The View from the Ground

by Martha Gellhorn

  We consider this man, and everything he stands for, with justified fear. We belong to the same species. Is the human race able—at any time, anywhere—to spew up others like him? Why not? Adolf Eichmann is the most dire warning to us all. He is a warning to guard our souls; to refuse utterly and forever to give allegiance without question, to obey orders silently, to scream slogans. He is a warning that the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.

  For three months, documents and living witnesses, all tested and checked every inch of the way, have bound this man to the crimes he is accused of: murder in a manner and on a scale unknown in history, and murder for gain. The Jews of Europe were robbed of everything they owned before they were killed; after death, there was still more to be wrested from their bodies—gold from their mouths, and occasionally in the slashed stomachs of corpses precious stones could be found, the pathetic last hope of buying safety somewhere. This vast plunder greatly enriched the Reich. Aside from the patriotic and spiritual uplift attendant upon murdering defenseless people, to kill Jews was profitable big business. The exact bookkeeping which accompanied the murders is the final loathsomeness. A man should be hanged only for stealing the shoes of children sent barefoot to their death in gas chambers. Their shoes had value, would be noted in a ledger, and shipped to Germany, to keep non-Jewish feet warm.

  Eichmann, devotedly and tirelessly organizing the murders, stopping every bolt-hole, never too busy to say no to a plea for mercy, meticulously accounting for the plunder, is now recognized to be what he was: the man in charge of “Jewish Affairs,” the executive responsible for destroying European Jewry. Since he was not unleashed on the rest of us, since we are safe in our bodies, surrounded by our possessions, we tend to forget that Eichmann despoiled us all. He robbed humanity of six million lives. Who were they? We know of some—their names, light as leaves, float through the days of testimony: artists, scientists, teachers, musicians, jurists, saints. The innumerable others, members of a most gifted race, had no time to mold their raw material of brain and heart and spirit. The world needed what they had to give, as a shield against darkness; to avoid becoming the world this man tried to build. He stole those lives, from us all. The world will never know how much it lost, but will always be poorer.

  The indictment of the Trial—unique in history, as the crime is also unique—is dated: Jerusalem, this fifth day of Adar, 5721. In the state of Israel, that is the usual way to date documents or official correspondence. More than two thousand years before Christ, the patriarchs of this ancient people were writing the history of their nation. Calculating the creation of the world, from Biblical data, they hit upon a year which coincides with 3760 B.C. as the basis for their chronology. In the year 5721, a Jewish Attorney General in the District Court of Jerusalem in the modern state of Israel rose and said: “When I stand before you here, O Judges of Israel, I do not stand alone. With me are six million accusers.” Thus began the Trial of Adolf Eichmann.

  At the beginning of this grave, scrupulous, heartbreaking Trial, the world's press attended: for a brief time the Trial was the brightest sensation the newspapers had to offer. Then a man, in a silver capsule, hurtled around the earth through outer space; there was other news; the Trial went on and on; people groaned in weariness; protested that the whole thing was useless—how could one man pay for six million deaths, perhaps having a trial at all was a mistake; most likely it would only start up a wave of anti-Semitism.

  I think this so shocking that I cannot find words for my indignation. The Trial was essential, to every human being now alive, and to all who follow us; and, despite its length, its carefulness, the Trial furnishes only a partial record—for the scene of the crime was a whole continent, the victims were a whole nation, the methodical savages who committed the crimes were as clever as they were evil, ingenious, brilliant organizers, addicts to paper-work. This is the best record we and our descendants will ever have; and we owe the state of Israel an immeasurable debt for providing it. No one who tries to understand our times, now or in the future, can overlook this documentation of a way of life and death which will stain our century forever. No one will see the complete dimensions of twentieth-century man—and that includes all of us, I insist—without studying the Eichmann Trial.

  Does it by any chance bore us to hear of the agony of a people? Deadness of imagination, deadness of heart are fatal diseases. Or are we afraid to know because we are afraid to examine our own consciences, our own responsibilities, and our immense selfishness? Do we possibly think that this Trial does not concern us—it concerns European Jews and Germans; and in our blessed land, running over with milk shakes and jars of honey, no such thing could ever happen? The Jews are not a separate breed from the human race, and, alas, neither are the Germans. We are desperately involved, all of us, everywhere.

  The massive destruction of innocent people, only because they were born Jews, happened in our lifetime. We must know everything about it; we must be able to recognize every symptom, every sign, to ensure that it never happens again—under any other disguise—to any people, anywhere. To turn away is as mad as turning away from cancer, saying that cancer is cruel, painful, unjust, and results in death. Anti-Semitism is cancer, and afflicts the weaker members of the human race. We have seen what Germany became, when the cancer cells multiplied, organized, gained control of the entire body politic. Not only Jews die; everything we believe in—decency, justice, truth, mercy—dies too. This Trial is meant for our education, and we are obliged to learn from it, for the safety and honor of our species.

  Admiration for the court grew, daily. The crimes covered twelve years in time. Some 2000 documents—as thick as sheaves, or a single sheet—were submitted, verified, numbered, accepted or rejected. Witnesses spoke Hebrew, Yiddish, German, Polish, English, more languages. It was visible torture for all the witnesses to speak; one wandered in his head, screamed something wordless but terrifying to hear, fainted, remembering Auschwitz. The audience was tense, still, straining forward to listen, until now and again a voice would cry out in despair; then the police silently led the disturber from the hall. The glaring light—for the security of the prisoner, for the hidden television—hurt the eyes. The air conditioning was too cold, and yet one sweated. Every day was more than the mind and heart could bear; and the Trial was kept running, always on time, always under quiet control. No lawyers or judges anywhere else have been presented with such a task or so dominated it. This is not intended as denigration of the Nuremberg Trials, which I also watched; but is intended, humbly, as praise of the coherence, the order, the absolute respect for rules of evidence, the courtesy, the shining justness of the Trial in Jerusalem.

  An American educational foundation could render an immediate service by collecting the stenographic Hebrew reports of the Trial—a paper mountain—and translating them into accurate, clean English. The conduct of the Trial was in every way above criticism, but the Israelis could not invent translators who had an equal grasp of Hebrew and English. The English transcripts of the day's proceedings are often opaque if not incomprehensible. We need the volumes of the Trial, in good English, in all our libraries; and we need them now.

  For two thirds of the Trial, the Prosecution piled up evidence of the black hell which stretched from the Urals to the Pyrenees, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, and was ruled by Adolf Eichmann. Random excerpts from the testimony may give some slight sense of the climate of a life we never knew. The Trial proceeded chronologically, country by country; two months after taking power in 1933, the Nazis were already hunting down the Jews in Germany.

  Everywhere, the Jews were first deprived of all their rights as citizens, then of all their worldly goods, then marked with a yellow star and herded together in Ghettos, to starve and die of the diseases of hunger and filth, and finally, since none of this was quick enough, they were slaughtered in tens of thousands daily. Those who could work were used as slave labor; their death was delayed until they bec
ame useless from exhaustion. On the way, all along the way, they were beaten, maimed, and murdered at will. Their bodies were broken quickly and with skill; their spirit seems to have endured even inside the gas chambers. People, being asphyxiated by cyanide gas, no easy way to die, apparently still kept their humanity: for corpses of women were found crouched over their children, trying to the last to protect them, and men and women were found with their hands clasped in love.

  Most of the witnesses were middle-aged; some looked older than they can have been; a few were young. There were men in business suits, with gold-rimmed glasses and tiepins, and men in short-sleeved open-necked shirts; women in tailored clothes, women in housedresses. Every one of them, in war, would have received medals for valor. Middle-aged and old men and women had represented the Jews and worked for their safety, stubbornly treating with the Germans, with Eichmann, and so had exposed themselves to special notice and wrath. Younger ones, bereft of their families, used and treated as animals with calculated cruelty, waiting their turn to die, nevertheless had risen against their murderers in doomed revolts. All of the witnesses were humble; none had anything much to say about his own life or acts. They were only reporting what they knew because they had seen and heard it, lived through it. They spoke of others.

  An old lawyer, a German Jew, a Zionist leader who had been in prison “for insulting the Gestapo,” tried to explain to the Court what life had been like for the Jews in Germany before the war. This was the first phase, when the Nazis were learning their trade, even Eichmann was learning. There was the ban against Jews as humanity—no work with or for gentiles, no cafeś no transport, no theaters, no shops; Jewish musicians must not play the music of Bach and Brahms, though Mendelssohn was permitted; the books of great Jewish writers were burned, while mobs gloated loudly around the bonfires. Keep the Jew vermin away from the pure Aryan supermen. Boxes of ashes were returned from Dachau on payment of a fee. Synagogues were destroyed. Many of the hunted killed themselves while the rest searched frantically for a country to escape to. At this time, the Germans were merely driving these now penniless people to emigrate. The “Final Solution” is in part the fault of the Western world; the Germans saw the blank casualness of the democracies and decided that no one wanted Jews; Jews were a drug on the market; it did not matter what was done to Jews.

  The old man cried out suddenly, “A planet without a visa!”

  Here is the guilt of the free democracies. We ought never to forget it. In this, the United States must bear the heaviest share of blame. From 1933 to 1943, we opened our golden doors a miserly crack to admit 190,000 of the millions of doomed Jews. Great Britain, even harder hit by the Depression, small, so soon to be at war, bombed, rationed, quartering its Allies’ soldiers on its overcrowded land, took in 65,000 refugee Jews. The comparison speaks for itself, though none of us has cause for self-congratulation.

  Later on, a brave old man, a German Christian, Pastor Grueber, spoke again in the same way. He had earned the right to speak; he helped the Jews in Germany openly; he believed the teachings of his Lord; and he paid for his faith by imprisonment in Dachau. After the pogroms organized by the Nazis throughout Germany in 1938, Pastor Grueber went to Switzerland to beg for more foreign visas for Jews: “All the official institutions, embassies, they did not reveal any understanding or interest in the lot of these Jews. Very often we came out of those places full of anger, not only full of shame at the lack of readiness to help. . . . May I be permitted to say that had these foreign countries at the time shown only a small percentage of the responsibility and interest being revealed now in the lot of refugees and displaced persons and immigrants, it would have been possible to save millions of souls?”

  But he would not tell the court the name of a compatriot, now living in Germany, who had helped Jews during the Nazi regime. “I could bring to the Court a whole file of threats and derision which I received, especially in connection with my trip to Israel. . . . To me these things do not mean much . . . but I would not like to cause this suffering to others.”

  What is the sickness of Germany?

  Pastor Grueber knew Eichmann well; he was often in Eichmann's office, pleading uselessly. “The impression he {Eichmann} made on me was that of a block of ice or marble, completely devoid of human feelings.”

  In hundreds, the Israelis wrote letters to thank and bless Pastor Grueber. For them, one good man redeemed a nation.

  A Jew from Greece, a poor merchant, described what had happened in Salonika; he spoke in a wondering voice, as though hardly able to believe this story himself. Their fellow citizens, the Greeks of Salonika, were given carte blanche to take anything they wanted from Jewish shops, paying with a cynical IOU. And, alas, they did so, like locusts. The Jews, dispossessed of all they owned, were crowded into Ghettos, where typhus immediately raged; the Germans feared typhus. This man probably survived because the Germans were loath to winkle him out as he lay sick in his hole. The Germans, following their usual practice of deceit, told the Salonika Jews that now they were going to leave all this misery and be happily settled in Poland and live together in peace. With their last hoarded savings, the people bought worthless zlotys (the disgusting theme of robbery recurs again and again); moreover, they bought umbrellas, for surely it rained in Krakow, unlike the sunny land of Greece. Doubt as to their future must have come quickly when they found they were seventy-eight people packed into sealed freight cars meant to hold forty. This was the regulation number of “transport material,” as the Germans called the Jews, to each goods wagon. The journey was very long; no freight car ever arrived without its load of dead. One can barely imagine the days and nights in those suffocating boxes, the thirst, the filth, the sickness, the fear, and the faces of the children. There had been 56,000 Jews in Salonika; afterwards there were 1950. This man had a mother, a father, a wife, four brothers, four sisters. “I remain alone,” he said, and looked about him as if he did not know where he was.

  Now there is a young man who grew up in the death camp of Treblinka. At the age of fourteen, separated from his mother, as was the custom at the entry to the concentration camp, he shouted to her where to write to him in Warsaw; his mother, of course, was sent straight to the gas chamber along what the Germans humorously called the “Himmelstrasse,” the barbed-wire path to heaven. By his first night, the boy had understood this place and he tried to kill himself but an old Jew saved him, telling him it was his duty to live and help others and, since he was young, he might have the strength to survive, and then it was his duty to tell the world.

  The young man explained Treblinka in the voice we became used to: you could almost see muscles straining in the effort to speak clearly and calmly. Before 1943, the bodies from the gas chambers were pitchforked into ditches or dumped by a crane; after a visit from Himmler, the pyre system was adopted as more efficient. There were thirteen separate gas chambers, and once, in thirty-five minutes, 10,000 people were killed in them. He had many jobs, this child, from cutting off women's hair for mattress stuffing to pulling out the gold teeth of corpses. Then, one day he found his sister's corpse on the pile. (He took a very deep breath; he held himself rigid.) From these teeth, eight to ten kilos of gold were collected each week and shipped in suitcases to Berlin.

  Behind me, in the public section of the courtroom, an old woman with a worn fine face, wearing a kerchief on her head and a newspaper around her shoulders, against the unaccustomed air cooling, wept—without movement, without sound, and without stopping.

  Another Polish Jew, an older workman, described Chelmno, a more primitive extermination camp, as it operated before the experiments in mass murder had reached Cyclon B, the cyanide crystals filtered into gas chambers disguised to look like shower rooms. At Chelmno, they still used trucks; gave the people a towel and a piece of soap, told them they were on their way to get a bath, see the doctor, receive fresh clothes, and start their new life. Then the sealed trucks were driven into a forest, and carbon monoxide was pumped into them. I
t was a slow death, wasted precious SS time, and killed too few people per truckload. Some Jews, of whom this man was one, were kept alive to dig the great trenches in which the corpses were buried; but this work gang was killed too, for sport, since the labor supply was not only unlimited but meant to be expended.

  “Yes, forty of us were left—forty-one. The others were killed. On Sundays there was no work, and we were placed in a row; each man had a bottle on his head, and they amused themselves by shooting at the bottles. When the bottle was hit, the man survived, but if the bullet landed below the target, he had had it. The others stayed behind to work.”

  An attractive dark-haired woman, who had been deported to the women's section of Auschwitz at the age of twenty-one, spoke of a man whose name we all know by now, and revile: Dr. Mengele. He is alive in the world still, hidden somewhere. He was the chief doctor at Auschwitz. The Germans practiced subhuman experiments on living flesh, in various camps: Dr. Mengele, of Auschwitz, seems to have been the most debased sadist of them all, an abomination among men.

  The young woman was a block leader; in this capacity she had some freedom of movement, and thus could visit the gypsies in the camp. (It should be noted that the Israelis were also trying Adolf Eichmann for the planned racial murder of gypsies, whom the Germans had decided to exterminate because they were an “asocial element.” The dead gypsies have no one else to speak for them.) The young woman was beaten—and lucky not to be killed by the whip, as so many were—for warning the gypsy women never to say they were ill, never to complain, never to ask for missing members of their families: the German answer to all such remarks was immediate death in the gas chamber. One day, in the gypsy camp, she saw newly born gypsy twins, returned to their mother; but Dr. Mengele had sewed them back to back, being interested apparently in creating Siamese twins. And again, since birth was not allowed to Jews, a baby was taken from its mother and thrown on a handy fire: the mother walked into the electrified fence to kill herself. But, said the girl, women were always doing that; it was the quickest way.