In the months following Germany’s surrender in May 1945, thousands of Holocaust survivors emerged from the shadows, desperate to leave Europe behind. But the world’s doors were largely closed. The United States took a few; others slipped illegally into British-controlled Palestine. Among them were my parents, who met in a displaced persons camp in Germany, both determined to reach Israel. My mother even had a reservation on the Exodus ship, but the organizers refused to let her elderly mother board. “Hitler didn’t distinguish between us,” she told them. “So you shouldn’t either.” On Christmas Eve 1945, they arrived on a crowded illegal immigrant boat off the coast of Nahariya. They spoke only Yiddish, many were children, and each wore four shirts, three sweaters, and two coats—everything they owned on their backs. They had just come from hell.
I was a child then, growing up in a neighborhood where a man with a small workshop used to shout at us kids as we passed: “A million children! They killed a million children like you!” He didn’t speak Hebrew well, but those words burned into our memory. We didn’t know the details of what had happened in Europe. We only knew something terrible had occurred.
Every day at 1:20 PM, my brother and I would listen to the radio while eating lunch. It was called the “Search for Family Bureau.” For ten minutes, an announcer would read a list of names—people searching for relatives who had vanished in the Holocaust. “Rivka Bat Rivka Bat Meir from the Donovich family is looking for her brother Yosel, last seen in Treblinka.” It was like a funeral melody, a requiem that accompanied our meals for years. We thought it was normal.
I had no one in Israel. I felt like an orphan. Alone. No ties to anyone. Then a socialist in a red shirt came and shouted at us kids—we were thirteen or fourteen: “We will no longer be like sheep led to the slaughter!” He was saying we were responsible. But here in Israel, we are not sheep. It was a kind of black humor. We asked them: “Why didn’t you defend yourselves?” We Israelis would have fought. We thought we were heroes. We would never have let those Nazis annihilate us.
We were ashamed of being victims. Maybe because we didn’t resist. Because they slaughtered us like sheep. So we decided not to talk about the Holocaust. For years in Israel, it was almost a taboo. Parents told their children nothing. Children didn’t dare ask questions. It was terrible for the survivors because they needed to talk. They needed someone to listen, but no one did. For years, there was this ideology: no Holocaust, no memory, no past—only the future. People swallowed it all inside. And the children of victims did too. It left a mark on us.
We were the children of a people to whom something so horrific and incomprehensible had happened that it would stay with us forever. Once an old man screamed in the middle of the night in Yiddish: “Jews, help us! They’re killing us all!” In Jerusalem, you’d hear people screaming at night in their sleep. I didn’t understand what they were saying, but they were screaming. You’d meet people with numbers tattooed on their arms. How can you live with someone who has a number on their arm? Your neighbor is tattooed with a number. What do you say to him? How do you live with Holocaust survivors? You work with them. You have fun with them. You go to the beach, to the cinema. How do you fall in love with them? How do you deal with children? How?
There was simply no room for all that humiliation and suffering. Nor for all the misery these people carried. Maybe they felt guilty for surviving while their families and friends were all killed. Ben-Gurion said it: “You survived because someone else died. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here.” Many people thought the survivors were the bad ones. That the good ones had all died. How did they survive? They felt people blamed them for not dying. They were hounded by suspicions of having done something vile to survive.
You can’t build a new life while telling your children you were treated like a floor rag, like garbage, like a piece of filth. That feeling of being debris, of being humiliated, was deeply rooted in the survivors. They didn’t want to talk, and we didn’t want to hear. They were ashamed, and so were we. The trauma, the shame—it was so strong that they, like anyone who has been through massive trauma, couldn’t speak. They locked everything inside. People only talked about those who resisted—a tiny minority. But they didn’t mention the rest of the Holocaust victims. That was taboo.
This lasted for nearly fifteen years. Until the Eichmann trial. When they captured Eichmann and brought him to Jerusalem, everything changed. Adolf Eichmann had participated in the Wannsee Conference in 1942, where fifteen Nazi leaders laid out the details of the Final Solution. He was responsible for managing the trains that transported Jews to the death camps in Poland. When Heinrich Himmler ordered the extermination halted, Eichmann personally organized a final convoy to Auschwitz. At the end of the war, he discarded his SS uniform and identity, and his comrades helped him escape. They got him more papers—Red Cross documents, exit visas—and thanks to his new identity and forged papers, he boarded a ship to Argentina.
The German immigrant community in Buenos Aires helped him upon arrival. They knew he was a wanted war criminal. When he thought it was safe, he arranged for his wife and children to join him, bought land, and built a house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Simon Wiesenthal, a Holocaust survivor, wanted to find Nazi war criminals and bring them to justice. Eichmann was at the top of his list because he was the highest-ranking figure who had left his mark on the persecution of Jews. Wiesenthal had a large network of informants around the world in Jewish communities. In Argentina, a Jewish man discovered that his daughter’s friend was none other than Eichmann’s son. “Where is your father?” “He’s there.” The Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, finally identified and confirmed that it was Adolf Eichmann.
One day, we heard the news on the radio. They had captured Eichmann. It was a real shock. Ben-Gurion sent someone to Argentina to abduct him, but his interest was in the trial more than in Eichmann himself. The Eichmann trial was the first major event in Israel—and especially in the United States—that made the genocide a separate event from the war. So, from that perspective, it was crucial. The Eichmann trial served as a kind of “Nuremberg” for the Jewish people. It was a collective therapy for Israelis.
The Nuremberg trials were about universal justice, a global process. In that sense, they were very different from the trial of Adolf Eichmann. It met very different needs and had a completely different outcome. When the Eichmann trial opened in Jerusalem, many were shocked when Eichmann entered through the door into the famous glass booth—because he looked like your uncle. He looked like an accountant or a small business owner. Bald, wearing glasses, in a dark suit and tie. He did not look like a man who had sent hundreds of thousands of Jews to death camps.
Simon Wiesenthal realized this would be the effect. Wiesenthal suggested that he appear wearing his SS uniform. The Eichmann trial was a deeply personal case. It was a national matter. It was a way to achieve what you might call a “closure” for the Jewish people. To give the survivors—who made up nearly half of Israel’s population—a sense that their suffering had been understood. During the trial, people crowded in to see their stories. This was something new for the survivors. The state needed to listen to them. Until then, they could not speak. And no one had heard them. Finally, you could speak.
The survivors were able to recount what had happened to them. Everything began to surface at the Eichmann trial. Wave after wave, like a sweeping flood. It was the first time people heard these accounts from ordinary people. In Israel, it radically changed the way the Holocaust was viewed. They heard 110 witnesses, and it wasn’t always just Warsaw Ghetto fighters telling the same story. They heard the truth of what total abandonment of a people meant. The myth that people didn’t want to talk was convenient, of course. Because you felt less guilty. It was a way of saying: “Well, they didn’t want to. They kept silent about it. We would have listened, but they didn’t want to talk.”
But the Eichmann trial made people here rediscover the Holocaust. They were glued to their radios. Finally, they understood what had happened. Every night at dinner, we listened to these horrific testimonies. Suddenly, everything we had suppressed in Israel floated to the surface. In all its horrifying detail. For a child like me, it was like an earthquake. That was when I truly saw what it was supposed to be like.
There were intellectuals sent to cover the trial. The most famous of all, Hannah Arendt. The German philosopher Hannah Arendt, who had obtained American citizenship, had been a brilliant student when she entered into a tempestuous affair in 1925 with her philosophy professor Martin Heidegger, whose stance toward Nazism and Jews was ambiguous. She came to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial, who for her embodied the true essence of the banality of evil. Her articles for The New Yorker were collected in a controversial book titled “Eichmann in Jerusalem.” For Hannah Arendt, sitting among the audience, Eichmann seemed a trivial, superficial figure—a small, boring man. Eichmann completely deceived her.
Eichmann performed the role of a very boring bureaucrat. He played a part. The role of the perfect subordinate. The gray, shy, pale, and dull employee. He wanted to appear stupid, boring, and bland. But he was not. And there are moments during the interrogation when Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor, pressed and provoked Eichmann, and suddenly Eichmann’s eyes would flash and he would become charged and angry. And then you could see that Eichmann could have been a terrifying and powerful figure. But Hannah Arendt never saw those moments because she had already left Jerusalem by then. She misjudged him. Eichmann deceived her.
Hannah Arendt attended, I believe, three sessions of the Eichmann trial over a week, but the trial itself lasted a full year. Eichmann had tremendous initiative and energy. He was a very intelligent man. He was more than just a good servant of the Reich. According to her, Eichmann was just a minor clerk, a modest person who never did anything, just a passive cog in the extermination machine. But listen to him, or read him outside the context of the trial—because you’re not yourself in court if you’re trying to save your skin. But listen to him in a private session, in a social situation. And we can do that because his friends recorded tapes.
His friends—Nazi SS refugees in Argentina, exiles like him—would gather to reminisce about the old days and record each other because they were thinking of writing a history of the Third Reich. Well, listen to Eichmann on those tapes, most of which have been transcribed, and you’ll hear something entirely different. Yes, he wasn’t saying he was a modest subordinate just following orders. He was saying: “I helped kill six million of them, but I would have preferred to kill twelve or fifteen million. Then I would have completed my mission and could have died. I didn’t kill enough of them.”
The trial had already begun when Hausner’s team managed to obtain the recordings and transcripts. The judges ruled that only the parts written by Eichmann himself could be admitted as evidence, but the material was already sufficient to convict Eichmann by his own tongue and his own words. Eichmann inspected the death camps and participated in what were called special operations—the gas executions—as well as other killings and shootings. He saw a woman holding out her baby to him, begging him to save the infant, only to watch them both shot and his elegant leather coat splattered with blood.
The prosecution wanted to prove that Eichmann was the one who devised the Final Solution plan for the extermination of the Jews. Hausner did not have Heydrich in the dock. He could not interrogate Himmler or Müller. And of course, he could not interrogate Adolf Hitler. He had Adolf Eichmann. So he loaded Adolf Eichmann with responsibility for all the crimes of the Third Reich. But what makes Eichmann a horrific figure is that, in the end, that did not prevent him from contributing to the mass killing. He had no excuse to say “I didn’t know.” He knew. He saw it. And afterward, as he said in his own words, he sent the Jews to the butcher.
When the trains departed for the East, he knew what the East meant. It meant shooting into pits. It meant gas trucks. It meant pushing women and children into gas chambers. It was over. It was like an endless lesson, followed by 500 students with varying degrees of patience, taking notes all the while. And the subject of the lesson was this kind of human spider displayed behind glass to the left of the judges’ platform. Eichmann himself there in his glass booth.
Eichmann did not understand how the court viewed his crimes. He believed he would be able to avoid the death penalty in Jerusalem. He thought he might get a prison sentence instead of acquittal and would not die, because Israel does not normally apply the death penalty. But they made an exception for him. It was clear from the beginning that he would never leave alive. He was going to be executed.
As a historian, I feel it was a great pity that Eichmann did not live longer to speak to more historians. I remember the day they announced Eichmann’s hanging. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. I heard it on the radio before going to school. And I swore I would never go down to the sea again. I did not want to swim in the sea where his ashes floated.
Other trials followed. The Treblinka trial in Düsseldorf, 1964. Ten men who had been part of Operation Reinhard, which killed millions in Poland. After the war they simply went on with their lives. Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and then Treblinka, evaded justice for nearly twenty years until Wiesenthal found him in São Paulo. “I feel very safe in Brazil,” he’d said. “My friends tell me, ‘One day Wiesenthal will get you.’ I smile.” He was sentenced to life, then died of a heart attack a year later.
Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon, who rounded up forty-four Jewish children from an orphanage—forty-two of them murdered at Auschwitz. After the war he fled along the rat line, and the Americans recruited him rather than hand him over. Not until 1987 was he tried in Lyon and sentenced to life. He died of cancer four years later. The last trial of a major Nazi.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center launched a poster campaign in Germany: “Operation Last Chance.” Beneath a photo of the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “Late, but not too late.” Up to 25,000 euros for testimony leading to a conviction. After all those years, were they hunting a few old men in their nineties who would soon die anyway? Why not earlier? The major criminals were gone. Only a few small fish remained.
Some say they should be tried until their last breath. Others say these trials now are a waste, even a kind of revenge rather than justice. The problem will solve itself soon, because no one will be left.
I walk through these places and it is shocking, because it is as if they were taken just yesterday. In Łódź there were 230,000 Jews. Today there are 300. We live with those ghosts. Every Polish town has two things: an empty market square, because all the shops were Jewish, and a mass grave. That is what traveling through Eastern Europe is like—Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania. All the same.
Kraków feels like a film set. All that tourism built around memory. In the old Jewish quarters there is no trace of Jews left—only a kind of restored memory of Jews. Some of it feels more like Disneyland than the real prewar days. Tourists want to know how “Schindler’s List” was filmed. You see the billboards: guided tours to Auschwitz, to Kraków, to Wieliczka. Package trips. And in Kraków, sixty kilometers from Auschwitz, you can buy a bottle of “Sarah” or “Solomon” vodka, klezmer CDs, wooden dolls of rabbis with hooked noses. It is a business.
In Lanzmann’s film there is a scene I will never forget, where he speaks to those Polish women in headscarves and silver crowns. They say: “Oh yes, you know, the poor Jews, they were all rich. They had all the money.” The same clichés, the same anti-Semitic stereotypes they were raised on. The locals watched what was happening with a sympathetic eye. They say Hitler was a swine and a bandit—but for one thing we will have to thank him in the future: that he removed the Jews from Poland. That was a very common statement during the war.
Mourning for the Jewish neighbors, for the Jewish population who lived in these places—that whole story of mourning the Jewish dead still needs to happen in Poland. It has not happened yet.
According to figures published by the Holocaust memorial foundation, more than a thousand survivors die every month. The great problem with the Holocaust is that the survivors are gradually disappearing. Very soon, no one will be able to speak firsthand of those who lived through it. At some point in the next decade or so, no survivor will remain who can speak with confidence about what he saw himself. So what is left? Who is left to tell the stories?
We have perhaps a hundred thousand video testimonies of Holocaust survivors these days. But I cannot ask a film a question. Direct contact with survivors, with those who were there, is precious. They are the only ones who can tell us the real story from the victims’ point of view. When they are gone, it will be harder for us to understand what happened. How will we preserve the memory of what happened then? We need written testimonies, historical research. Many people have done very good work. But there is something only art can give us. To be able to identify with it all.
It was literature that saved Napoleon’s Russian campaign from oblivion—thanks to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Otherwise, who would remember what happened to Russia in 1812? Literature is the best way to preserve memories for centuries to come.
I receive many letters from children of Holocaust survivors. All of them affect me deeply. My mother, whom I loved so much, survived the Holocaust. She told us very little. Almost nothing. Now I understand what an exceptional woman she was. Why didn’t I realize it? I never understood what the survivors carried inside them. How was I so blind?
There is something terrible happening in Israel. We treat Holocaust survivors very badly. They are elderly people. The state does not give them enough help. Some live in very difficult conditions. The state does not give them enough because they do not have a strong enough lobby. It gives them a little more now, but only because of a large demonstration in Jerusalem. Why should these old people have to fight for it? There are still 250,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel. A thousand of them die every month. They went through hell. Give them what they need. The cost will gradually decrease because they are all leaving.
There are Holocaust survivors here who cannot find enough food. It is madness. I went to see one of them at the station. He was in forced labor camps in Russia. Then he came here, so he received no compensation from Germany. The state must take care of the survivors. They are the ones who founded this state. It is shameful that survivors of the camps live in Israel humiliated and hungry. It is an eternal stain on the State of Israel. They are reliving everything again, the Holocaust survivors who came to Israel. No one wants to listen to them today either.
One day my son Jonathan came home from school. He was three years old. It was Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Israel, the sirens go off and everyone stops for a moment of silence. He came home confused and upset and asked me: “Dad, what happened? Who are those Nazis? Why did they kill us?” I was angry because the teacher had told such young children about it. I did not want to talk to him about it. I felt that this fragile, innocent child, if he discovered what human beings were capable of doing to their own kind, would never be the same again. Somehow, he would no longer be a child. I spoke about it very little to protect him.
I myself, when I think about that terrifying mystery of human behavior. The infinite power of evil. Its unique nature. I feel inadequate before the war. I might go mad.
In my childhood, we did not talk much in school about the crimes of the Nazis. We mentioned them, but only in passing. Terrible crimes happened during the war. In Eastern Europe, the war was terrible and the Germans killed Jews. But no one asked what really happened. How it was done. What our neighbors or our family did. When I was young, the Nazis and the Jews were like two extinct species. It had all happened so long ago.
Our teacher told us we had been brainwashed. At first we did not understand. But we discovered afterward that he was not allowed to teach history after the Middle Ages. Because he had been a Nazi during the Third Reich. He could teach history, but only ancient and medieval history. To us children, it seemed as if it had all happened centuries ago.
How easy it is to pass through here without knowing that every one of these little plaques represents a person who was deported and killed in a concentration camp simply for being Jewish, or Roma, or communist, or homosexual, or disabled. The idea of the Stolperstein—the little stones you might stumble over—plays an important role in German cities. They are small memorial plaques set in the pavement, inscribed with the names of the people who lived there, most of them Jews, along with the dates of their deportation and death. Some people think this is excessive, that we should have moved on long ago.
Non-Jews tend to believe it is too much. They say the Jews never stop talking about the Shoah. Everyone knows the word “Shoah” now. I recently heard about “cow Shoah.” Vegans talk about it. Cow Shoah. The word is everywhere. Shoah. And abortion Shoah, and animal Shoah, and economic Shoah. Everything has become Shoah.
Germans say: “Do we have to carry Auschwitz’s cross until the end of time? Enough.” Perhaps some people do not want to hear news about the historical crimes committed by their country. There is an expression now in Germany. I am tired of the Holocaust. That is enough. It is over. With the third generation. If you try to talk about it in schools, they lose patience. They say: “Yes, yes, we have studied this five times already. We know the story.” I have students who think we talk about it more than we should. But there is so much media coverage.
Even in Israel, some people say: “I have heard enough about this subject. It is understandable.” Who wants to hear Holocaust news all the time? It has made them numb as well. It has made them indifferent. So you tell the children: “You must learn this history, otherwise we might all become Nazis or something.” So we teach you about good and evil. The Shoah is not a lesson in civic education about tolerance, or human rights, or anti-racism. The Shoah is far more complex than that. We should always be only speechless, angry, shocked, and horrified when we hear this story. And my fear is that it will become normal. That this unnatural story will become something ordinary.
It took a whole generation in Israel and beyond before we began to absorb what happened. It is an open wound. Little by little, you learn to face it. There is a document about a Jewish soldier in the Dutch army in 1940 when the Germans invaded his country. He lost both legs and ended up in a wheelchair. When they were gathering people for Auschwitz in 1943, he was summoned. He wrote to a senior German officer in the Netherlands asking not to be sent to Auschwitz because of his health condition. A clerk returned his letter with red writing on it: “Jude ist Jude, ob mit oder ohne Beine.” A Jew is a Jew with or without legs. You will be deported because we must eliminate Judaism. Unbelievable. A Jew is a Jew with or without legs.
I would say that what distinguishes the Holocaust from most of these events is how fantastical the Jewish threat was that Hitler was destroying. It was simply a fantasy in his own mind. The idea that Germany was somehow threatened if you did not kill a two-year-old Jewish child in Ukraine is pure fantasy. The idea that this is an infection, a germ that must be treated so that if any trace of it remains, we have not achieved the goal. This disproportion between the drastic measure of killing six million people and the fact that none of them posed any threat to Hitler and the Germans.
For the Jews, Germany will never be a normal country. Nor do I think Germans will ever feel normal because of history. Germans cannot escape their history. Not only the crimes against the Jews, but the destruction of democracy. Germany will remain, in one way or another, marked with the sign of Cain. It will always be linked to the Nazi era and Nazi atrocities. It will never be a normal country, but perhaps that is a good thing. Because…
And perhaps that is the only honest ending: not resolution, but remembrance—carried forward, like a stone in the pocket, by those of us still here to stumble over it.
So I ask you, reading this now: when the last survivor falls silent, who will you become in their place?
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