. He was diligent and relentless in his job and had a thoroughness about him that astounded me. We all prepared reports for him on each of our issues and cases, which gave us mastery of the details about those specific cases, but Metzger knew the details about every witness, every issue, every case.
Not long after I took the job, Reuven Shiloah’s term as Mossad director came to an end. Isser Harel, former director of Shin Bet, replaced him. I was concerned about the change, but Metzger reassured me this was actually good for us. “Shiloah was committed to finding the Nazis, but he had many other issues on his mind. Harel has moved our work to the top of the list. He is particularly interested in Eichmann and is very glad you are assisting us.”
“He knows of me?” “Yes,” Metzger nodded.
I was skeptical. “How could he possibly know anything about me?” “He read your file, of course.”
Then I saw the twinkle in Metzger’s eye. “You mean, he read all our files.”
“Well,” Metzger grinned, “he was impressed by your story.”
My first assignment was to track down credible leads on Eichmann’s last known location and sift through the details, separating valid reports from those found to be inaccurate. I quickly learned we had very little information with which to work. Files in our office on Eichmann consisted of one folder with background information compiled from magazine articles and one or two personal accounts. Another folder had reports of his location immediately following the war, the most recent of which was a report passed to us by the French government several years after the war, indicating Eichmann had been seen in Italy and was perhaps living there permanently. I read through them in a matter of minutes and spent my first week on the job scouring newspapers and interviewing embassy contacts in an effort to update our files, but no one had any more recent information about him.
Then Yaakov Rothenberg, one of the interns in our office, suggested Yad Vashem, a then fledgling organization working to collect and preserve the names and testimonies of Shoah victims, might have some useful information. Although at that time it was in the early stages of its work, they already had collected files and dossiers on hundreds of thousands of survivors, victims, and perpetrators.
That afternoon, I walked up the street to their offices. An archivist showed me their file on Eichmann. “Unfortunately, we do not have much,” she said.
The file contained a few notes about his life, pictures of his childhood home, newspaper clippings from the 1930s, and two reports from the US Army—one about his capture by Allied forces after the war, and a second on his escape from an Allied POW camp. I studied the pictures of his childhood home and in one of them I saw the edge of the roof of our house in Linz.
“Where did you get these photographs?”
She checked the back of the picture, but it was blank. “I’m not sure. Many of our earliest files came from a documentation center in Vienna that was operated by Tuviah Friedman.”
“Do you have an address for them? Perhaps they can help.”
“The center no longer exists. That’s how we came to have their files. Mr. Friedman sent most of what he’d collected to us.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Most?”
“He kept some things for himself on one or two matters that particularly interested him.”
“Any chance one of those he kept was the file on Eichmann?” “Perhaps. Finding Eichmann was the central focus of his work.” “Where is he now?”
“Eichmann?”
“No,” I said, frustrated. “Tuviah Friedman.” “He lives in Haifa.”
The following day I rode to Haifa and located Friedman at a nondescript office building on Chen Boulevard. A brass plaque on the office door read Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes. From the name on the door I expected to find a neat and orderly office. Something like what one might expect from a police station. Institutional. Instead, I opened the door to a cramped outer office with boxes stacked three high around two large steel desks. A man sat at one, a woman at the other. To the right, a young girl was sorting through an open box, taking documents from it and placing them on the desks. When I asked to see Friedman, she escorted me across the room to his office.
Friedman’s office was much like what I had just seen. A wooden desk sat in front of two windows that looked out on the street below. On it were stacks of documents and files that covered every available space. Seated behind the desk was a short man, almost bald, with a prominent nose and ears that stood out at an angle. He was dressed in a light gray suit, white shirt, and dark blue tie. As I entered, he was bent over a file that lay open before him, forehead with a slight wrinkle, eyes focused and intense. He glanced up at me and I explained why I was there, just beginning on the trail of Adolf Eichmann. I expected him to be excited that someone connected with the government had been assigned the specific task of locating Eichmann. Instead, he seemed skeptical and suspicious.
“You work for Metzger?” “Yes,” I replied.
“What do you know about Eichmann?”
“I read the file on him at Yad Vashem.” Knowing little about him, I wasn’t prepared to divulge any secrets.
“Huh,” he chortled. “Not much to that, from what I hear.”
“No,” I agreed. “There isn’t, but they said many of their other files came from you and that you might be able to help.”
“Perhaps.” He leaned back in his chair. “What is your interest in all of this?”
“Mine?”
“Yes.” He pointed wi
th his index finger. “You. Personally. You seem like a smart young woman. Why would you be interested in tracking down former Nazis? Is it just a job?”
His tone was brusque and I was rather put off by it, but I reminded myself that he’d been working at this a long time, probably with great frustration. I was new to the effort and needed his help. Without providing much in the way of detail, I told him briefly about my experiences in the Vienna ghetto, Mauthausen, and my escape. “What about you?” I asked when I was through. “What’s your interest?”
He avoided discussion of his own death camp experiences and talked instead about the Documentation Center he operated in Vienna and how he closed it due to lack of interest or support from the Allies and the Jewish community. He came to Israel to pursue other interests, but in Haifa he found renewed motivation for the cause in the stories he heard from others, and so he started again. His voice had an edge, not quite bitter but intense and unrelenting. As if he’d spent his entire life trying to get people to listen, and then was forced to watch as the conversation he tried to start about the misery each had endured turned into an argument among victims over who among them had the right to speak.
After a while, his attention began to wane. He pushed back from the desk and stood. “Come with me. I’ll show you our files.”
I followed him to a door along the wall to the right. He opened it, and I stepped into a room filled with file cabinets and boxes. I looked around and sighed, “This is a lot.”
“The files in this room,” his voice had a hint of reverence, “contain the souls of all of us. The living and the dead. The soul of everyone who endured the Shoah is right here in this room.” He pulled open a file drawer and took out a folder. Holding it with one hand, he gently flipped to a document that was browned with age. “You see this?” He pointed to it, and I leaned closer to see that the document was stained and dirty. “This is the memory of a man who died at Auschwitz.” He pointed to a line scrawled across the top of the first page and read aloud, “‘A list of the people I knew who were deported from Beuthen’—that’s a city in southern Poland. The person who wrote this document hid it in a tin can and buried it near the apartment where he lived, hoping someone would one day find it.”
“And they did.”
“Yes. It was unearthed as they were razing a site in Beuthen after the war, preparing it for construction.” He carefully replaced the document in the file and closed the drawer. Then with a broad, sweeping gesture he continued, “This room is filled with similar stories. Someone made a list, wrote out an account, kept a diary. Many of them include not just names and locations but dates, physical descriptions, notes from events that happened, as if they were trying to capture an image of their lives for us to see.” He paused and smiled at me politely. “The files on Eichmann are over here.” He stepped across the room to three cardboard boxes filled with documents that sat on the floor near a worktable. He lifted the boxes from the floor and set them on the table. “You may study them as long as you like. If you need anything else, just ask.” Then he retreated from the room, leaving me alone with all those memories.
For the next two days I sorted through pictures of Eichmann, records from his job as a traveling salesman for Vacuum Oil Company, documents from his early years in the Nazi Party, and records from his enlistment in the German Army. There were copies of several identification cards showing him a German citizen and reports from the POW camps where he was held after the war. In the third box were two files with written accounts of people who claimed to have seen him in various locations after the war. I made an inventory of the contents from each box and took extensive notes from the statements that gave information about his location after the war.
Late the third day I stepped into Friedman’s office. “You have more here than I can digest in just a few days, but I think I gleaned enough of it to get me started.”
“Feel free to come back and review them anytime. I’ll tell the others to let you in the file room whenever you like.”
“I appreciate the help. We’re interested in finding his present location, and I think information from the past will help with clues about that. People don’t change that much.”
“We’ve had several reports of sighting him after the war. Many of them proved to be cases of mistaken identity. I’m sure you noticed that from the files. I think it’s rather well established that he disappeared from Italy. Many did that.”
“But how?”
“Priests and other officials with the Catholic Church were heavily involved in refugee resettlement work. All of Europe was in disarray. Many people were stranded far from home with no documents and no way to return. Catholic officials issued thousands of refugee passports through the Red Cross. It was a good work and benefited many, but the volume of people seeking help was overwhelming and some who worked in that field were less discrete in their effort. Many Nazis traveled abroad on passports obtained through the church—a church, by the way, which Hitler fully intended to destroy.”
While we talked, I remembered the day Grandma died, when I was talking to Eichmann on the steps of his house. He was reading a pamphlet about Argentina.
“Do you think he went to South America?”
“I suspect so,” Friedman nodded. “Many Nazis have been sighted there. So far as I know, there are no facts to substantiate that idea, but many of us think he did. Something you saw in the files made you think that?”
“Not really.” I pulled a chair up to his desk and sat down. “I knew Adolf Eichmann when I was a child.” “You knew him? Personally?”
“When he was a teenager, we lived three houses up the street from him, in Linz.”
“Then you should talk to Simon Wiesenthal. He lives in Linz. Not far from the Eichmanns.”
“The Eichmanns are still there?”
“His mother is still alive. And he has many relatives in that area.” “I saw from your files that he married.”
“Yes. Married and had children. A few years ago, his wife tried to have him declared legally dead.”
“To get his pension.”
“That’s what most people thought,” Friedman nodded. “But you think otherwise?”
“Eichmann was crafty and paid close attention to details. If he was officially dead, not many people would continue to look for him. Certainly not the Americans or the British.”
“But the courts refused.”
“Thankfully. They saw through the whole thing. But after that, she and the children disappeared. No one knows what happened to them. Wiesenthal could tell you all about it. You should go talk to him.”
The following morning I returned to the office in Jerusalem and told Metzger about seeing Friedman. “He thinks Eichmann is in South America.”
“And why?”
“Just a hunch. A number of former Nazis are known to be living there. It was a popular location with Germans even before the war. Strong German culture there. They would provide him a ready-made place to fit in.”
“Interesting idea. You’ve read more about Eichmann now than anyone here. What do you think?”
“I think Friedman’s right.” Then I told him about the incident from my childhood, seeing Eichmann with a brochure on South America.
“Maybe so,” Metzger smiled, “but we can’t send someone to South America based on a memory from your childhood. We have to connect the points on the line from where he was to where he is now.”
“Friedman suggested I should talk to Simon Wiesenthal. Do you know him?”
“I know of him. Never met him.”
“Think I should see him?”
“Yes. By all means. Last I heard of him, he was living in Linz, Austria.” “It would take several days to go there, see him, and get back.” “You’ll have to fly,” Metzger added. “We will make the arrangements.” “We have the money for a trip like that?”
“We have the money for the things we need.” Then he looked at me thoughtfully. “Have you been back there sinc
e the war?”
“No,” I answered. “Not since I escaped.” “Think you’re ready to see it?”
“Yes,” I nodded confidently. “I think I am.” “I do, too.”
That night, after David was in bed, Eli was sitting in the living room, reading a book and making notes. I didn’t bother asking why he was doing that, I just pushed the book aside and sat in his lap. He smiled at me. “What’s on your mind?”
I knew what he wanted me to say but instead I replied, “I need to go to Linz.”
“Austria?” “Yes.” “When?”
“Soon. Later this week, probably.” “Want me to come with you?” “Yes.”
“Great,” he beamed. “I would love to see all the places you talk about.”
“But you can’t.”
His countenance dropped. “Why not?” “I need to go alone.”
He had a questioning look. “Have you really told me all that happened to you back there?”
“As much as I remember.”
“Is this job helping you remember more?”
“No. But it’s keeping me from forgetting what I knew.”
“That’s good.” He looked into my eyes. “But I still think you need me with you.”
“Yes, I do,” I agreed. “Then I will go.” “Not this time.”
He looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.”
“Having you with me would be much easier than going alone, but if you are with me I will let you shield me from the past.” I rested my head on his chest. “You have always been my protector, and you did it by letting me be myself. I need you to keep doing that. I won’t be gone long.”
He wrapped his arms around me. “Okay,” he whispered. Then he picked me up and carried me to bed.
